Oolite Bulletins

Just wondered

on larger vessels like the Cadeaus, and Python Class Cruiser, on my system anyways, the laser appears as a coloured cross in the middle of the hud crosshairs

with smaller vessels like the tiger, and the cobra lasers appear normally from the middle of the hud shooting to the centre of the crosshairs, is there anyway to change the cadeaus, and pythons so the the lasers look more normal?


looking for someway to change the oxps, I love the space the python CC has,

I'm thinking of playing around with the Python class cruiser oxp to make a new military version of the ship, a little more cargo space (as the navy would need bigger cargo drops) a little faster (around .45, instead of .35) and Larger missile capacity 6 or 8 instead of 4.

what you think?

With regards to the Caduceus, that was deliberate on the part of the original ship builders - the view position is directly behind the gun mount, so that they are as accurate as possible. In other ships there is an inherent accuracy error. The funny cross effect is a result of this positioning.

I wasn't a fan of it either. 'Tis easy to fix in the shipdata.plist: find the view_position_aft, view_position_forward, view_position_port and view_position_starboard strings, and change the values in there. In my copy, I changed the y coodinates to 0.5, which doesn't sacrifice too much accuracy, but gives a proper laser fire effect.

thanks I'll give that a try

Namttep wrote:

I'm thinking of playing around with the Python class cruiser oxp to make a new military version of the ship, a little more cargo space (as the navy would need bigger cargo drops) a little faster (around .45, instead of .35) and Larger missile capacity 6 or 8 instead of 4.

what you think?

Bigger hold, bigger engines, bigger missile bays...what's going to go? It's easy to add stuff (and surprisingly hard to 'delete') but for something to 'Make Sense' there has to be a balance. eg bigger engines need more space, so some cargo capacity has to go.
My other thought is that if the Navy wanted lots of cargo capacity they would go for a bigger ship, lightly armed but with adequate escorts. Indeed in Galactic Navy you'll find something very much like an Anaconda with turrets.
Having said that, although an old design now, the Python Class Cruiser certainly has potential to be developed further.

my thoughts are the navy have access to better tech, so maybe a faster engine, could be smaller take up less space. be more efficient, more speed doesn't have to mean the engine has to take more space. it just means an enhancement to efficiency

Think computers, they used to be as big as a house, in the sixty's the dream was to build a powerful computer that would fit into only one room, now my digital watch has more computing power than put man into space, an Ipod the size of my thumb has 300 times (or more) space on it than the first hard drives.

the other thing is are missiles in bays?, the game lists them as pylon weapons, and as we are talking a non newtonian flight model adding more pylons won't add any Drag.

the whole cargo space thing is kind of wierd anyways, take metals/alloys lets talk about steel - a cubic metre of steel weighs 7.8 tonnes a cubic metre of aluminum weighs far less, versus a tonne of luxuries that may take 5-10 cubic metres dependant on what luxuries we're talking about, a tonne of machinary may take 2 cubic metres or 10 cubic metres dependant on the machinary, yet we see everything stored in the same size storage containers in the game, (and yes I know how hard it would be to make everything different sizes.

the PPC is 80 metres x 90 metres x 180 metres thats aprox 240ft x 270 x almost 600ft thats a lot of space, its longer than the Humber bridge is tall, if the engine compartment was 200 feet long x 80 x 90 theres much more room for equipment and cargo than the game allows for. hears a modern real world example, the average oil tanker is 1500ft from end to end, thats aproximatley 3 times the size of the pcc, an average oil tanker can carry up to around 55,000 tonnes dwt (dead weight tonnage).

think of the space savings with a smaller more efficient engine, (still of course limited to 7lyr Jumps)
anyways just a few thoughs on efficiency and storage space.

anyways I have thought about this, and ship sizes are far greater than the space required to carry such meagre cargo tonnages.

If the Gal Navy is anything like RL navies then their engine specs have been so long in contracts and requirement slides that the delivered engines are actually two generations behind the best commercially available and are bigger and chunkier and harder to maintain because of all the extra redundancy and ruggedness required to meet all those aforementioned specs and requirements.

Daddy thats a good point,

but mine are also valid, even if the engine was 80x90x100 metres long, the other 80x90x80 is much more storage space than a paltry 160 tonnes would take to store.

but I guess when they threw out newtonian physics for the flight model, they also threw out mass and volumetric physics too.

Hi Namttep,
You might want to take a look at this thread as it is just one of many touching on these issues, and the way they are viewed on the Board.
We all get ideas, some great, some less so and some downright silly, and that is such a good thing because it keeps the game bouyant, but you need to remember that one man's great idea is anothers nightmare.
I found this out for myself when I first released the original version of Contractor. The first post has been edited several times to reflect new version releases, but if you read the thread, you'll get the picture. I spent weeks agonising over the spec and justifying everything in my mind until I was fully happy it made sense and was valid. Many thought I got it wrong, and eventually I did tone it down...quite a lot. To this day I think the original was valid, but it didn't fit in with the Ooniverse as everyone sees it so it had to go. No worries, the 'correct' version that emerged is still awesome and I am more than content with it.
What I'm saying is that sometimes you have to go with the flow...

Namttep wrote:

Daddy thats a good point,

but mine are also valid, even if the engine was 80x90x100 metres long, the other 80x90x80 is much more storage space than a paltry 160 tonnes would take to store.

but I guess when they threw out newtonian physics for the flight model, they also threw out mass and volumetric physics too.

You have to throw out all mathematics, I'm afraid. Especially distances and sizes make no sense in Oolite and cannot be persuaded to make sense.

The point is not what you could physically fit into the hull of a PCC (or any ship, for that matter). The only point is comparison and balance. If you create a ship which is better than the existing ships in all aspects, then what's the reason to keep the existing ships at all? Nobody in their right mind would use them anymore, because they quickly become ridiculously underpowered losers. But then the next guy comes and creates another ship which is better than your ship in all aspects. So what you effectively did was to start an arms race into uberness which very quickly will spiral out of control.

We've been very nearly there. And that's the reason why most ship creators have a very high awareness for balance. If you want to make your ship better in, let's say, speed, that's fine, as long as you make it worse in another crucial aspect (for instance, agility; or cargo space). That's the only way to keep things balanced in a way that allows the standard Oolite ships to still be present in the Ooniverse as more than pure cannon fodder.

I always thought hundreds of metres was a pretty good scale for spaceships. A fighter jet-sized interstellar trader makes even less sense.

Phantom Hoover wrote:

I always thought hundreds of metres was a pretty good scale for spaceships. A fighter jet-sized interstellar trader makes even less sense.

Well let's try another example - I created a ship called Tycho 8, based on the Comic Book Jonnie Rocket - I knew how big Tycho 8 was so I made it to scale and put it Oolite - I couldn't see it - the reason - in a RL(tm) scale Tycho 8 fitted neatly inside a Cargo Pod...

Stuff in Oolite seems to be proportional - if you want a ship that's a bit bigger than a Cobra Mk III then that's what you do - you make it so that in-game it's a bit bigger than a Cobby3, if you then backstory it and say its got Mil-spec engines and shields and a micro-nav computer then you could even justify it having say 50 tons of cargo space, but then you have to make it expensive and/or rare and/or NPC only and/or a pig to fly and/or can't have a fuel scoop and/or can only have a forward laser - something that keeps your lovely new ship in balance with the rest of them...