The flight model wouldn't be going away. This would be an extra system with extra costs. Critically, it would not be free and instant travel - there will be costs and risks involved.

Consider this scenario: you see a battle happening and want to join, but it would takes days of normal flight to get there, so you decide to jump. The battle is happening perilously close to a planet, so there's a non-zero chance that you could end up too close the the planet and crash, unless you allow your computer to take the time to calculate the jump properly. It will take five minutes, but the battle will be over by then, so maybe you only do a partial calculation and take your chances. Oh, and maybe your shields need a recharge after jump for some reason.

Now I don't know which if any of those factors would happen or make sense. My point is that there should be a way to balance it so that normal flight is probably the right choice most of the time, but a short jump may occasionally make some sense. We discussed a fair bit of this in IRC. The log of those discussion is linked from the wiki topic I mentioned.

Perhaps using something like Oolite uses, some form of fuel injection that will burn up your fuel reserves at a massive pace. Also, because you also need to reduce your mass to zero (using some fuel hungary mass adjustment add-on), yet at the same time, travel in normal space, your shields would be stripped bare. This happens because you are exceeding relativistic speeds, so even tiny particles hitting your ship will slowly but surely reduce your shields to zero. Once this happens you must drop out of these "superluminal speeds" or your hull will disintegrate. Doing it this way, you will have more control over the process but also have easy to understand costs for doing it. Also, since it takes such a toll on your ship, you could only do this in short bursts. Doing it all the way from hyperspace jump entry point to planetfall wouldn't feel right in my view.

For those interested here is what The Wiki says on FTL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

Or perhaps increase the accuracy of the jump engines but with penalties the closer you get to a gravitational reference point, for example, trying to jump to just outside a planetary atmosphere also includes a very high chance of having an exit point beneath the planet's crust! 😮

I know this "intercept" issue must be giving you guys some trouble, it's not easy having full-sized solar systems and reconciling that with pirate intercepts, but if you can pull it off, it would be awesome 😎

Okay, you got me back there. 😀

Would someone mind explaining the cargo and fuel scoop. I tried to get close to Sol with the fuel scoop equipped, but ended up TOO close. I also tried to mine Phobos but got chased off by the fuzz. Can mining be done yet?

Mine somewhere that doesn't have a base in it! Fuel scooping is safer in a gas giant's atmosphere.

i agree with geraldine on the intercept issue ....i thought the oolite system for getting round was great .......the fuel injection system giving you short range warp capabilitys would take away the need to constantly speed up time just to get places quickly

Geraldine's idea of using up fuel to get a speed boost... does it slow down again if you run out of fuel? How?

That sort of concept doesn't make sense in a vacuum governed by Newtonian physics. It's not just the huge distances, but the vast differences in velocity that everything has. You don't just have to reach your target; you must also reach your target's velocity.

Sorry Brianetta, I should have fleshed out the idea better. 🙂

Granted that FTL is impossible for objects with mass, but that was why I suggested a "mass altering device" that would reduce the ship's mass to zero, however it takes a lot of fuel to run this gadget. When your fuel runs out (or if you choose to shut it off), mass returns to the ship, hence you would drop to sub-light speeds again. This gadget is smart though in how it re-applies mass in that it returns you to the same space normal speed you were doing before you engaged it perhaps by actually increasing the original mass of your ship untill equilibrium with your starting speed is attained. Obviously it would also incorporate some form if internal damping to handle the massive Gees involved in changing your velocity.

It's only an idea though, my attempt in trying to deal with this tricky intercept problem. It's only now when thinking about it, how difficult this would be for the devs to get right.

Whatever method the devs decide upon, I just hope it doesn't involve jumpgates 😕

A mass-reducing device might work kind of well. If hyperspacing works by travelling through a different dimension than our three, then you may be able to put your ship partway into that dimension while what's left of you in the third dimension moves around the system.

