Oolite Bulletins

Hello,

A short presentation:
I discovered Elite in the Eighties (around 1983, I believe) on an Atari. oolite takes me back in the future! I now own a Python with all the options ;o)

After the short presentation, the question!
Is it possible to go from a planet to another without using the "H" key?

As I carry cargo and passengers from there to there, I would like to go through the areas without planets. I am not sure it is shorter but I would like to test ! The advanced compass with the N/W signs might help.

Thanks,

Welcome to the boards. Some OXPs add moons and extra planets to a system (eg Lave OXP, Diso OXP, Planets.oxp, Assassins.oxp) Many also add more stations and dockable "things" to systems (Commies, Dictators, HoOpy Casino, Black Monks Space Dredger, Pirate Coves etc). If you have these OXPs installed then there are possibilities for in system travel to planets or trading between stations in the same system, but in the normal unexpanded game there is only one planet in each system. If you check the Wiki OXP page, there is a list with download links to mods you can add to put more "stuff" in the system!

If you haven't already discovered it, the Wiki OXP page is here:-

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP.

Hello Poovga, welcome to the boards.
I don't really know if it's possible to travel interstellar without hyperspace/Witchspace drives. Even with the Torus drive, you would be sat there for a *very* long time before ever you came with in 2ly of your destination. Another problem would be direction, which way would you go? The stellar charts don't give information about which way to go to get from Lave to say Diso. And finally, would you be happy to fight Thargoids the entire journey?

Captain Hesperus

Well I tried iti nt he Atari ST version of elite. I got to a point where the sun stopped getting smaller. it never disappeared.

in FFE there is an actual barrier that stops you going any further out of a system.

Think in Oolite you'll just go on forever! (Flew a long way out to playtest the Gas Giants and stations added by Assassins. ). I'd placed them at a realistic distance so they looked right from the POV in the space lanes, but can actually fly to them if you want to and it does indeed take about 10 mins at Jump Drive speed to reach them. (I just added them to pretty up the system). The sun gets smaller and smaller, but you'd never get to a new system. As the J drive increases speed three times, so does take a Cobra III to 1 C, in therory you should be able to go from Lave to a planet 2 light years away if you J jumped for 2 years. But as that would just be silly, Oolite does not model this feature!

Hello,

Thanks for your answers: travelling without witchspace is unuseful, painful and dangerous
Anyway, I now plenty to discover with the OXP!

Thanks

Poovga wrote:

Is it possible to go from a planet to another without using the "H" key?

As I carry cargo and passengers from there to there, I would like to go through the areas without planets.

You don't ever use "H" for intra system travel, so if I understand your question correctly, you mean travelling from one system to another through conventional space. In this case, the answer is "no".

You can, however, go into the other ships' exit cloud to follow them to wherever they've gone. That will lead you to a random system within 7LY, but you won't have spent any of your own fuel. In this case, the system's ships will be generated normally on top of which the ship you followed will be added.

Hi, Poovga! Welcome to the boards and of course to this great game!

(I think your first experience with Elite is not as long ago as you think. The first Elite came out in 1984, and the Atari ST version wasn't published before 1988, according to Ian Bell's website. I played that, too, after my first encounter with Elite on a C64, which was in 1984 or 1985, I guess.)

To your question: Cmdr. Maegil has the right answer. It is not possible to travel to another system other than with your interstellar drive ('H'-key). The only exception being to drive into the wormhole left by another ship (the blue circle), which brings you to the system that ship went into without using any of your fuel.

There are no shortcuts on the galactic map, which means you can't address any point between planets as your destination. The only way to get into this interplanetary space is by a misjump, that will catapult you out of witchspace halfway between your current location and your destination. You'll be astonished how much action you are going to meet here in the middle of nowhere! A misjump happens with a very low probability every now and then due to a malfunction of your witchdrives. But you can force a misjump by starting to dive or roll shortly before the witchspace countdown ends. Be warned, though: A misjump will consume the full amount of fuel that was needed to get you to your destination (that fuel is needed to create the wormhole in the first place). So if your distance to your destination is at the upper end of your fuel capacity, a misjump may well lead you into a dead end. There is no way out of interplanetary space, if you don't have sufficient fuel to jump to the closest star!

And as the other guys discussed above, you can't get from system to system by normal flight. Apart from the journey taking a ridiculous amount of time, the game engine simply doesn't allow for that, as there is only one system created at the time (namely the one you're in right now). Also where you end up in a misjump is created and treated as a system by the engine, with just some features missing, like the sun and planets, obviously.

And to put in my thoughts on the last issue raised above: I think you could travel from your current planet using your jumpdrive ('J'-key) pretty much forever. I don't know whether there is an upper (or lower) limit to the co-ordinates you can be at other than the floating point capacity of your computer. And this is huge. So I'm sure you could reach a point where you don't see the sun anymore, but there is no point to it, as long as no OXPer makes us do something so very boring as to travel for hours, doing nothing. (The Tianve Pulsar e.g., being already a long journey away from the system center, is only located at "0 -5000000 0", just five million meters from the center. Now imagine setting that value to something like one hundred billion... (still not too many digits)) Anyway, this way of travel wouldn't bring you any closer to the next system.

I travelled to one of the gas giants in Assassins OXP, and it took me 45 mins!

ditto, i don't know why, I knew it would take that long!

TGHC wrote:

ditto, i don't know why, I knew it would take that long!

"Because it was there?" The noble spirit of adventure? The offchance that the OXP's author might have put something there, just because? Like an asteroid of solid gold, maybe? I've heard rumours* that there is one out there somewhere...



*Or it may have been the voices in my head.

Disembodied wrote:

TGHC wrote:

ditto, i don't know why, I knew it would take that long!

"Because it was there?" The noble spirit of adventure? The offchance that the OXP's author might have put something there, just because? Like an asteroid of solid gold, maybe? I've heard rumours* that there is one out there somewhere...

Actually the Gas giants all have 'LittleBear done this' written on the back using clouds (and in one case, a system of fjords )

Disembodied wrote:

*Or it may have been the voices in my head.

You get those too?

Captain Hesperus

Captain Hesperus wrote:

Actually the Gas giants all have 'LittleBear done this' written on the back using clouds (and in one case, a system of fjords )

See, that's the kind of thing I'd do, if I was capable: I don't know how Ahruman resists the temptation to carve his face into the surface of a sun, or scrawl his very name across the Firmament... programmers must spend a lot of time sitting in huge high-backed chairs, cackling.

IIRC hidden messages and screens written by programmers are called easter eggs, I wonder if it's possible to do that in OXP's

TGHC wrote:

IIRC hidden messages and screens written by programmers are called easter eggs, I wonder if it's possible to do that in OXP's

You wouldn't have to hide anything: just make a particularly baroque object, like a gigantic asteroid in the shape of your own head. Ooh, with the docking port in the mouth! Some sort of orbital temple... it could beam out hymns and demands for prayer and obedience.