An honest traders strategy guide?

[Simon B]

MS Discovered in an otherwise empty escape pod:
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Getting your cargo to port fastest is the secret to making a killing in commodities. However, the need for speed is tempered by some down-home realities.

Sadly, we live in a ooniverse of selfishness and greed - bandits are everywhere.

On arrival at the witchpoint, most of heavy-rig pilots just push right on down the spacelanes. Many smaller operators also do this.

We do this because we have our escorts to worry about - we are all in each others scanner range, so we each block the other's hyperdrive. Injectoring all the way is expensive and the shortest distance between two points is a line (in this non-newton/einstein euclidean ooniverse).

The smaller operators follow suit to avoid being caught by themselves. In general, we can spare an escort to help out a fellow trader in distress. We also seldom hesitate to call on their more manouverable, and usually quite well armed selves in our turn.

And such is the usual way of things... but...

but but but... what if... you wanted to get clever?

Strategies to get there quicker:

Really you want to hyperdrive all the way. This means abandoning your escorts and risking an ambush. Most Jamesons figure out how to do this in their first week - they run out pi-over-two radiens delta-theta off their R2NAV. A few minutes of this is enough to get a good way off the well trodden path. Engage their jumpers and hold their breath. This way the small carriers beat us every time - but they are all alone out there.

You don't want to lose your protectors... so, what do you do?

Take your escort ships on board? - It's what the Navy do, launch them when you hit trouble. That takes up cargo space, and most of us are not equipped to become carriers. Lets face it, if we were piloting a Behemoth, we wouldn't be worried about pirates.

Use robot escorts - Thargoid style? Well sure if you want. But the Thargoids also have tailless STL drives, targetless witchdrives, universal gunmounts, six eyes and ten penises (their trousers fit, I am told, like a glove). The eggheads are still working out each of those tricks - call me when they figure out how to control all those bots at once. Still - cargo space is money, nuff said.

No. Send escorts ahead and behind... this is more promising. Here's how it works:

Take yourself outside the spacelanes with your escorts by the simple expedient of heading away from the navibouy. Give your fleet a bit of delta-theta as well and you are soon off-line with the spacelane-crowd.

Point your compass direct to the N - make sure you are lined up on an external feature: a small deviation here will lose you your protection down the track.

Send one escort down the track - when they lose scanner contact, they hit the jump drive. You follow - no escorts. (Or you send the next escort. But, at some point, you'll have to follow - yes?) The second you lose your remaining escorts, you hit the jump drive too. When they lose you, they wait a bit (or they'll catch you too soon - they are faster than you right?) then follow suit.

The effect of this is - your lead ships will run into any would-be ambushers first. Assess the trouble, and hang about at the edge of scanner range until the rest of you catch up. (Or engage - maybe lure them out of your path - brave sods.)

If you hit any trouble, your trailing escorts will be along in a few seconds to tidy up.

It takes a gutsy commander to try this trick. Look at what it looks ike to someone else...

They are noseing around trying to look innocent when a small craft pops into scanner range. If you know the trick, you gotta take him out now, and fast. Big brother's coming soon. His tactic is to run away, back the way he came... it's a race.

In seconds, another small fighter arrives, then the main event. While you are trying to take them down, reinforcements arrive. It's a nightmare!

The downside of the technique is that it gives the bad guys notice that you are coming. They can prepare. The upside is that you spend most of the trip at hyperspeed. Sure, your trailing escorts will catch you occasionally - but this just makes sure you're all on the right path. You have just sacrificed some (but not all) security in return for shorter in-system times.

And - if you are a big outfit, you may want to use this as a sting operation - instead of a freighter, use a warship. There'll be no problem identifying the hostiles - where said miscreants may be a tad circumspect otherwise.

Cmmdr John "Cap" Doric (Elite)

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Afterward:

Cmmdr Doric was also known for deliberately hobbling his forward thrusters so, when masslocked, his ship would often coast right past trouble to the point where the jump-drive could be safely re-engaged.

Old captains tell of the terror of having an Anaconda barrel past at just-sub-hyperspeeds, barely controlled.

Captains taking over his ships, who did not read the supporting documentation, had a tendency to crash into things - like stations.

