Oolite Bulletins

I'm sorry if this question has already been asked, but are there any informations about the inner mechanics of the Witchdrive? (If it has been ask or there is, just point me polity towards it.)

So, Witchdrives are creating a phenomenon, which is called "Wormhole" in-game. But this "Wormhole" can be intercepted in between start and end location, which shouldn't be possible for theoretical wormholes, as they create a new connection and not some way, which connects to spacetime in between the locations....I'am ranting, aren't I? Back to my question or even better, the reason, why did I ask it.

I tried [wiki]Illicit Unlock OXP[/wiki] and it's fun, but a Witchdrive would be nice. Dipping into "Wormholes" with those witchdriveless funscooters and see were you end up, has its charm too, but sometimes you want to know were you gonna appear. A single-use Witchdrive would be nice. You know, it's smaller, but it gets its job done by overcharging its....well itself. (Similar to the Intergalactic Jumpdrive) And here's the catch. What breaks? Does it have coils? An emitter? It would be nice if there is already some canon, which I could use, when I write an OXP. (Again, if there is already a OXP that does this, post a link. Pluuuueeease.)

As far as the OXP is concerned I thought about the drive takes 2t of cargo space, costs 400 Cr, breaks after each use, repair costs are around 200 Cr (no surprises here(Ohh, but I like surprises.)), the drive itself can only be purchases in Tech 10 Systems, but repairs are available in down to Tech 4 systems and last but not least you can buy a second drive/set of coils/injector/whatever, but no more than that.

What are your 2 cents about the OXP.

And what about the Witchdrive. What's your headcanon? Coils, injector, goo?

hmmh, intriging idea.... Have to ponder on it.

As for the surprise location there is a   OXP, which helps you to locate where it leads to. Another way is using broadcast coms and bugging fellow trader to announce where they are going.

As far as I know there is no canon really.
This is an Oolite issue of course - in Elite (the original versions) it was irrelevant as the player could only have a Cobra 3 and NPCs were pretty dumb. In Oolite, for entirely practical reasons, all player-buyable ships had a witchdrive. The NPC equivalents also have them and that left the slightly odd situation where only certain ships didn't. Normally this doesn't matter unless OXPs play a part, and so you could argue that it is the responsibility of the OXP author to sort it out. There are three possible options.
1) Leave things as they are, with certain ships denied witchdrive (even if they are player ships). This is the current situation.
2) Allow only player versions of these ships to have witchdrives (which is illogical in-game).
3) Give witchdrives to all ships.
Options 2 and 3 are both easily achieved, and as you are suggesting, another solution is also possible - a buyable one-shot witchdrive. However I do have a problem with this. The one-shot drive would have to include fuel as the ships in question do not have a fuel tank. Now, if a witchdrive-equiped ship then buys a one-shot drive, does this give the potential to do two consecutive jumps? This would be a massive game-changer/breaker and should be considered carefully.

Well, there's canon and there's canon ... it's not even settled as to whether the transit is more-or-less instantaneous (as it appears to be in the game – but is that just the game skipping out the sometimes dozens of hours it takes, according to the ship's clock?). Opinions, and fictions, vary ...

ocz wrote:

Dipping into "Wormholes" with those witchdriveless funscooters and see were you end up, has its charm too, but sometimes you want to know were you gonna appear.

As Amah says, the [wiki]Wormhole Scanner[/wiki] is your friend here.

For me, personally the witchdrive and the torus drive (and the basic in-system drive, too) are all functions of the same thing - a big torus full of quirium (which, in my head, is an allotrope of Hydrogen). Put this in a torus and spin it around and it will generate reactionless thrust (the basic in-system drive). It does this by dragging spacetime in, accelerating it, and shoving it out the back, leaving a blue glowing wake of Cherenkov radiation as the virtual particles in the accelerated spacetime find themselves briefly moving faster than the speed of light in the medium, as the accelerated spacetime mixes with and decelerates back to normal spacetime. The positioning of the torus within the ship allows for pitching and rolling, but yawing is problematic as it involves rotating the ship around the central axis of the torus.

If local spacetime is sufficiently flat - i.e. no local large masses, or nearby other spacetime-warping engines - you can speed up the circulation of the quirium in the torus and scoot along at very nearly the speed of light (the torus drive).

And if you spin the quirium at very high speeds, this will pull local spacetime so violently it will create a rupture (called a "wormhole", but not in the classic Einsteinian sense). The faster you spin the quirium, the further the wormhole will stretch. Spin it up to 99.9999% of the speed of light, and the wormhole will reach 7 light years. Since (of course) you can't spin the quirium any faster than c, you can't create a wormhole more than 7 light years long. At wormhole-creating speeds, though, the quirium denatures and reverts to ordinary hydrogen, which a thrifty commander will bleed off into the ship's tokamak. I assume that ships which are not hyperspace-capable lack the power to accelerate the quirium to a high enough speed to create a wormhole.

