Oolite Bulletins

Can you go backwards?

I went up close to an asteroid and wanted to just move back slightly.. but I could not go negative speed by pressing the 'S' key as I had expected.

Can this be done?

Hi wolis, welcome to the forum! No, you can't go backwards. Your ship engines are non-Newtonian: there are no forward thrusters. There's no "thrust" of any kind, really. The engines grab hold of spacetime and shove it out the back. The engine flares aren't rockets: they're wakes of disturbed spacetime. The bad news is, you can't shove the ship around this way and that. The good news is, you don't use any reaction mass, so you can keep flying forever (or as long as your power plant holds out, at least), and there's no inertia to worry about: when you stop, you stop!

(This is my interpretation of what happens, anyway – your opinion may vary. The important thing is, your engines only push in one direction.)

Ah.. that makes perfect sense.

And if I think hard about it, I could have simply spun my ship around, looked out the rear and pushed forwards a tad.

Space travel can be so awkward sometimes.

the Amiga Elite had retro rockets as a buyable addon. pretty good in combat for giving you distance if your shields took a hammering.

Killer Wolf wrote:

the Amiga Elite had retro rockets as a buyable addon. pretty good in combat for giving you distance if your shields took a hammering.

Yea, I remember. They came quite handy in the one or other situation. OXP, anyone?

You have a pretty tight turning radius in a Cobra MKIII. I was able to turn 180 in a fuel station and go out the way I came in.

Chrisfs wrote:

You have a pretty tight turning radius in a Cobra MKIII. I was able to turn 180 in a fuel station and go out the way I came in.

Try flying through the sides next time - I've done that both with a Boa Class Cruiser and a Caduceus

Screet