Cap's last ship was a souped up Anaconda SB with secret modifications which should "leave those pirates eating stardust - you'll see". His last communication was somewhat garbled - something about "brakes" before heading deep into a star to evade some people who wanted "just to talk, you know". Some people believe he was able to jump at the last minute and even today wanders the spacelanes helping beleagered ships in distress.

Whenever a Jameson complains of unusually weak thrusters, experienced spacers nod and tell of the famous commander. It is considered "luck" to inherit one of hit boats.

[BlackKnight]

Nice supporting text, and a definite possibility if (when?) someone finally codes a multiplayer Oolite (or have I just fallen out the wrong wormhole, and that's already been done yet?)

Not too sure about the description of the Thargon spacesuit though - shouldn't it be "fits like 2 pairs of gloves"?

[Commander McLane]

Oops, somehow missed that post.

Simon B: You should think of making this available somewhere on the wiki. Too bad if it would just slip down the index here.

[Simon B]

Ahhh now... I did that off the top of my head.
If the writing style is well received, I'll do a novella.

BTW - that behavior is probably scriptable, in effect... but the player would only see it in bits. You never see an npc in hyperdrive. You would see traders head off out of the spacelanes, and you'll see a lone ship arrive in scanner range, then another, then another, then they form up and try to leave jump-lock range.

That's some math and some spawns, surely...

I've also seen npcs injector past and never seen again.

I've been thinking of this for a custom-scripted role for the the coyote trader

... spawns near the witchpoint (sorry - jumps in) then injectors 100-110deg to the spacelanes. (Yes - *away* from the station.) When the player is out of sight, he can be removed, and respawned exiting the station when the player gets there (without jumping first).

Encountered elsewhere, they injector past and vanish.

If you chase, on your own injectors, generate a comms message "Hey buddy, mind letting me use the jump-drive, I'm in a hurry y'know?" (Unless, of course, you're shooting... when it is "Hey buddy, I'm not carrying anything valuable... just urgent. How about letting me go? In fact, I'm sure I passed a fully laden and defensless boa back there... what do you say?)

In other words, simulating player tactics when you really don't want to get held up.

[edit]Oh, I should mention that we see something like this when a krait or two harrass you... you chase, and run into a fleet headed by a python-blackdog.[/edit]

[Commander McLane]

As a story: nice.

As an in-game feature: Forget it. NPCs do not have jumpdrives. (The whole thing is essentially only a time-saving feature for the player.)

[drew]

Ahhh now... I did that off the top of my head.
If the writing style is well received, I'll do a novella.

Novella! Yes! Do it!

Cheers,

Drew.

[Simon B]

As a story: nice.

As an in-game feature: Forget it. NPCs do not have jumpdrives. (The whole thing is essentially only a time-saving feature for the player.)

Admittedly, it's not much of a feature ... where's the harm in giving the appearance that npcs have jump-drive too?

Note - the nomenclature is a little rough an me ... to me a "jump drive" is the form of ftl which is essentially a kind of teleportation, "hyperdrive" is ftl where you use hyperspace - which you can navigate in, and a "warp drive" is where you travel ftl through e-space due to some additional, currently unknown, physics.

traveller, cities in flight, and battlestar galactica use jump drives - you set your target and go. n-space uses hyperdrives, and Star Trek is warp-drive.

So to me, the oolite "jump drive" is a kind of sub-light warp-drive. The witch-drive is a jump-drive.

[Commander McLane]

Yep, the terminology is a little messed up.

1) I think the use of 'Jumpdrive' for the fast in-system travel (exactly three times your ship's max speed, therefore not necessarily FTL(!), for instance not for anything smaller (and slower) than a Cobra III) comes from old 8-bit Elite. I recall that in C64-Elite the use of the 'J'-key got you closer to the planet in steps, like making an instant jump (as opposed to a slow walk) from your current location to a distant location in front of you. Which--I guess--was also the reason to assign it to the 'J'-key in the first place.

Oolite works of course differently. Here the 'J'-key activates a continuous movement, just (three times, as mentioned above) faster than your ship's normal top-speed. But still the old key, and together with it the name, stuck to it.

