Oolite Bulletins

How does fuel get to the stations?

I have thought of two options:

A) There are ships (tankers) that skim the stars and then go to the stations and back.
B) There is a collecting station near the star (with solar pannels or something like that) and the tankers move between the skimming station and the planetary station.

I'd prefer the second option, since it leaves sun skimming as a stunt.

Like one of these? As sometimes seen around system suns if you have WildShips OXP installed.

Precisely! But where are the ships that transport that fuel?

They have a sub-aether pipeline!

Agis Silverfish wrote:

Precisely! But where are the ships that transport that fuel?

 Here

@ Agis Silverfish - A tanker is one of the ship oxps that I have had in mind for a future release for a while.

If anyone would be interested in developing a specific AI/script to apply the behaviour described in Agis Silverfish's post above I would be happy to develop a model and put together an oxp.

Failing that I will probably give it a go myself at some stage but this will be once I have managed to learn some scripting skills.

Thargoid wrote:

With suitable OXPs installed (WildShips plus Aquatics and/or Transports), setting up a route between the solar station and the main one would be quite simple to do. When I update WildShips (with 1.77 most probably) I'll drop in a little script to do that

That would be great!

If you are interested, I'll skin this and put it on my box account next week as a model to work with. (unfortunately, I'm no good at scripting)

I like the look of this ship Amaranth

Amaranth wrote:

If you are interested, I'll skin this and put it on my box account next week as a model to work with. (unfortunately, I'm no good at scripting)

Nice looking ship! One request: can you centre the model before uploading it? The origin of the coordinate system should be visible in the middle of the ship, not at its cockpit section.

Good point there Commander McLane. If ships are not correctly centred they do not manoeuvre in game correctly.

@ Thargoid - Thanks for your offer of a suitable AI. I've almost finished a second escape pod model that I will be adding to an updated version of the Galtech Escape Pods OXP this weekend so I will look to get a tanker model posted in the near future.

Or the transports.oxp setup. There I created a 4 times scaled-up model of the fueltanker. It can't dock, but releases its tanks near the station and they fly into the station themselves. (Tanks have a very low thrust and low roll/pitch).

You could also include the gereric 'fueltanker' role, used by transports.oxp, in your ship.

I'd expect tankers to exist in the form of modified Anacondas that devote some/most/all of their normal 750 TC cargo capacity for extra fuel-scooping capacity. Thus, with just one "bombing run" the Anaconda might gather enough fuel for 10-100 ships to max out their fuel.