Oolite Bulletins

Zireael wrote:

Because player ships can't have multiple lasers, duh. You'd probably have to use a NPC version with multiple lasers and a player version with a single laser.

player ships should be able to have multiple lasers

Staer9 wrote:

Zireael wrote:

Because player ships can't have multiple lasers, duh. You'd probably have to use a NPC version with multiple lasers and a player version with a single laser.

player ships should be able to have multiple lasers

That is questionable.

Multiple lasers are not necessarily an advantage. For starters, they all shoot strictly forward, absolutely parallel to each other. Their beams do not merge. Thus, if you have let's say three forward pointing lasers in a wide angle and fire at a relatively small ship, most of the time only one of your three lasers will actually hit. If you're lucky and the ship is broader than the distance between two of your lasers, you have the chance of two lasers simultaneously, but I guess that's a rare luck. In other words: at least the fire of one laser, and in most cases the fire of the majority of your lasers is completely wasted.

And this is where the second disadvantage kicks in: overheating. All lasers pointing in one direction would be connected to the same, unaltered cooling system. So again, if you have three forward pointing lasers, the laser heat would increase at triple the usual amount, and the lasers would overheat three times as fast. Again, while on average at least two thirds of their shots don't do anything useful. Thus, having three forward lasers is in effect basically the same as having only one laser, and deliberately missing with at least two out of three shots. This is not an effective fighting technique, therefore multiple lasers for player ships are actually not a desirable addition, unless they would be very close together (but this is not what you have in mind for the ship design you're working at).

And before you ask: no, there is no such thing as laser cooling boosters, and there won't be in the future.

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

That's the same thing as laser cooling boosters !!!

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

How do you think they're cooled anyway?

Moved back into the show and tell thread from whence it came!

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

Unfortunately Space is actually one huge vacuum flask, and a vacuum is a remarkably good insulator, shedding heat is a very tricky issue in Space...

Smivs wrote:

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

How do you think they're cooled anyway?

I always presumed it was some liquid cooling system... but perhaps a vacume heat sink or a solar heat converter so all heat is taken to reverse solar panels then radiated off?

Commander McLane wrote:

And before you ask: no, there is no such thing as laser cooling boosters, and there won't be in the future.

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

Well, let me rephrase:

Commander McLane wrote:

And before you ask: no, there is no such thing as laser cooling boosters, and there won't be in the future.

Answering from a scripting perspective: no method of decreasing the laser's temperature faster than it does will be made available for scripting through the code. Period. It doesn't matter how you would call the device, or what kind of technobabble you'd invoke in order to justify it. The underlying scriptability is deliberately missing from Oolite's code, and will not be made available.

There are very few hard limitations to scriptability in Oolite. Additional laser cooling is one of them. The basic reason is that it would change the game balance too drastically, giving a huge advantage to the player (NPCs fire their lasers randomly, they are not subjected to actual overheating; therefore only the player could profit from additional laser cooling).

The original author of Oolite, Giles Williams (Aegidian), actually once enabled additional laser cooling in the code (in Oolite 1.64, it seems), and a laser coolant OXP was created. However, after a brief period of experimenting with it and disliking it, Giles explicitly took away the feature again in Oolite 1.65. In the world of Oolite this is as close as it gets to a final and undebatable 'no' to a feature. So far the development team has stood by this decision, and there will be no laser cooling feature in Oolite 1.7x.

Oolite 2.0 (or Oolite 3.0, for that matter) may be a different issue. I don't remember off the top of my head whether the powers-that-be have already voiced any intent on how to handle lasers in these (which could involve the question of additional cooling amongst other questions).

Commander McLane wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

And before you ask: no, there is no such thing as laser cooling boosters, and there won't be in the future.

Staer9 wrote:

hmmmmm, what about a laser heat sink? space is cold enough

Well, let me rephrase:

Commander McLane wrote:

And before you ask: no, there is no such thing as laser cooling boosters, and there won't be in the future.

well rephrased, I guess you dont like the idea.

Staer9 wrote:

well rephrased, I guess you dont like the idea.

I hope you've read the rest of the post as well?

It doesn't matter what I like or don't like. The point is that the creator and the current developers of Oolite don't like the idea. Their likes matter.

Commander McLane wrote:

It doesn't matter what I like or don't like.

Yes it does, and it matters what we all think. Many, like you and me don't like the idea of laser coolers because of the appalling effect they would have on game play. For the same reason many of us wouldn't want multiple lasers (even if they 'worked properly') for player ships, and I for one don't like plasma canon either (except maybe on huge ships like Naval Frigates).

I fully understand why you dont like the change it would make to game balance, however I am often the sort of person that will look through the shipdata.plist and make all npc only ships into player flyable ones, like the ones in assassins for example. I like changing things

Staer9 wrote:

however I am often the sort of person that will look through the shipdata.plist and make all npc only ships into player flyable ones, like the ones in assassins for example. I like changing things

There's certainly nothing wrong with that I did the same once for all the 'core' NPCs and it was really interesting. If nothing else it's good 'research' because it can help enlighten you about the strong and weak points of the other ships and that knowledge is of great tactical benefit.
As has been explained by McLane, even the multi-laser NPCs can make good player ships, and with no loss in real terms even with them losing some of the lasers.

I flew for a long time in a griff krait, but I remeber being gutted when I left the station and only had one foward laser (it was actually the easyest ship to convert due to a player role on already existing in the shipdata, all I had to do was make a shipyard.plist refering to it)