To make things more complicated, the Jumpdrive is sometimes called 'Torusdrive', referring to its physical shape inside your ship, I think.

2) Opposed to and different from the 'Jumpdrive' for in-system travel there is the 'Witchdrive' for inter-system travel. This one works basically in the same way in Oolite than it was in Elite.

Don't get me wrong: there's absolutely no harm in giving the appearance that NPCs have jumpdrives too. It's just that in the real game they haven't. Therefore it would be a little tricky to give that appearance in-game.


EDIT: Corrected my own confusion of what 'Torusdrive' is.

[Sarin]

hold on, I thought Torus drive is in-system.

Anyway, I'd like some clarification about sppeds in Oolite. We have three speeds...normal, on injectors and jumpdrive. But the speed is ship statistics...well, either there's something very wrong with Ooniverse or...because speed of ship on insystem jumpdrive can't be, even if ship's speed is supposed to be 0.5 LS, much more than 50 km/s...and that is approx. 0.00017 LS actually. And...that 3x normal speed is related to injector speed right?

[Simon B]

I've been wondering about this too... though I am only guessing that LS=LightSpeed, the ships seem slow...

We can check inside the game...
Planets are 4-8000kw diameter, you can check the exact size from F7.
Fly past a planet at top speed, time how long it takes for a side gunsite to pass from one edge to the other... you'll need several flights to be exact because you are traversing the disk along a chord.

But we can do back-of-envelope right now:

LS=300,000kmps
333mLS ~ 100,000kmps

so 1000km takes 0.01 seconds ... you should be flying past a planet in less than a 10th of a second in a Cobra Mk3 (350mLS) The million or so km to the star should take about 10s.

(a light-second is properly about 299.792.458kms)

You want to do the experiment and work out the true speed of your ship?

Of course, that sort of speed makes the game horrifyingly fast but posting real speeds would make the ships look puny. All you really need to know is that 350 is about twice as fast as 180.

I always figured that the top-speed was the jump-drive speed.

[CptnEcho]

As a story: nice.

As an in-game feature: Forget it. NPCs do not have jumpdrives. (The whole thing is essentially only a time-saving feature for the player.)

Admittedly, it's not much of a feature ... where's the harm in giving the appearance that npcs have jump-drive too?

Note - the nomenclature is a little rough an me ... to me a "jump drive" is the form of ftl which is essentially a kind of teleportation, "hyperdrive" is ftl where you use hyperspace - which you can navigate in, and a "warp drive" is where you travel ftl through e-space due to some additional, currently unknown, physics.

traveller, cities in flight, and battlestar galactica use jump drives - you set your target and go. n-space uses hyperdrives, and Star Trek is warp-drive.

So to me, the oolite "jump drive" is a kind of sub-light warp-drive. The witch-drive is a jump-drive.

Firstly, remember than some terms may be copyrighted. So to avoid litigation, Elite/Oolite doesn't have Warp Drive (faster than light speed travel in Star Trek). Hyperspace seems to be common enough term in Sci-Fi writing, so I don't think Hyperspace or Jump Drive is going to step on literary toes. Still, to be in the Ooniverse, one should be familiar with Witchspace.

In Elite, the "J" key (on the keyboard) was assigned to the Jump Drive which was used to travel in-system quickly by jumping instantaneously through sections of normal space. In Oolite the Torus Drive performs that function (still using the "J" key) and movement is continuous instead of 'jumpy'. The Torus Drive can be "mass-locked" by the presence of other ships. The Torus Drive does not use quirium fuel.

Sub-light travel in Elite/Oolite also uses separate engines that do not normally consume quirium fuel, unless the Witchfuel injectors are installed and activated (see below).

The Witchspace (Hyperspace in Elite) drive allows travel from one star/planet system to another. The Witchspace (Hyperspace) drive uses quirium for fuel.

The Witchfuel Injectors use the same quirium fuel that your Witchspace drives use, but the Witchfuel Injectors boost the ships' in-system speed while a ship is using "normal" propulsion (whatever that is in Oolite).

