Oolite Bulletins

this is more in the line of a question than a suggestion, so i hope it's in the right place.

the idea running through my head is this:
a team of cargohauler and escort, where the player would actually fly the escort ship.

the mothership would give the player decent load capacity, while the escort would be optimised for combat. because of the necessity to protect the mothership, the slight advantage over pirate ships would be diminished.
or if the player wants to play pirate her/himself, the mothership could be called up to collect the loot. that could get interesting once the cops show up.

maybe something like this has already been done. if so, please enlighten me.

Wyvern wrote:

maybe something like this has already been done. if so, please enlighten me.

Have you done any Oo-Haul missions before? Nice for a few times, but than the very slow mother becomes boring.

Hi Wyvern... welcome aboard.

Eric Walch wrote:

Wyvern wrote:

maybe something like this has already been done. if so, please enlighten me.

Have you done any Oo-Haul missions before? Nice for a few times, but than the very slow mother becomes boring.

my solution would be to send the mother ahead on torus, then follow with the daughter once greenlighted. when the mother falls out of torus due to contact with pirates, the daughter would be right behind.
or alternatively clear a path ahead of the mother.

either way, there would have to be a "radio-link" between the ships exceeding radar range.


and thanks El Viejo

Hi Wyvern - a Torus drive exists only for player ships - its a go-faster "cheat" available on to the player.

But you'd never see an NPC torus-driving....you'd mass-lock them

well, how abouts giving the mother a "normal" top speed matching the escort's torus drive, then script it so it's only used when there's no other ships around?

I'm working on something similar right now - escort contracts with NPC traders. The NPC trader has a 'resonating torus drive' (actually some cheating JS code) that can jump the mother, player, and any NPC escorts for that mother 1/2 a scanner range at a time if there is nothing else around that would normally mass lock a player.

Capt. Murphy wrote:

I'm working on something similar right now - escort contracts with NPC traders. The NPC trader has a 'resonating torus drive' (actually some cheating JS code) that can jump the mother, player, and any NPC escorts for that mother 1/2 a scanner range at a time if there is nothing else around that would normally mass lock a player.

well, synchronising torus drives (maybe by phase locking their oscillations?) would be an obvious -engineering feat- against the limitations of the torus drive. (or alternatively a complete different drive system with similar speeds without the mass lock problems) coordinating torus jumps of flotillas would be the obvious workaround until the sync drive became operational.

i guess both would have their own advantages and challenges.

though the actual question i have neglected to ask so far: would my idea even be possible to implement?

Wyvern wrote:

well, synchronising torus drives (maybe by phase locking their oscillations?) would be an obvious -engineering feat- against the limitations of the torus drive. (or alternatively a complete different drive system with similar speeds without the mass lock problems) coordinating torus jumps of flotillas would be the obvious workaround until the sync drive became operational.

That would also depend on whether torus drives actually exist.

It can be argued that the so-called torus drive is nothing but a hand-waved time acceleration feature for the player, not something that actually exists for any ship. The player needs a means to quicken the long journey to the station, or else they will get bored and stop playing. Naturally the game designers want to avoid that, and came up with an accelerating feature and a semi-logical in-game explanation for it. NPCs, however, don't get bored.

Indeed the torus drive doesn't really fit into the Ooniverse. There have been suggestions to drop it completely in favour of the fuel injectors (which didn't exist in old Elite, and provide a more balanced way of speeding things up; balanced means that (1) they cost something and (2) everybody can have them).

The only way to deal with the idea of all-ships-have-torus-drives in an in-game-logical way is through their mass-lock feature: you may assume that NPCs have torus drives, because through the very nature of the torus drive you can never witness another ship using it. That doesn't explain, though, why for instance a fleeing pirate is only using his injectors. Why doesn't he switch to torus drive once he's outside your scanner? If you pursue another ship you can always catch it, because your opponent must always use his fuel to get away, while you can let him get out of scanner range, hit 'J' until he is in scanner range again, and repeat until he's run out of fuel. This is a strong in-game hint that torus drives don't actually exist (and that the speeding-up feature for long journeys is becoming a cheat in combat situations).