Perhaps in real life. In Pioneer, we use Newtonian physics, not Einsteinian physics. There's nothing special about the speed of light.

See, the problem there is that you move across the system just fine, and might even be at the same place as the guy you're trying to meet. Trouble is, you're still at the velocity you started at, and he almost certainly isn't, so you'd see him continue to coast away from you at whatever speed he's doing. You're still playing catch-up; you still have to spend time matching his velocity, and once you've done that, what a surprise, he's bloody miles away.

Jump into Sol and select Earth. Look at your speed relative to Earth - very nearly 30km/s, which is positively belting along. Ships are in a hurry; Earth dawdles along at only 6.28 AU per year. Just reaching them quickly isn't the problem. It's reaching them and staying with them.

Any scheme that relies on a temporary speed boost simply won't work, unless your game is like Oolite and everybody knows what 0 m/s means.

Of course, I keep forgetting the Pioneer universe is not Einsteinian 😳 Still, its nice to pretend it is! 😆

Ah, ok now I see what you mean. Hard (15 hour) day at work so I am a little slow 🙂 Ok then, how about "the gadget" plotting the course and velocity of your intercept according to your target? You could set a small relative velocity differential between yourself and the target by sharing the same reference point. That would drop you out of superluminal speed right on their tail. After that it's all down to piloting skills if you make the kill or not. Conversely, attacking ships could pull the same stunt to intercept you.

Yes I agree there is no absolute 0ms with regards to Pioneer as it depends on what your measuring your zero velocity at (the reference point), but for intercepts, you could use the same reference point as the target ship. Once you are close enough, use the gadget to automatically adjust your speed to bring you within striking range at a low speed differential. Remember though, there is costs to doing this because your shield will be weak from travelling at superluminal. So some tactics would need to be employed to enable you to survive this vunerable period until your shields recharge. Thats about it Brianetta, a fudge by any other name I admit, but to be honest I would still like to see what others could come up with. Perhaps there is an even simpler solution, if I could only think of it 😕

Well, there's still the cheating by teleporting...

General consensus *seems* to be (and I can't speak for all of the dev team) that since we already have a drive that can make hyperspace wormholes, we should use that rather than invent yet another fictitious technology.

Which is effectively cheating by teleporting, but we're just trying to spin a bit of plausibility around it 🙂

LMAO .....see .....now my brain just jumped out the back of my head ...........im not a rocket scientist ......nor do i have ANY understanding of newtonian or einsteinian physics (i dont even know the differance im not even gonna pretend to) .......it dosnt bother me in my everyday life so as far as im concerned i dont need to know the differance 😉

but the one thing i dont want is to need a degree in engineering to be able to fly a ship 😀 ....in my opinion in the future this kind of thing would get passed from father to son ......otherwise how the hell do pirates themselves exist ......cos the only people who would be able to fly in space would be the military and have the training afforded by that way of life ........so their must be some kind of tech that makes this simpler

now im being told that the speed of light means nothing .......ok i can handle that ...so as an uneducated moron i can factor that into my thoughts

i also DO have some grasp of the fact that space is the thing thats moving ....but like simon pegg ....i forget this fact easily

so here are my thoughts on this ....... bear with me whilst i make my retarded suggestion in the hope that its not actualy as retarded as it sounds (i dont explain things so good)

if faster than light travel dosnt exist ....than the only other explaination as to what a hyperdrive does is dimension shifting ......witchspace ..if you prefer .........

