Oolite Bulletins

In Oolite before v1.80, if my docking was a bit off, I got bumps and scrapes. Now my ship blows up - at least I think because it's a scrape.

Is this a feature? It is causing me to avoid Con stores and Rock Hermits unless I have saved at a station very recently.

It's not like I'm wildly off course. As far as I can see my line up is accurate. Just a thought - could ironhide armour be responsible?

Which ship are you flying?

I have the same problem and I pilot big ships and even at a very slow crawl... if I am not aligned... BOOM press space commander. The ironhide has no effect on docking as it is a part of the hull.

There was a bug in 1.77 and earlier where if a rectangular docking bay was aligned in a particular way (one of the two obvious ones, but I forget which) with respect to its long and short axes, it was treated as if it were a square of the size of the long side for docking collisions, so you could - for example - dock a Cobra III exactly sideways so long as you were vaguely centred on the approach. This was fixed in 1.80.

Cody wrote:

Which ship are you flying?

Arafura, but the same was happening when I had a Cobra.

So, question.

Is this deliberate or a bug where a small scrape ir treated as a big impact? I would have thought that, as in the past, there would be a scale from scratch to BOOM!

The gap between "in cleanly" and "destroyed" is fairly narrow, but it is still there.

That said, it's always been the case that the extremely high mass of a station multiplies even small scrapes into ridiculously large amounts of damage. There's some exception code to reduce or ignore this when colliding with the station close to the dock, but there may be a need to look at it more generally.

The high mass of the station should mean, that the movement of the station is not changed by the impact. It would be the ship that is moving, like a billiard ball reflected from the wall. If the impact is not at high speeds and perpendicular to the wall, I do not see a reason why a gently touch of the wall passing by tangentially should destroy a ship?

On the other hand... Unlike to Elite in the old days, I never had any trouble in docking manually in Oolite with my Cobra MK3. Not one single crash until today.

cim wrote:

, but there may be a need to look at it more generally.

I'll say! My old Imperial Courier had scrapes and dents galore, when I played the older versions (I've been playing six years or more, on and off). The Arafura is pristine, never having been scraped. Blown up and reload saved game, yes, far too often.

I've noticed this too - never get the rattle and scrape any more if I dock manually, it's either perfect or BOOM!

cim wrote:

Tyou could - for example - dock a Cobra III exactly sideways so long as you were vaguely centred on the approach. This was fixed in 1.80.

Now, if you try to do that with a Rock Hermit, you just go right through and end up on the other side...