A one-shot witchdrive would be possible, I suppose (the galactic jump drive is a one-shot device, after all). In my head, it would be a single sealed torus, lacking the plumbing and coils which would allow it to connect to and provide reactionless thrust to a ship, but capable of spinning its small load of quirium up to wormhole-creating speeds. It might have issues, e.g. prone to failure, prone to dumping the jumper a long way away from the witchpoint, etc. And of course it would have to be opened up, emptied of denatured quirium and refilled after every jump.

ocz wrote:

Coils, injector, goo?

Again, stressing that all of this is my own take on the matter, I see the Oolite ships as being quite industrial. Hydraulics, rivets, pipes, ducts and coils. Very little automation - very little electronics, even. Ships that could be built with spanners and repaired with hammers.

Ooh.

I like the idea of a wormhole missile. Limited (5km) range and produces a (large for its mass) wormhole to a random destination. Hmm...

Witchspace = hand wavium i.e. It got Robert Holdstock out of a hole as it did the creators of Elite.

Just listen to the "I'm not saying nothing" initial description of it in the literature.

You're going to cover maybe seven light years in a few minutes, and you might think that's a lot of space to get lost in, but that isn't how it works. Faraway is a tunnel, like any other tunnel. Inside that tunnel is the realm called Witch-Space, a magic place, a place where the normal rules of the Universe don't necessarily work. And every few thousand parsecs along the Witch-Space tunnel there are monitoring satellites, and branch lines, and stop points, and rescue stations; and passing by all of these are perhaps a hundred channels, a hundred 'lines' for ships to travel, each one protected against the two big dangers of hyperspace travel: atomic reorganisation, and time displacement.

Jump on your own through hyperspace, across more than half a light year, and you'll be lucky to make the same Universe, let alone your destination. You might emerge from Witch-Space turned inside out (which is not a pretty sight).

You might be stretched in all the wrong angles, and although the ship keeps travelling, that jelly mass of broken bone and flesh inside the cabin is you.

According to legend, you might come through okay and breathe a sigh of relief, only to go into
Earth orbit and wonder why that big lizard, with the teeth and the long tail and the green scales is roaring up at you, and warning you off of his nice Jurassic patch of prehistoric desert.
To go Faraway is a killer, unless you obey the rules.

Magical place eh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qpEVl-Q-Ks

So a bit like "Toys are us" but with less toys and more death?

Smivs wrote:

However I do have a problem with this. The one-shot drive would have to include fuel as the ships in question do not have a fuel tank.

For some reason they do. Not even in Illicit Unlock. As you know Witchdrive Fuel Injectors use witchfuel and I have seen my fair share of Kraits escaping my clutches in Oolite vanilla. Maybe Witchfuel is a great inexpensive fuel to power all sort of things aboard a ship, therefore a tank is standard equipment. The reason you don't see it being used up over time by the ship systems could be, that they only need a few drips to operate for a long time. Or the fuel is there in case the main energy core malfunctions and to power the emergency power generator, which never happens on-screen.
Witchfuel might also be very potent. Maybe it a very special form of hydrogen (like Disembodied said) or a strange form or state of matter, being only created in small amounts in high temperature plasmas and therefore available in a suns core, which is kinda bad accessible, and in a sun's corona, which is much better reachable in-game wise. As it may be so potent, a small tank a few liters/gallons might be enough. More aboard the ship might even make it unstable. (Therefore a standardized size for all the tanks.) A small tank would also deliver a fine explanation, why ships that don't have Witchdrives and no need for a tank suddenly have them, when injectors are installed. Retrofitting them is easy enough. Though I don't go with this.

My headcanon is:
- Witchdrive Fuel is a hydrogen allotrope.
- The tanks are as big as possible, but just small enough to be save. Therefore a for economic/safety reasons balanced standard size. But they still weight several tons.
- Tanks are standard equipment for all ships.

Smivs wrote:

Now, if a witchdrive-equiped ship then buys a one-shot drive, does this give the potential to do two consecutive jumps? This would be a massive game-changer/breaker and should be considered carefully.

It would be a game-breaker, but no. In my OXP it wouldn't be possible, as the Single-Use Witchdrive (that's the name I came up with) uses the ships tank and therefore is exhausted after 7 LY. Also, my OXP wouldn't allow fitting them into ships with Witchdrives, because it's unnecessary and would spam the purchase list.

Disembodied wrote:

[...]It does this by dragging spacetime in, accelerating it, and shoving it out the back, leaving a blue glowing wake of Cherenkov radiation as the virtual particles in the accelerated spacetime find themselves briefly moving faster than the speed of light in the medium, as the accelerated spacetime mixes with and decelerates back to normal spacetime.[...]

