Oolite Bulletins

Having had occasion to revisit the New Cargoes Trading Advice page on the wiki, something struck me about a paragraph I read there..

You can tell where this is going. They get to Esveor, and only then check the fine print. Mud hockey kit. Not Zero-G. There's nowhere in Santaari that sells decent Mud hockey kit. So they've got this choice - they default on the contract and pay tens of thousands of credits in penalty fees, or they desperately try to hitch a lift on eight galactic jumps so that they can pick some up from one of the other charts without paying tens of thousands just for the galactic hyperdrives.

My question is, do NPC ships ever make jumps to the next chart? I don't recall ever seeing one. If they don't, please consider this as a feature request for 1.83.

They don't. What it would look like if they did is a little hard to tell - galactic jumps currently take zero time, so the wormhole would never be visible at the start side.

I would imagine they'd look like a regular one.. indistinguishable unless you scan it. On the other hand, having them a different colour might be interesting, too.

Would it be hard to massage the code to make it possible? The idea of a GalJump taking zero time is kinda weird, too. Doesn't seem right, somehow.

cim wrote:

They don't. What it would look like if they did is a little hard to tell - galactic jumps currently take zero time, so the wormhole would never be visible at the start side.

Why not? The length of time a wormhole lasts isn't tied to the time taken for the jump, surely? Otherwise you'd see a wormhole lying around for anything up to 49 hours.

Well, a gal-jump is obviously very different from a hyperspace jump. It needs a special one-off engine and presumably works in a different way. So it takes no time and probably doesn't involve a wormhole. A visual indicator could be fun thought - perhaps it should just disappear in a puff of smoke

Hmm, I wondered what happens presently with Hired Escorts when you make a galactic jump. Seems they get left behind. (Well, that's going to have to get creatively edited for my next piece of fiction, anyway.) I was hoping it turned out they tag along, which would prove that a wormhole does exist long enough for someone else to jump through. Of course, the fact that they stay behind doesn't prove that it doesn't - only that they can tell a galactic jump by sight and go "Nuh-uh, that's not in the contract".

I would dearly love to hitch a ride with a gal-jumping NPC - one fine day, perhaps!
As for time-elapsed, I think we've had that discussion - but it should take time.

There is also a bit of canon suggesting that gal-jumps are not only visually detectable, but are distinct from 'normal' hyper-jumps.
As part of a certain core mission the player is told at one point

“Yep, an unusual new ship had a galactic hyperdrive fitted here, used it too.”

which suggests that this event was witnessed and identified as a gal-jump.

Malacandra wrote:

what happens presently with Hired Escorts when you make a galactic jump. Seems they get left behind.

[wiki]Hired Guns[/wiki] remove all in the playerEnteredNewGalaxy event handler. If you want to play as if escorts are equipped with a galactic drive for this case then insert return; into the 79. line in hiredGuns_system.js .

Bought escorts on [wiki]EscortDeck[/wiki] will stay with you after a galactic jump due to physically attached to your ship.

Norby wrote:

Bought escorts on [wiki]EscortDeck[/wiki] will stay with you after a galactic jump due to physically attached to your ship.

Does all that extra mass make the wormhole stay open longer?

Cody wrote:

I would dearly love to hitch a ride with a gal-jumping NPC - one fine day, perhaps!

Likewise.. hence my making it a feature request.

Smivs wrote:

Norby wrote:

Bought escorts on [wiki]EscortDeck[/wiki] will stay with you after a galactic jump due to physically attached to your ship.

Does all that extra mass make the wormhole stay open longer?

In theory yes, should be imho. In fact for the non-galactic wormholes only and NPCs has not a working deck yet but the core count the mass of the arriving additional ships so sould be when will be. After the player jumped out from a system I do not know how the core simulate further the followers and whether take care about increasing the timeframe with each following ships or not.

Malacandra wrote:

The length of time a wormhole lasts isn't tied to the time taken for the jump, surely?

The length of time a wormhole is open for usually depends on how much mass is put into it, but you can't have both ends of the wormhole open at once, so for wormholes with particularly short travel times compared with their mass the travel time becomes the limiting factor.

If this wasn't the case, a ship could jump from A to B, then from B to A, then use its own wormhole to return to B again. Bearing in mind that only the initiating ship uses fuel, this could be combined with sufficient "dumb" mass to create permanent semi-stable wormholes between the two systems.

Norby wrote:

Malacandra wrote:

what happens presently with Hired Escorts when you make a galactic jump. Seems they get left behind.

[wiki]Hired Guns[/wiki] remove all in the playerEnteredNewGalaxy event handler. If you want to play as if escorts are equipped with a galactic drive for this case then insert return; into the 79. line in hiredGuns_system.js .

Bought escorts on [wiki]EscortDeck[/wiki] will stay with you after a galactic jump due to physically attached to your ship.

What I was after wasn't that Hired Guns could follow using their own Galactic Hyperdrive (not at 5k a pop!!) but that they followed through your wormhole the same as they normally do.

cim, I'd have figured that any given wormhole was unidirectional regardless of mass, distance, whatever.

Malacandra wrote:

cim, I'd have figured that any given wormhole was unidirectional regardless of mass, distance, whatever.

Oh, they are. A->B (jump 1, conventional); B->A (jump 2, conventional); A->B (jump 3, using jump 1's wormhole)