Oolite Bulletins

has anybody looked into being able to land on the planets like in frontier?? how hard would it be to make a oxp for that?

Arr, matey, ya got a mighty big name thar, and boisterous too! Can ya live up to it, can ya? If ya thin' ya can, welcome!

Now, Commander, if you had paid attention to your Academy lessons, you'd know that you need a special permit to do that, and that it's only issued to local system traders. All other landings are forbidden by law!

Or: since the Oolite planets are but a painted over ball, to make them landable would imply redoing that part of the code completely, them fiddling and tweaking until next ice age to get it bug free - I don't think it's going to happen (or are you volunteering?).

Taking an idea from Lestradae, I was thinking you could fake this by having a suitably designed space station (rock hermit, whatever -- something dockable) orbiting at zero, or just above zero altitude. It isnt likely to look much like a runway, but you could have an "airlock" that you fly into.

You can probably do this as it stands in an oxp, and experimenting with the location -- you might have trouble with the startport "crashing" into the ground and being destroyed. Other problems might include the fact that the texture doesnt really allow you a way to put the landing point anywhere sensible, might end up in the sea.

However, I am not convinced that this is a good thing. If you allow people to fly in the atmosphere you have problems that the planets are not very planet like. From space they are quite good. Balls of colour with areas of ea and land or whatever is fine. But up close, there are no mountains, no cities, no nothing, so it will probably look a bit weird.

CAPTN_SPARROW wrote:

has anybody looked into being able to land on the planets like in frontier?? how hard would it be to make a oxp for that?

Hi, CAPTN_SPARROW, and welcome to the boards and of course to this great game!

I can only second my colleagues here. (And actually I forgot to mention the breach of the background story, when I replied to Lestradae.)

For a broader discussion of a "let's make the Oolite-universe more look like it was the Frontier-universe"-plan you might want to read this thread. Have fun!