I love that explanation for the blue glow. Cherenkov radiation is one of my favourite radiations. Btw, shouldn't there be traces of Cherenkov radiation around some fast rotating singularities IRL? Well, I certainly hope Cherenkov radiation isn't the reason behind the blue glow of those "Wormholes". I would have to write a OXP correcting, what happens to a ship trying to fly into a "Wormhole"/ into regions of space, that are relativistic seemingly scrubbing FTL on themselves. (Wow, hard to come up with words to describe this. I'm imaging it more like Honey less like scrubbing.)
I have to look into the canon of "Quirium"

Checking through the shipdata.plist the Krait does have a 7LY tank as you say, for its injectors, but the Gecko, Mamba, Sidewinder, Shuttle and Transporter do not. The Viper variants don't seem to either, but I thought they did. Odd!

Disembodied wrote:

As Amah says, the [wiki]Wormhole Scanner[/wiki] is your friend here.

Do not recommend this tricky OXP.
What it really does is creating misjumps in addition to those created by the game engine itself, and then warns about them, as that's the only way for an OXP to be able to know that there will be a misjump. It does not warn about true misjumps. Thus it is utterly useless. It even increases frequency of misjumps if it only is installed, to even out this problem you have to fit it to your ship.
Assuming that you want to make the game easier of course. If you want more misjumps, install it. What it checks for is your fuel though, it will not create misjumps in case the player would get stuck, only in case the jump is short enough/there will be enough fuel left.

EDIT
As mentioned below, I was referring to [wiki]Misjump Analyser[/wiki] here instead.

Anonymissimus wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

As Amah says, the [wiki]Wormhole Scanner[/wiki] is your friend here.

Do not recommend this tricky OXP.
What it really does is creating misjumps in addition to those created by the game engine itself, and then warns about them, as that's the only way for an OXP to be able to know that there will be a misjump. It does not warn about true misjumps. Thus it is utterly useless. It even increases frequency of misjumps if it only is installed, to even out this problem you have to fit it to your ship.
Assuming that you want to make the game easier of course. If you want more misjumps, install it. What it checks for is your fuel though, it will not create misjumps in case the player would get stuck, only in case the jump is short enough/there will be enough fuel left.

I think you are confusing it with [wiki]Misjump Analyser[/wiki]

I seem to be on drugs indeed. And it's not even an OXP...

@ClymAngus: Man and I thought Hyperspace is freaky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFlSPtKVwn8&t=38s

Use in this order if necessary, else don't:
Hyperdrive
Witchdrive
Finite Improbability Drive
Infinite Improbability Drive

And as far speed goes:
Torus Speed
Light Speed
Ridiculous Speed
Ludicrous Speed

Smivs wrote:

Checking through the shipdata.plist the Krait does have a 7LY tank as you say, for its injectors, but the Gecko, Mamba, Sidewinder, Shuttle and Transporter do not. The Viper variants don't seem to either, but I thought they did. Odd!

You're right. https://github.com/JustinPinner/moolite ... data.plist
fuel = 70;

Hrmm. Illicit Unlock uses "like_ship" = "somethingsomething"
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Shipda ... #like_ship
I don't read anything about it adding fuel = 70; to it, but I guess it does.

I just flew a gecko with injector and yupp fuel. No circle indicating the jump distance in the starmap (F6) though, as no Witchdrive is fitted.

Edit:
https://github.com/JustinPinner/moolite ... ipEntity.h

Every ship seems to have got fuel capacity, but as not every ship should be accessible as player ship, this doesn't answer the question for the canon, if there are tanks an them or not. Again: It depends on the OXP. I goes with: "What? I didn't ask that question."

ocz wrote:

I have to look into the canon of "Quirium"

The original Elite manual provided the name. "Quirium H-fuel" is probably what made me think it's a hydrogen allotrope. (I've just found out that it's also the name of a type of booze in the German space opera Perry Rhodan. Perry Rhodan has been around since the 1960s, but I don't know which reference came first, or even if it's just a coincidence.)

Drew Wagar developed some canon for quirium (or at least, for the terrifyingly destructive quirium cascade mine) in his novella [wiki]Status Quo[/wiki]. But canons are made to be fired: if you want to take it somewhere else, feel free!

ocz wrote:

Every ship seems to have got fuel capacity...

Now this is interesting. Fuel is specified in shipdata, but the only info in the wiki refers to NPCs.

the Wiki wrote:

Determines an NPC ship's fuel storage, which will affect how it uses its Fuel Injectors and how far it can jump. If unspecified the default is zero (though ships added via the system populator will often be given some fuel anyway)

So no fuel specified in shipdata means no fuel. However from what you say player ships do, but (I'm guessing due to the lack of range circle on the chart) an unspecified amount.
We need a Boffin to answer this one I think.
Re Quirium, well we can scoop it directly from the Sun, so it has to be a normal component of the Sun's outer atmosphere. Some sort of Hydrogen allotrope sounds good to me.