Battlestar Galactica (the original television series) had ships that could travel at Light Speed. But due to the huge consumption of Tyleum fuel, use of Light Speed was rare.
In the more recent version of Battlestar Galactica, the ships can be equipped with Faster Than Lightspeed (FTL) drives which allow ships to "jump" from one location to another via a journey through some form of hyperspace. In the newer BSG series, FTL jumps were commonplace.

Babylon 5 ships could enter hyperspace and shorten the amount of time required to travel vast distances of normal space.

Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis ships use hyperspace capable equipment, often called hyperdrives.

The Starship Andromeda used a Slipstream drive.

In Elite/Oolite, things may sometimes seem confusing, but the equipment and its' performance is explained in various wiki-articles and readme documents.

[JensAyton]

Firstly, remember than some terms may be copyrighted.

No, terms are not subject to copyright. Trademarks work very differently to copyright.

[CptnEcho]

Firstly, remember than some terms may be copyrighted.

No, terms are not subject to copyright. Trademarks work very differently to copyright.

Thanks for the clarification.

[Simon B]

Thank you Ahruman - saved me the trouble :)

Additionally, the term "warp" to refer to a distortion in space-time pre-dates Star Trek and comes from Physics via an analogy with cloth. A congruent distortion would be a "weave" ;) Hyperspace comes from mathematics, I think... and "jump drive" comes from Cities in Flight (the drives were called "Spin-Dizzies", which is also where we get the term "spinning up" for getting a jump drive ready - used in Battlestar Galactica (as a deliberate homage to the book) and in Oolite as "hyperspace_motor_spin_time ".

You'll also find the terms used in RPGs - particularly I'm thinking of GURPS Space, traveller, and Space Opera.

The name-confusion is not fatal, and the terms are spelled out. I do not mean that this needs to be changed. Good grief. And the term "Witch-space" is a good one which does not get the confusion. Even when "Witch" and "Hyper" are used interchangeably.

Just to make things worse though - my keyboard layout is Dvorak. So the "jump drive" key is the letter "h" - handy to be designated "hyper-speed".

For comparison - if you visited NZ, you'll find (some) people call out "Hurray!" when you leave them. We can tell you that it means general good wishes for your leave-taking... but foreigners have trouble shaking the nagging sensation that we are happy to see the last of them.

When turning away Nuke-laden ships, nobody says "hurray".

Aside: for those who have not seen it - Dvorak Layout is as follows -

' , . p y f g c r l / =
a o e u i d h t n s -
; q j k x b m w v z \

So - a,o are attack, speed up, and speed down.
The period (.) key activates the ECM.
q and E operate the docking computers and I hit p to activate the scanner.
dhc are witch-drive, jump-drive, and injectors.
When I'm talking to other people, I have to translate into qwerty.
I have seen threads about implimenting dvorak in the game, soas to get the actions mapped to the "right" keys. However, this would mean that speed-up and slow down are on the left hand. (tries it - actually, that's not too bad... swapping back would be odd though.) The keys get scattered - but it lusters the throttle with the missile stuff and the compass. Dumping docking is in the middle, with witch-drive and galactic drive, injectors, and so on. This could get interesting...

[Commander McLane]

@ Sarin and Simon B: Just to repeat another mantra of mine: Please keep in mind that in Oolite distances, sizes and speeds are completely and utterly messed up.

To cut a long story very short (the complete rant can be found several times here one the board): Planet and sun sizes are way too small, ships and other objects are way too big, distances between objects are way too short. All this has a very practical reason: Oolite is a game, not a simulation. If it was a correct sized simulation, it would be utterly boring as a game, because you never would find the tiny station orbiting the gigantic planet; and you would never ever meet another ship on any route, because in reality space is just waaaaaaay to huge to make encounters with anybody else likely.

The sizes are out of scale. The distances (e.g.) between planet and sun are way out of scale (roughly 1000 kilometers instead of for instance 150 million kilometers between sun and earth). But the most ridiculously out of scale thing is the speed of light. Which in Oolite is--as you can easily measure, if you take the time from seeing the station on the edge of your scanner until arriving at a given speed--10 km/s. Not a bit more.

So please, don't try too hard to bring RealLife™-sense into your favorite game. Instead--relax and remember: it's just a game!