Oolite Bulletins

Don't know if this has been suggested before. Something that might be useful, especially as a last-ditch escape device - a computer or other add-on that gives you the ability to hyperjump to the witch point of the system you're in. Obviously you'd need some fuel - I'd suggest at least a light-year's worth because you're using the engines in a way that isn't ideal. Also make it expensive and easily damaged, like other bits of computer, with nasty ways of going wrong.

I don't know - having spent ages fighting your way towards the planet the last thing I'd want is to go back to the witchpoint!
And there is an emergency escape mechanism in the game. It's called the Escape Capsule

Ffutures,

Have the emergency jump put the ship in the Station Aegis so you'll end up in a safe spot.

However, the penalty for using this should be huge, else people will just be using it to get to the station faster.

Maybe have the emergency jump device damage lots of equipment (let's say half of all breakable things) ?

Even if you have the money to pay for the repairs, the huge repair time would likely mean you fail contracts.

I suggested the Witch Point as the only destination because it fits in with how the drive seems to work, also because it's less useful than jumping to the station, so shouldn't be abused as much. But if (for example) Thargoids are chasing you and have you cut off from the station and from the sun, jumping back to the Witch Point is better than nothing - you may get there to find that there are Thargoids or pirates there, of course, but that's the luck of the draw.

I really don't see why this should do a lot of damage - it's something that's easily enough done if there's another system in range and things get dangerous, doing it in the same system shouldn't really be any more hazardous to the ship.

 Retro Rockets OXP is similar, and a jump to the witchpoint is an imaginable alternative imho.

Other options might be:

• to the sun (or at least a safe distance from it)
  to the opposite side of the main planet (equidistant perhaps)
  to a random location (lucky dip)

Wouldn't your attackers simply follow you through the wormhole though?

If it were to follow the normal rules for how long the entry wormhole stayed open (i.e. it's not possible for both ends to be open at once) and the normal rules for transit time, they'd never be able to reach it in time, since it would close in under a microsecond.

With enough big ships dog-piling into the same wormhole, I don't see why a wormhole between 2 close points wouldn't be open on both ends at the same time.
I've experimented with using stations and asteroids to make very long-lived wormholes without too many problems.

Switeck wrote:

With enough big ships dog-piling into the same wormhole, I don't see why a wormhole between 2 close points wouldn't be open on both ends at the same time.

Game engine limitation, and one that before that rule was entered was noticeable in normal play - if you were in one of the zero-distance doubles, a small ship jumping to the other half would transit in about 40 seconds, but create a wormhole lasting longer (an Anaconda would generate one lasting much longer). This got it horribly confused about which end of the wormhole was which.

You could see it elsewhere too, but you needed something really big to be making the jump - I managed to get the same bug to occur on the Zaonce-Tionisla route by using a Behemoth.

The implications of a really heavy ship being able to jump between two close-ish systems, return, and then re-use its own original entrance wormholes - re-adding its mass to them when by the calculations that mass is already in the wormhole - to keep going back and forward to carve out a permanent effectively stable wormhole between the two systems were also not things I particularly felt like writing the support code for.

cim wrote:

The implications of a really heavy ship being able to jump between two close-ish systems, return, and then re-use its own original entrance wormholes - re-adding its mass to them when by the calculations that mass is already in the wormhole - to keep going back and forward to carve out a permanent effectively stable wormhole between the two systems were also not things I particularly felt like writing the support code for.

Somehow, I can't see an infinitely recursive wormhole being a good thing..

Someone wants to try and break the universe

I've run into something like this with the liners add-on; I could see a huge ship from hundreds of miles away, as I got closer it vanished, and I saw it had created a wormhole with a duration of something like 800 minutes. So I checked where it was going, realised it would be reasonably profitable, and tried to follow it. Result, my ship was instantly destroyed - not sure exactly what happened, I think I flew into the big ship INSIDE the worm-hole, if not then it was the universe telling me not to be a smart-arse...

Reminds me to ask, why don't NPC ships follow player ships through wormholes? Can't remember it ever happening to me.

ffutures wrote:

... why don't NPC ships follow player ships through wormholes?

Some do... it depends on the circumstances and type of NPC.