so if you can enter witchspace to fly to another system that means that portable wormhole tech exists .....and if that is the case ....than isnt it possible that tech to get an accurate destination would also be required am i right

so its obvious to me that if a ship has said tech already its not actualy cheating .........your already bending the rules to get to a destination as it is ....(because in this model your cheating anyway to just jump to a new place) so its not cheating to bend them a little further and say ..look .....ships have this onboard thing that locks onto a target destination with as much accuracy as it can .........how close it gets you to said destination depends on how old it is (when it was invented .....and when it was last serviced) ....tech for this would obviously get better as time goes on ....so obviously you get some that are more accurate than others

now how this computer works is ......it uses your ships star charts to lock onto a body and automaticaly puts your speed relative to that body (geting rid of the need to build up to that speed on re-entry ...... it automaticaly boots you out of witchspace at this speed because the witchspace dimention wraps around our own meaning that when you enter you automaticaly appear in every point in our universe at the same time and are theirfore reletive to everything .....its just a case of picking a spot to emerge (or somthing like that .....think infinite improbability drive from hitchikers)

mis jumps can still occur because the drive has malfunctioned or is old and does a ...no ..i want to go here .not their thing

their problem solved .......if you cant come up with a plausible explaination ....than make one up ....because uneducated boneheads like me wont know the differance and at least this way sounds plausible to those that are .....why try to apply rationality to somthing that isnt already

basicaly what im saying is ...... your calling teleporting cheating when effectivly its what your already doing in game anyway .......so their is no point holding back ......just work out how to get to planets within a system with that in mind ....you cant have an explaination to everything in life or the fun is lost

EDIT .........yeah im probly talking out my arse .....but im just trying to make sure you dont lose sight of things by trying to rationalise everything .......if you want my honest opinion you could use this theory and say that the drive gets less accurate the further away you are ....but within a system its accurate to the point of intercepting ships

EDIT 2 ....yeah i just read that back and i know i havent solved the getting from planet to planet problem 🙄 ........but at least i have tryed to make an explaination to make the teleporting thing seem plausible and not cheating

If I understand this correctly from the alpha16 new features list, then a ship jumping from system a to system b will always emerge into system b in the same area of system b every time. If this is true then pirates would wait in that area for victims to appear. That's what I imagined the 'teleporting' of Frontier pirates was supposed to simulate, and would give them a good chance of intercepting you without intra-system jumps being necessary. That being said, such jumps if implemented should require as much fuel as inter-system jumps to prevent them from being over used, imho. The rationale could be that jumps close to a gravity well would require proportionately more energy.

Yea, more accurate jumps sound good to me too 😉

Hi all, a compilation on Linux observation.

On the Wiki, you've specified the following prerequisites:

I'm getting errors (package not found error) for libglut3-dev.

I've found that replacing this prerequisite with freeglut3-dev resolves this missing dependancy.

Something I only discovered the other day, after finally upgrading. Those stated dependencies are correct for Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10.

OK, I'm using XUbuntu 11.10...

It may be purely because I'm an Aussie but is there any scope to add a spaceport to the continent of Australia on Earth? Australia's importance in the space program (by the way of tracking stations and communications and radio telescopes) means that surely there'd be a spaceport SOMEWHERE on the continent in the 31st century. It's the only major continent not to have a spaceport. That and maybe Africa/Middle East...y'know, so each continent is represented equally or something like that.

There's no spaceport on the Australian continent, but there *is* an entire Australian star system. Bear in mind that about half of the dev team are Australian, live in Australia or have strong family ties to Australia. Australia isn't forgotten! (-:

Where is this Australian starsystem you speak of? I shall make it my home!

Werribee (22,4,11)

This script:

https://gist.github.com/1433651

...will get you there with the minimum of effort. Just download that into your data/modules directory and start a new game. I'll fly you right there in my custom ship; you just need to find me on the bulletin board.

I posted an addon that places a spaceport at people from SSC's home towns. It works in alpha 16 and can be found here. http://www.spacesimcentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=2249&start=20

Hello

I have just downloaded ships from the completed models for Pioneer thread, last page

I would like to know the exact procedure to add them to Pioneer alpha 16,I assume it

is a bit more complex than just dropping the contents from the zip files in to the ships

folder thanks

(edit in fact i now know its a bit more complex than just dropping the contents into the

ships folder)