Oolite Bulletins

Is there anything that defines the number of ships that can berth at a station? Or any lore that defines it? Not looking for exact numbers, just a general idea.

2000! Wow! I couldn't remember that from the manual, but that's a lot of ships!

Yes. I imagine it is quite packed if they are all Anacondas

The Elite manual wrote:

Each Coriolis station has a diameter of 1 standard kilometer. They can berth 2000 ships.....

I expect though that the (fictional) reality would be a lot less as most of a coriolis would be made up of people space, and a chunk of the rest would be devoted to materials and cargo storage, workshops for spacecraft and station maintenance.

The way I imagine it, for a standard coriolis, the interior space represented from the docking slot to the inner circle on the planet side of a coriolis represents the dock, goods, cargo and material storage and heavy industry (like spaceship maintenance). To me, that eyeballs in at around 0.3-0.5 of the available space in a coriolis. At least half of that would be devoted to cargo store and workshop, maybe hydroponics, which would leave maybe 0.2 of the original space as the port. Some of that would have to be ship manouvreabillity (depending on how you look at it). ED's docks have a lot of manouvring space and less landing pads. I tend to think that a robotic arm(s) would take a ship from the launch/landing cradle to a 'warf' in the relatively weightless section at the centre of the coriolis' port.

Being a binary thinker (only because it's a computer game ), I imagine 16 or 32 'piers' or 'warfs', like spokes, from the outer limit of the port jutting towards the axis anchored against the inner limits of the port with each ship moored like cards in an inverted roladex. The bigger ships towards the more weightless centre (therefore less of them due to less space) and the smaller ships or passenger ferries/liners closer to the low gravity of the inner ring.

If fully loaded, I can imagine a port to berth an average of maybe 100-150 moderate sized ships, but limited to maybe 16 Anacondas that have to stay near the centre, down to maybe 128 Adders that could perhaps be slotted in at 4 each to an outer berth, being lighter and easier to manouvre in a low gravity zone. This gives plenty of scope for all the ships that could be added to a system by oxp with perhaps a possibility that a station in a popular system could reach capacity at some point.

SteveKing wrote:

This gives plenty of scope for all the ships that could be added to a system by oxp with perhaps a possibility that a station in a popular system could reach capacity at some point.

I have at least seen messages in my console window that launching of trader ships has been cancelled because of too long launching queue so we may already have hit the peak here.

It works like the transporter in Star Wars, where you get lasered to death & then they make a new you out of poop & discarded racing forms in a new location.