erm yes, i giuess scooping from stars was removed for two reasons, no one ever did that and the chances are actually very low.
Pioneer calculteted something wrong with a suns gravity (i assume), in the beginning it was impossible to collide with a star the gravitation accelerated you easy far over the escape velocity. the effect was that you was repelled from a star before you can reach it no matter even if you approached to the centre. i remember that i was once repelled with a large galactical cruiser and i found myself in seconds past jupiter without any time acceleration.
FTL in Pioneer?
However this is fixed since long and now you won't get close to a star and your thrusters won't be powerful enough to escape the gravity. to scoop fuel if that would be still possible you would have to calculate an exact orbit respectively an exact sling shot. It's not what we can assume a player can do.
But a player can handle a large gas giants gravity without to know the mechanics.
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Try out "phoenix" or copy at least "ikarus" i positioned this station in closest possible orbit to the sun (right after it refused to tell me that the orbit is to small)
try to reach this station with my lousy shuttle - good luck.
It's possible but most of the tim e you will find yourself on a curse into the sun.
since it's that close to the sun the autopilot gets confused and can't dock you have to do that manually.
Just to tell that it's almost impossible to scoop fuel from a star and i'm pretty sure that's why it has been dropped.
That works in cheated Frontier, it has worked in Pioneer when we started, but it isn't proper.
I'm not sure but FE2 is 10 times smaller, in fact it's in decimeters and not in meters. this means also that not only the extension is ten times smaller it means also that gravitational effect and masses are ten times smaller as in reality else it wouldn't work.
it might have the sideeffect that the mass of a sun is to small to show the proper effect its gravitation would have on you.
However i trust Pioneer, the recent state that you nearly can't escape a stars gravity from on a certain range is comprehensible to me.
The repelling and resulting velocity above speed of light was more then just wrong. Getting this close as in FE2 is also wrong, it's not possible and this is not because it would get damned hot inside your vessel, this i disregarded.
With our old mechanics i could perform slingshots easy, now i can't do that and would need to precalculate them - looks very comprehensible to me.
What i reached once is an orbit around a star (a brown dwarf in fact) if it would have been stable i don't know but it was at least for a couple of hours. this i reached with that i have let my vessel been accelerated by the stars gravity. I positioned my ship where i assumed it could end up well and gave it a little kick in direction past the star and bingo i was in an orbit.
Besides orbit, the weirdest orbit i discovered in a far out sector, you might know "Phoenix" starts in a sector around 50,50,50 negative or positive, this is (by default) the rim of explored space in Pioneer. Now i stumbled (and hope i can repeat this and find the system again) over a weird multiple system where the whole partner star inclusive its planets sinks into the central star. looks very funny, unfortunately i didn't took me enough time to stay and neither made a screenshot, i would have liked but i had no patience to wait so long. i recognized it in the planetray map view and would have had to stay in orbit to the star in time accel 3x that's far to slow to wait some months for such to happen.
Yes i do examine sometimes this map, dunno why it offers no important information but it gives you an overview how the system looks like.
Since my plays was test runs i certainly checked each system i passed on my way back to sol.
Else i wouldn't have noticed this or the systems with 1500AU and more distance between the partner stars.
Which obviousely makes alpha centauri (or Toliman or uga-uga if you like to me it's alpha centauri. there is no right or wrong but one name is enough the rest is only hairsplitting) to a triple system for Pioneer, Proxima isn't that far from Alpha, it's debated if it's one, i stay to that it is one and we only can't recognise that proxima is in fact in an orbit to alpha, it's to slow to be recognized, we would have to observe it many hundred years to notice the movement.
It seems like that as further you are from sol as weirder the systems get, at least this was my impression.
For such like if alpha centauri is a triple system or not i will contact an astrophysician, i'm not convinced of certain things we introduced like the strong colors of our stars in pioneer.
the colors are classes and don't reflect the actual light a star emits or how this light would affect lighting of an object.
We classify sun as a yellow G type, but the light isn't yellow no?
Right we are born under this light and to us it's white because of this simple fact.
Nonetheless a red dwarf doesn't means he emits only red light, this would be subtractive color mixing.
a star emits light, light color mixes additive not subtractive.
it's no filter wich filters all wavelenghts except red, it emits more red but it emits all the rest of the spectrum to.
