Oolite Bulletins

Quick question. I've been thinking of coding up a ship recently, and it's meant to be a fast one. In doing research I was curious as to the speed boosts given by the injectors and the Jump Drive. I looked around for the EQ script for the injectors but couldn't find them. So, two questions:

1. What kind of speed bonus do the Witchdrive Fuel Injectors confer? Is it a preset constant, or does it modify the max speed of the ship you currently own? If the former, what would be the equivalent speed in LM; if the latter, how would the equipment affect the MaxSpeed?

2. Same question, but in regards to the Jump Drive. It seems to be a constant speed across ships, but I have not been able to determine it as of yet.

Thanks in advance for any illumination provided.

LordHaHa

Both cases involve multiplying the ship's speed by a factor. For the fuel injectors this factor is set to 7.0, while for the torus jump drive, it is set to 32.0.

Based on my estimates, only the torus drive is close to the LM speed reported for ships. This is even assuming the "m" distances stand for MILES rather than meters. 1 km would be 1 kilo-miles, yet even 1 km/sec would still be less than 0.01 LM. The time needed to travel the width of a planet is still a couple seconds even on the torus drive and that would still be considerably less than 1.0 LM (~186 kilo-miles/second).

What is the "LM" unit being used here?

The Black Albatross wrote:

What is the "LM" unit being used here?

Unless memory is playing tricks on me, Light Mach. So 0.3LM would be 30% of the speed of light. Which lightspeed, you ask? Dunno. Probably the speed of light as it travels through jellybabies.

The Black Albatross wrote:

What is the "LM" unit being used here?

Whatever you want it to be.

In context of Oolite's back story it's supposed to by the speed of light.

In context of Oolite's coordinate system, which is supposed to be in meters, it's 1000 m/s. (With the debugging features it's not too difficult to measure that.)

Time to re-repeat my mantra: sizes, distances, and as a result of that also speeds are completely messed up and out of scale in Oolite. By design this isn't fixable, no matter how hard you try.

Therefore it is absolutely pointless to try to get an absolute reference point, like 'speed of light', or even '1 km/s'. The only reference point you can get is the speeds of other ships. If you want an exceptional fast ship, look how fast the fastest ship in the Oolite original set is (it's the Viper Interceptor with 0.52) and note that it's a whole lot faster than any other ship. Therefore, if your ship exceeds this value, you can be sure that you have placed it firmly in the uber-territory. A ship that would be really fast, but still believable, and available to the private sector (as opposed to the security-forces military-technology Viper Interceptor), would have to sacrifice a lot of other things as trade-offs (cargo bay, probably shield technology) and could perhaps achieve 0.45.

In context of Oolite's back story it's supposed to by the speed of light.

I don't think this was ever established in the original Elite manuals or backstory. LM simply stands for 'LightMach' - it could represent a fraction of the speed of light, or ... not.

All we know is that the default Mk3 Cobra from Elite has a top speed of 0.3 LM.

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

In context of Oolite's back story it's supposed to by the speed of light.

I don't think this was ever established in the original Elite manuals or backstory. LM simply stands for 'LightMach' - it could represent a fraction of the speed of light, or ... not.

Personally I'd say that's a little nitpicky. I always understood 'LightMach' to be analogous to 'Mach'. Mach stands for the speed of sound, therefore the qualifier LightMach makes it clear that it's the same basic idea, but based on light instead of sound. Now, setting aside the issue of the medium and resulting different speeds, 1 Mach (or Mach 1) represents 1/1 of the speed of sound, not a fraction of it. Therefore in analogy 1 LightMach would represent the full speed of light, not a fraction of it. I think that's a logical reasoning, even if it isn't explicitly explained like this in the written material.

Although, come to think of it, you could perhaps start from the numbers themselves, noticing that they're roughly equal. In the context where 'Mach' is most commonly used, which is air-travel, 1 km/s is an acceptable rough estimation of Mach 1. Then you could argue that Mach doesn't make sense in vacuum, so perhaps LightMach was introduced as an equivalent, but indicating roughly the same speed in km/h as the air-bound Mach. So Mach 1 became 1 LM, and for easiness in the decimal system they made it a round value of 1000 m/s. This would match the observable reality of LM in Oolite. (Perhaps I'm going to adopt this as my new working hypothesis?!? )

EDIT: Oops, I blew it here above. I just noticed that I was confusing 1000 km/h with 1000 m/s. There goes my hypothesis down the drain.

It still wouldn't match the reality of astrophysics in RealLife™, though, where 1 km/s is a ridiculously slow speed. From Earth you need 11 km/s to even get into orbit, and more than that in order to leave orbit. Which begs the question how the human colonials could leave Earth at all centuries ago and conquer the 8 galaxies, if at the time of Oolite they still are nowhere near 1 km/s as a typical ship speed. A Cobra could (barely!) reach escape velocity from an Earth-like planet if engaging its torus drive (0.3 x 32 = 9.6 km/s; player Cobra: 0.35 x 32 = 11.2 km/s). However, close to a planet the torus drive cannot be engaged. And most ships are slower than a Cobra III, so they definitely couldn't. Which makes planetary landing (or, to be precise, take-off from planets) in Oolite effectively impossible. On the other hand of course, planets in Oolite are so tiny that you could probably reach escape velocity by simply jumping on the ground. I doubt that any of them could even hold an atmosphere. (Don't rely on the numbers on the F7-screen. Planets are so ludicrously small that Oolite is lying to you in order to cover the blatant mess. On the F7 screen it takes the diameter in meters and pretends it to be in kilometers, making the planets appear a thousand times bigger—and a billion times more voluminous—than they are.)

Like I said, it's all a complete screw-up. No matter how you turn it around, it's never going to make sense if you take the whole system into consideration.

a related question :

does the throttle setting have impact on injector powered flight / jumpdrive flight ?

I kinda expect it doesn't impact jumpdrive flight, but does affect speed with injectors.

Lone_Wolf wrote:

does the throttle setting have impact on injector powered flight / jumpdrive flight ?

What do you mean by 'throttle setting'? There is no property called 'throttle' for ship-entities.

If your question is whether you can go fractions of injector speed or jump speed, the answer is: it depends.

Supposing that we talk about the player ship, it's either 'on' or 'off'. There is no such thing as 'half-injector'. Injector speed is 7 x max speed, torus speed is 32 x max speed, period. (Of course neither acceleration nor deceleration are instantaneous, therefore you go briefly through the whole tachometer while accelerating or breaking.)

If we talk about NPCs, it's different. They can go at any speed below 7 x max speed. As long as their current speed is between their max speed and 7 x max speed, they use up their fuel (and once they have used all of it, they're limited to max speed). Therefore fractions of full injector speed are possible. Torus drive doesn't exist for NPCs.

guess i'm used to much to playing oolite with a joystick.

i should have asked :
does it matter for injector / torusdrive speed if you're flying at 50% of max speed, 75% of max speed etc ?

the answer is clear now, thanks.