Oolite Bulletins

Did you know that a Cobra Mk.3 is almost as large as a Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer? A type 45 is 152 metres long and 21.2 metres wide. The Cobra Mk. 3 is almost as wide as the Type 45 is long at 130 metres, and longer than the Type 45 is wide at 65 metres (and probably as tall as the keel to the outside deck of a Type 45 at 30 metres).

All the ships in Oolite are ridiculously large, even when you don’t take the tiny planets into account. Weren’t they at some stage converted from N ft to N m instead of 0.3048N m? If so, the sizes on feet were merely surprising, not silly. :-p

Ahruman wrote:

All the ships in Oolite are ridiculously large, even when you don’t take the tiny planets into account. Weren’t they at some stage converted from N ft to N m instead of 0.3048N m? If so, the sizes on feet were merely surprising, not silly. :-p

Agreeing here!

The adjustment from feet to meters was necessitated by the increase in scale of the space station to it's full 1km diameter glory. If the ships had stayed scaled by feet then they'd almost all fit in the docking slit sideways - and docking is such an important part of the experience it was necessary to scale ships to match.

The Cobra 3 is particularly huge!

Now personally, I’d just have scaled down the docking slit. :-p (Some decor around it, like big arrows pointing inwards and stuff, would stop it from disappearing.)

Ahruman wrote:

Now personally, I’d just have scaled down the docking slit. :-p (Some decor around it, like big arrows pointing inwards and stuff, would stop it from disappearing.)

Somehow, it just didn't look right to me.

I've always considered the ships to be measured in meters anyway, since the entire rest of the manual refers to meters and kilometers.

Consider this. The Cobra Mk 3 is 130m wide. It has room inside for a 30 - 45 tonne canister capacity cargo hold. Each canister is over 2m in height and 1m in diameter. It also has a shuttlebay inside with two shuttles. It also has a fully automatic cargo loading and unloading system.

It has a luxury living area with space to comfortably accommodate 2 crew. It has waste and recycling facilities. It has a sophisticated bridge with a medical bay, a set of stasis booths and an escape capsule mechanism that basically folds down over the bridge control area in order to eject the crew without them having to move from thier seats.

There are four laser mounts, all with room for cooling systems and the (presumably) liquid or gas components that go with them. There is room internally to store up to four heavy duty missiles and the deploying and launch assembly.

There is an engineering section that contains two completely separate engines plus thier auxiliary systems. The hyperdrive incorporates a highly complicated reaction chamber that requires shielding and dampening. It also requires storage area for the quirium fuel that makes it work. This storage area has a feed to the cargo/fuel scoop assembly on the bottom of the ship. The hyperdrive also has the capacity to be expanded to incorporate a galactic hyperdrive unit.

The system drive also resides in the engineering section, and is itself a complex piece of kit. It does not require fuel to operate, and therefore must contain machinery that generates or manufactures its own fuel (probably from stellar matter like hydrogen). This will require some sort of reaction or synthesis chamber. It could be an ionic drive, in which case it will require a charging or atomic reaction chamber.

All of this equipment as well as the fittings are modular and must be easy to remove and replace, which would give the size of the ship some meaning.

When looking at the size of the ship compared to a station, it does become clear exactly how big the Cobra is, but how well the scale works. I started working on an internal model of a Coriolis some time ago, and this shows the scale (the Cobra is the red blob, the long box is the docking port):

Bearing in mind that the Coriolis is a small, easy to construct design, the scale fits fairly well!

helpful illustration.

where does that leave us with Holdstock's Coriolis description, "They can berth 2000 ships, and support a fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids."
how say your new manual?

Doesn’t TDW also have a city on each square face? (I’ve only read it half a time…) Their total area, including the docking-side one, is well under 3 (km)².

I'd also like to know just how much centrifugal effect you would be getting at the outermost edges of the station (500m from centre of rotation), given their rate of spin? I forget how fast the station spins, but I'd guess we're talking about a horizontal velocity of about 310m, which equates to about 10G!

Some stories also state that there are berths for thousands of ships....

Iside capacity is endemically overestimated.
It seems all Elite entities are scaled according to some exponential scale.
10 times bigger = 2 times the size.

It prevents small objects to be invisible and large objects to look unrealistically undertextured.
But isd poses big problems when combining models into one scale model such as that station Selezen has.

I dunno how Holdstock could state that a coriolis can berth 2000 ships. I've just tried to create 2000 Cobras and fit them in, and although they will go in, there's not much room left for anything else, and that's with then stacked fairly close together!!

The point-to-point width of a square facet is 1km. That's a total of 6km squared surface area on the inside of the station. Not much space.

The cities are fair enough - if you assume that 200m is a fair height for an apartment block, then you could pack a fair few people in there.

<rant>
On the topic of Robert Holdstock's novella, which is often mentioned as a source of reference, I would like to point out that it is not canonical.

There are facts in the novella which contradict gameplay in Original BBC Elite.

Obviously, we are making up Oolite to whatever specs we like, and some elements from the novella have been incorporated.

But, just cause Holdstock says something, doesn't mean it's so!
</rant>

The "berthing 2000 ships" comment is from the manual, not TDW. Silly me.

Y'see, we do kinda have to take the manual as gospel, even the small amount of fluff that it contains. Mind you, it says that the stations CAN berth 2000, not that they actually do. I suppose if you strip out the cities, you could berth 2000, but ot with a lot of room for anything else.

I used that coriolis model and created 2000 cobras. stacked end to end and right on top of each other they do take up a fair bit of space. Any station equipped to berth 2000 ships would be like a beehive, literally filled with little boxes with ships in.

It's like a challenge now...how can it be done and yet still have room for personnel and living areas for the staff and visitors?

<scratches head>

Selezen wrote:

It's like a challenge now...how can it be done and yet still have room for personnel and living areas for the staff and visitors?

<scratches head>

Visitors would have to stay onboard their ships and the station is staffed entirely by Oompa Loompas? Which leads to the obvious question... What would they sing about on a Coriolis station?

but maybe Holdstock was, when writing the manual, persistently previsualizing the ship-thing in feet, so that, by the Giles conversions and some rough lazy math, should change the Coriolis limit to ca. 600 ships?

still quite a bit, but would maybe make some more room for a society of bigger folk than OompaLoompas and their "cities, hospitals, farmlands and leisure-scapes"..?