Oolite Bulletins

Sexed up the headline a bit there.

What I meant was scale does matter a lot.

Has anyone ever looked at a Mark3 and an Anaconda next to each other? Or a Cobra next to a station?

It doesn't make sense to me. The Cobra model is way too oversized while stations and Anacondas are way too undersized (and the Anaconda's cargo space is surely an artifact of someone misreading a cipher hand scribbled by Bell or Braben. I don't see a problem making docking easier for new players if we in return get a game with relative sizes that make sense.

It would be nice to see a set of replacement models address the issue of scale.

While we're at the Cobra MK3: It's almost an ubership. In the basic set you can't really get anything better. I propose that something heretical should be done to it's stats. Eg. lower max cargo to 15t and have the expansion be only 10t.

I know that this is something that some people feel strongly about. I think that whenever gameplay or realism clash with continuity, gameplay and realism should take precedence.

i would agree totally re the scale. one of the missions in Elite had Thargs taking over a spacestation : i remember driving up and seeing Tharg motherf - motherSHIPS, i mean - appear at the dock slot - they were as big as the station themselves!!

be lush to do a flyby of some REALLY big ships - get this in Wing Commander Prophecy when you're off tw@ing alien capships : they's BIG.

am i right in thinking you could go to the .dat files and just alter the size? i see in the (eg) behemoth one there's info re size - the only prob might be texture scaling??

You can scale dat files using dry dock. It gives you a nice user-friendly size in meters too. No issues with textures, unless you decide to stretch a model rather than just scale it. Mac only unfortunatly.

no idea what dry dock is :-/

what i meant re textures, is if you have to expand them to now cover an Anaconda that's 10x the size it was, won't it lose resolution and look a bit blocky?

speaking of size, i stumbled across a size-comparison chart of the oolite ships a few days ago and i'll be buggered if i can find it again, my history search is pulling up nowt - anyoen know where it is??

cheers

I've also seen all the basic ships next to each other somewhere. Related to their cargo sizes the CMK3 is waay too big IMO and the Anaconda is way way too small. Will post link if here, if I come across it again.

size is a bit of a sticky point in Oolite, in that the ship i've built was made using an estimate as to how big it should logically be for what it does and how much it can carry. but - next to the other ships, it now seems overly large. i think some creative licence might have to be applied and a further reduction made :-/

I concur on the scale issue - although it's a little way down on my wish list, it would be nice to have bigger planets and stations in particular. From The Dark Wheel:

He made it, though, and once inside the vast hanger space, magnetic traction drew the Nemesis slowly to a vacant berth. AutoCom links snaked out and clamped to its hull. Alex watched the bustle in the great, brightly-lit void, the customs ships, the police Vipers, the advertising modules, the repair modules, all moving slowly in the cube-space, touting for business.

This description of the Coriolis interior makes sense to me (although in my fiction, I'm incorporating internal "docking bays") - and to have room for the "void", I'd say the game model would need to be at least three times bigger in each dimension (i.e. 27 times the volume)!

Roberto wrote:

This description of the Coriolis interior makes sense to me (although in my fiction, I'm incorporating internal "docking bays") - and to have room for the "void", I'd say the game model would need to be at least three times bigger in each dimension (i.e. 27 times the volume)!

If this happened, it would open up a whole new vista. Forget docking at your local Coriolis and then it's 'purple rings time', now you have to navigate through the docking port and then find your allocated docking area before you can trade that bay full of cargo that you 'found' out near the Witchpoint.

Captain Hesperus
"That's right, challenge me. Is it not enough that I leave several inches of hull plating on the outside of the station, now you want me to embarrass myself on the inside of it too?"

There's this mysterious "magnetic traction" thing, though, which I interpret as the station taking control of your vessel to guide it into a berth (which I guess would be desirable from the commander's point of view, due to the variations in gravity).

Would be very, very cool to see it, though! One day...

*EDIT* Maybe they'd have some kind of "gravity-dampening field" around the cube-space…

While this site doesn't have any Elite/Oolite ships, it might be of interest and/or use -> Starship Dimensions.

And I also came across this, Spaceship Beds, which may be of use to DaddyHoggy more than anybody else!!

Uncle Reno wrote:

And I also came across this, Spaceship Beds, which may be of use to DaddyHoggy more than anybody else!!

My 5yr old is a very princess orientated pink obsessed thing at the moment (although she goes to Rocket Club with me once a week after school so credit where credit is due!)

However, Hoglet_Sproglet_Mk2 is currently gender unspecified so I have logged site in my favourites just in case (having just rebuilt a wardrobe over the weekend my joinery skills may have improved sufficiently in a few years to build one my self!)

Uncle Reno wrote:

Starship Dimensions.

Yowza! There's some BIG ships out there!! (Off Topic) I once saw a table-top battle using the Full Thrust rules that pitted the Star Wars Empire against the Star Trek Federation. It makes my nose bleed that the Federation players were saying one of their Galaxy class starships could take on a Star Destroyer.

And I also came across this, Spaceship Beds, which may be of use to DaddyHoggy more than anybody else!!

If I bought this for my children (and remortgaged my house, sold half my liver and a kidney, and probably traded in my soul to the guy with the goat's legs and pointy beard and horns) I might never see them again!

Captain Hesperus
"What's so scary about this 'Executor', it looks pretty easy on paper. what's this tiny dot underneath it? THAT'S a Behemoth!!"

I've done Star Trek/Imperial Cross over stuff before based on the tech manuals for each universe - basically the Federation ships have (by comparison to the Imperial equvalents) stupidly powerful shielding - the fleet which tried to defend the Federation against the Borg at Wolf 359 would have kicked the Death Star and its defending Imperial fleet completely into touch...

Hypothetically speaking of course - I am fully aware that both/all things related to this are completely imaginary...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Hypothetically speaking of course - I am fully aware that both/all things related to this are completely imaginary...

Back on topic, does anyone know the dimensions of a SuperCobra? I'm writing a little bitty fiction starring the Capt. and I need the H/W/L of the SC. It's not on the Wiki, unfortunately.

Captain Hesperus
"If there weren't insane people in the Universe, where would I get a crew?"