The easiest way of simulating an NPC-torus drive would be to remove an NPC which you knows is at the other end of the system, and reposition it just outside the player's scanner range. That would somehow look like an NPC coming out of nowhere and getting mass-locked by the player ship.

Wyvern wrote:

though the actual question i have neglected to ask so far: would my idea even be possible to implement?

Depends. Which part of the idea?

I can imagine one general problem: basically your idea amounts to an escort mission. Escort missions are dreaded by players of many games, because they're very difficult to create and balance correctly. They tend to be either too hard (if the character/ship you have to escort usually ends up dead, no matter what you do) or too boring and repetitive. Much depends on the AI of the escorted entity, and the environment over which you (both as scripter and as player) have only limited influence.

while it's true what you say about hand-weaving the same could be argued about the oolite-physics in general.
i do agree that the torus drive (and it's explanation) is an "invention" (in several meanings) to shorten the time between encounters with other ships and the station. though it's not a time acceleration. if that would be so, NPCs outside the scanner range would be accelerated as well. that would make escaping from pirates by getting just beyond scanner range, then running away on torus, make virtually impossible, unless the pirate is slower than the player ship on normal drive.

however, i have to disagree about teleporting ships. all that would simulate is ships teleporting. there would neither be the (at least sometimes notable) deceleration from torus speed, nor encounters with other ships between here and there. now while the latter could be argued as "does it make a sound if nobody is there to listen", the former can not. and in both cases there are situations where it does make a difference.

indeed, i already outlined a (i think) simple way to give torus drives to NPCs: a max speed in the neighborhood of torus speed and a script to limit them to normal speeds in "mass lock" situations. and a thrust figure (or another scripting feature)that makes the decelleration noticable.



what i don't know if it could be done... is it possible to have a two ship (or more) team, where the cargo is transported by "the other ship(s)", yet still have control over the manifest when it comes to buying and selling?


PS: Laurin läßt grüssen.

Wyvern wrote:

indeed, i already outlined a (i think) simple way to give torus drives to NPCs: a max speed in the neighborhood of torus speed and a script to limit them to normal speeds in "mass lock" situations. and a thrust figure (or another scripting feature)that makes the decelleration noticable.

Just guessing, but I think that wouldn't work. The player's torus speed is 32 x maxSpeed. So you would have to multiply the NPC maxSpeed by 32 and have them usually operate in the range of setSpeedFactorTo: 0.03125, or to be precise setSpeedFactorTo: 0.025, because normal cruising speed is 80% of maxSpeed. My guess is that with these small numbers you would run into precision problems quite soon. And that is apart from the fact that the standard trader AI doesn't even operate that much with explicit factors anymore, but with the convenience method setSpeedToCruiseSpeed, which is defined as 80% of maxSpeed (or 99% of the speed of the slowest escort).

Also not mentioning the overhead for all NPCs constantly monitoring their scanner range for mass-locking entities, and slowing down if they find one.

EDIT: typo corrected, first speed factor was 10 times too high

Commander McLane wrote:

Wyvern wrote:

indeed, i already outlined a (i think) simple way to give torus drives to NPCs: a max speed in the neighborhood of torus speed and a script to limit them to normal speeds in "mass lock" situations. and a thrust figure (or another scripting feature)that makes the decelleration noticable.

Just guessing, but I think that wouldn't work. The player's torus speed is 32 x maxSpeed. So you would have to multiply the NPC maxSpeed by 32 and have them usually operate in the range of setSpeedFactorTo: 0.3125, or to be precise setSpeedFactorTo: 0.025, because normal cruising speed is 80% of maxSpeed. My guess is that with these small numbers you would run into precision problems quite soon. And that is apart from the fact that the standard trader AI doesn't even operate that much with explicit factors anymore, but with the convenience method setSpeedToCruiseSpeed, which is defined as 80% of maxSpeed (or 99% of the speed of the slowest escort).

Also not mentioning the overhead for all NPCs constantly monitoring their scanner range for mass-locking entities, and slowing down if they find one.

And that is a good reason to get rid of torus altogether...

Smivs wrote:

But you'd never see an NPC torus-driving....you'd mass-lock them

You can see large freighters from further away than 25 km, so it would be possible to see an NPC using witchfuel injectors or a torus (were one to exist) from just outside radar range.

True, but can you judge speed at that distance?