Oolite Bulletins

It has come to my attention that scale Has been a difficult thing to pin when it comes to the Elite Universe. I'd like to suggest a few possibilities which might be somewhat helpful. I've heard that Feet and Metres are interchangeable in the world. this is the first thing which made me think of the most basic of answers: measurement names are simply rudimentary names. I could easily call an apple a Metric Ton, the width of my toe a metre, and the circumference of Lave a Foot. considering the fact that it's been a little more than 12 centuries since our time. a huge amount of things could have changed, including the meaning of measurements. I also have been doing minor amounts of digging and have found that Earth is in fact a planet. wouldn't it make sense that we use the scale of Earth, which we know very clearly, as the basic form of measurement and deem the measurements used by the game a new measurement system? Of course, it could simply be that we just ignore scale for the rest of the time this games life-span. I just like the idea of resolving this issue so that it may allow for more stories and ideas about the world.

-J.L.D.

The problem is not so much the names of the scale units as that there are, for gameplay purposes, three separate scaling systems in use.

1) "Ship" scale. This is measured in metres (or kilometres). By this scale a Coriolis station is approximately 1 cubic kilometre in size (massive, but not excessively so), and the various ships range from about 50m to 150m in scale.

2) "Planetary" scale. According to your system data screen, the planets are between ~3000 and ~7000km in radius. In game, they are scaled down to 1% of this radius (or 1 millionth of the volume). By this scale, a Coriolis station is about the size of France, if you rolled France up into a cube, and a Cobra III could use Luxembourg as a landing pad.

2.5) "Stellar" scale. The sun is scaled down by more than the planet, but not as much as the system.

3) "System" scale. The distance between the star and the planet is about 500-1500km in game. If we take the midpoint of this range to be about 1AU, then 1 ingame "km" is around 150,000km. By this scale, a Coriolis station is around twice the radius of Jupiter.

Reconciling them neatly is not straightforward...

And this is why Oolite is a game and not a simulator.

Space simulators are genuinely very very very boring, because space is huge and effectively utterly empty - Oolite is fun - just how I like my games.

Scale? <chortles>

J.L.D. wrote:

I also have been doing minor amounts of digging and have found that Earth is in fact a planet.

As far as Oolite is concerned, planet Earth doesn't exist - that link refers to the Frontier universe.