Oolite Bulletins

I am proud to announce the launch of a newcomparative size chartof all the core Oolite ships. The idea for this was originally P A Groove's and I thought it was such a good idea I decided to do it! Some three months of 'spare 10 minuteses' later, it's finished, and has been posted on the Wiki.
As I have a huge library of screenshots of my Smivs'Shipset ships, it made sense to use these, so for each ship I firstly aligned it facing left (if it wasn't already) then accurately cropped the image to the length of the ship, and scaled the images using a scale of 5 pixels per metre to the length of the ship as specified in the .dat file. These were then super-imposed over a grid, and text added, and finally the resultant image was scaled down to a suitable size.
The result is an accurate to-scale chart of all the Core ships, at a scale of 2 pixels per metre, on a 10 metre square grid.
If no-one objects I will add a link to it from the main 'Ships' page of the Wiki.
I have now added a link to the chart at the bottom of the main Wiki 'Ships' page.

That's very good work, Smivs... I like it.

Good job!

Nice!

Good Job.

I am surprised, I always thought the anaconda, boa and python were much bigger than the cobra mk III.

coolness!

aye, i'm surprised at some of the sizes too, you keep thinking of the Condas as being fricking mega but they're not THAT much larget than a Cob!

Chrisfs wrote:

Good Job.

I am surprised, I always thought the anaconda, boa and python were much bigger than the cobra mk III.

Thanks for the compliments, Guys. The Cobra does seem quite big, and this is down to it's shape. Being 'flat' it looks quite big from above (as in the chart) but is really narrow when viewed from the side, whereas the big freighters look big from all viewpoints.
I had thought about showing top-and side-views for each ship, but this would have made the chart far too long. Perhaps the Mk2 version....?

Ehm...nice job of research, you show a lot of patience and a uncommon will to complete the task. Kudos to you!
But I noticed the sizes:
I compare them with real aircrafts/spacecrafts...and I'm a little perplexed:

The Adder is only 2,5 meters short of a B-52 (lenght 48,5).
The Space Shuttle (I'm talking about the Orbiter Vehicle) is 37,23m long.
IHMO they're too much big. All of them.

PS: Try to compare the cabin's glasses with those of real vehicles. This is like to have a wall of an house entirely made of glass or space-resistant trasparent material. They're shaped for a smaller ship (look at Viper).

aye, well if you wanna get onto scale in Oolite, there's about 300 threads you can pick from.
short answer, it's unrealistic. just enjoy the game.

One from one of those said threads - "here's one I prepared earlier"

DaddyHoggy wrote:

One from one of those said threads - "here's one I prepared earlier"

Is that a Dodecahedron Station Space Station I see in the upper left?

That's real interesting, Smivs.

I've just started, timidly, to create a new ship oxp and this'll help get my model dimensions a bit more realistic (in Oolite terms).

My first attempt was a bit on the, erm, small side. The engine exhaust cone was larger than the ship itself!

Still, incoming missiles were having a hell of a job hitting it!

Newt_Othis wrote:

My first attempt was a bit on the, erm, small side. The engine exhaust cone was larger than the ship itself!

To be precise, the engine exhaust cone is usually exactly as long as you define it in shipdata.

Newt_Othis wrote:

That's real interesting, Smivs.

I've just started, timidly, to create a new ship oxp and this'll help get my model dimensions a bit more realistic (in Oolite terms).

My first attempt was a bit on the, erm, small side. The engine exhaust cone was larger than the ship itself!

Still, incoming missiles were having a hell of a job hitting it!

My first attempt at a ship (Tycho 8 from Jonnie Rocket - where my unit of measure was the height of an average 8yr old boy) - the ship in Oolite was smaller than a cargo pod!

here is my take on what happened with the sizes..

The cobra is not 130 meters wide, its 130 feet wide as stated In the classic Elite manual. However, somewhere along the translations and reprints, it became 130 meters, in reality: it should have been 39,39 meters wide..

However in Oolite its 130 meters, as a result some OXP that tries to use other universe ships like the X-Wing from Star wars, looks ridiculously small, because they are true to their stated size...

In reality, the Author of any oxp or other universe ship, should take the intended size of his ship and multiply it by a factor of 3.25, that way everything in Oolite looks and feels correct.

So the adder is as stated 45 meters long, however do we divide it with 3.25 we get a more correct 13.85 meters long or 45 feet

Cheers Frame..