Oolite Bulletins

Chrisfs wrote:

I thought the extra cargo bay was an actual physical addition wielded on ton the ship, but if more exotic answers are required, I would go straight to the top.
an Extra Cargo bay is actually a small machine which creates a pocket dimension inside the ship. This dimension allows you to hold extra stuff. But if the machine is damaged in a fight, the entire space goes away at once. (If this is the way it actually works).

Your ship is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside slightly

Some ships can be reconfigured to increase their cargohold. This is no trivial upgrade, as it involves moving bulkheads and rerouting multiple systems, while maintaining the ship's inertial balance.

Cargo Bay Extension Specification: Standard model is the Mariner Freight Chamber.

Commander McLane wrote:

There is of course an explanation in the Wiki:

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

Some ships can be reconfigured to increase their cargohold. This is no trivial upgrade, as it involves moving bulkheads and rerouting multiple systems, while maintaining the ship's inertial balance.

The manual knows (and this is canonic!):

Cargo Bay Extension Specification: Standard model is the Mariner Freight Chamber.

treczoks wrote:

In another discussion I found a nice explanation why the normal flight does not consume fuel (something about "pushing spacetime" and the "exhaust" being only a kind of radiation by-effect of this), which also explained why the ship stops as soon as you turn this engines off, and why we fly the way we do. Sadly, I don't know in which discussion it was, or who wrote the article.

A ship's drive accelerates quirium particles in a closed circular particle accelerator – a torus – thus manipulating the fabric of spacetime, drawing it in at one end and pushing it out at the other. The faster the quirium spins, the faster the ship goes. No quirium is consumed in the process. Properly maintained, a closed quirium torus could propel a ship indefinitely.

[nifty diagram of a Witchspace "broomstick" drive]

Top view:
(bow) <----O----## (stern)

Side view:
(bow) <----=----## (stern)

When local spacetime is sufficiently flat, i.e. not distorted by a large mass or by the actions of another nearby drive, it can propel the ship at around lightspeed. If local spacetime is too distorted, this torus system can only operate at a fraction of capacity: 0.2C, 0.35C, etc. In these distorted conditions, spinning the qurium at full speed would cause it to rapidly decay, bringing the whole engine to a crashing halt in milliseconds. The "Witchdrive fuel injector" system gets round this, by constantly topping up the quirium in the torus from an external tank.

Of course, the ship doesn't actually move at all: it remains stationary, while space itself is hauled in at one end and rammed out at the other. Because of this there is no inertia, hence the non-Newtonian flight characteristics. When the ship appears to "turn", it's actually revolving the entire universe around itself. Because the torus is fitted in the horizontal plane of the ship – see nifty diagram above – it's easy to move the ship (or rather it's easy for the ship to move the universe) up and down vertically, but almost impossible to move it horizontally. However the ship can be spun around its longitudinal axis (or rather, the universe can be spun around ... you get the idea) by rotating the drive assembly. Some progress has been made towards "yawing" by building a smaller torus set at 90° to the main loop, and spinning it either clockwise or anticlockwise. The internal strain on the ship, and on the drive train itself, though, is massive, and personally I think this is just a passing fad with no real advantage.

The "exhaust" is caused by spacetime emerging from the Witchdrive: as this spacetime wake merges back into the normal flow, the particles and antiparticles constantly being produced from the quantum foam are briefly travelling faster than light, and hence give off the distinctive blue-purple glow of Cherenkov radiation. The faster spacetime is moving as it emerges from the engine, the more intense the glow. The conical shape is a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional wake.

(This was all summed up much more neatly by Aegidian, who described the drives as "burrow[ing] through the semi-rigid phlogiston leaving glowing subspace channels that heal at a constant rate, like hot boiled prunes through icy jelly.")

A large enough mass of quirium, spun sufficiently fast, can distort spacetime to such an extent that it can tear open a wormhole. Again, the faster the quirium spins, the longer the wormhole. Accelerated to 99.9999...% of C (constantly topped up from an external tank, as the accelerated quirium decays), the wormhole can reach a full 7 light-years. If it was possible to spin the quirium faster than light, then theoretically the wormhole could be even longer – but it's not possible.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

There is of course an explanation in the Wiki:

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

Some ships can be reconfigured to increase their cargohold. This is no trivial upgrade, as it involves moving bulkheads and rerouting multiple systems, while maintaining the ship's inertial balance.

The manual knows (and this is canonic!):

Cargo Bay Extension Specification: Standard model is the Mariner Freight Chamber.

And I don't think the CBE can be damaged either can it?