How much more i can't tell i only know that it is this kind, for detailed information i need an astrophysician. How strong the red section of the spectrum would be i can't tell, but not as strong.
what we do is subtractive mixing, it's quasi a red filter (for a red dwarf) and this isn't proper.
Light and the effect lighting has on a surface was part of my education.
Light is important for a textile technician, cause we work with colors.
We use many different lightsources to cover the different effects a certain light will have, but none of these bulbs are red or blue or yellow filtered, they emit a different spectrum. that makes a bulb "red" "yellow" or "blue" but in fact visible is all as white light.
"tubes", flourescence tubes you can design to an exact spectrum you need, but none of them is blue red or yellow, it appears as white light to us.
It's only to recognize that i.e. a enlightened green tends to be olive or more forest green depending on the spectrum the tube emits.
I guess it's also caused by that we can't receive the full brightness, it would not be useful. thus we see everything as white light because it's simply to strong to recognize any other as the full bright white mix.
On a sunny summer day the lumen of sun equal to infinite!
On a cloudy winter day it's still 10'000 lumen strong, still stronger as any light source i can legally buy (i was an indoor grower to when it was still new in europe back in the early '90s, is their anything i didn't did already? yes i never was bungee jumping
)
Mercury bulbs are forbidden in switzerland and Xenon bulbs you neither¨ can buy as a customer. We had them in industry to test the destructing effect of light on materials in a reasonable short time. this because you can never know...
most we know and the extreme large encyclopedia of ICI chemicals lists already almost all bad combinations. certain colors can destroy a material together with the UV in a short time, it burns holes into the textiles. most is known but not all possible bad combinations.
It's besides simple physics, somewhere has the energy to go which is absorbed by a subtractive color, sometimes this energy simply destroys the material. mostly it's converted to temperature, sometimes they convert an invisible section of the spectrum to a visible (caused by the loss of energy), infrared or ultraviolet. a side effect of colors we use since many decades for optical brightnessers. it converts UV to visible light this brightens a surface and makes colors appear more saturated as they are. usually it's in every color washing powder.
a side effect of LED light and other crap, this doesn't works with bulbs which emit a exact matching spectrum, no UV no effect of optical brightnessers.
Just if you wonder why things look so flat in this light.
It's no light whatever they state, it never lightens out a room and it's horrible imho. no input = no output, we haven't invented a perpetuum mobile yet. 1 watt in 1 watt out at maximum all the rest is a blatant lie.
we can match the emitted spectrum exactly to what our eyes receive but that didn't lights out a room. there is no "extra energy" which could be converted to visible light by the surface. so everything is flat and bad enlightened.
in no way a 7 watt LED can match with a 40 watt edison.
yes it wastes alot of energy in temperature, but especially the UV part isn't unimportant. FL tubes are ok, you can even match them to our eye but not as close as an LED. they still waste temperature and some UV.
It's a somewhat bad idea, it didn't lights up a room proper.
and if i need 10 times of bulbs to reach the same i gained nothing.
this was my comparison for sodium vapor lamps to FL tubes.
Special growing FL tubes arent bad but if i like to reach the same "lichtstrom" (oh no translation) erm... lightpower (i guess it's not the proper term for "lichtstrom" is the amount of energy a lightsource emits as light and which can be received by a surface)
OK ... if you like to reach the same power the you need ten times as much FL tubes and the resulting energy consumption is exactly the same
400watt a single one 10 x 40 watt for the FL tubes. if i like to reach the same "lichtstrom" i need the same amount of energy. "lichtstrom" didn't cares for what we see, it measures the whole light a lamp emits.
as a grower (i.e) i like to know how much a plant can use of this "lichtstrom" but the differences in this are neglectible small. the advantage of the FL tubes is that they emit less infrared and are due to that not as hot and that the light isn't concentrated on a small area and that i won't need a good designed reflector to shatter the light. However i decided to use sodium vapor lamps and a professional reflector, fortunately my girlfriend was a gardener and we could buy this stuff reduced in price.
In principles a sodium vapor lamp wastes a lot of yellow light which is "invisible" to plants. Yellow and green are the sections of the spectrum a plant reflects. Useful is red and blue. Nonethelees the sodium vapor lamps have a good yield.
See Gernötli examined spectrums up and down, not only because i'm a textile technician.
And yes a sodium vapor lamp is yellow. but when i stand in a growing room it's dammit just bright white light, very unlike if i see them on a road crossing where they are usually used to lighten out the road crossing.
White because so much light is concentrated in a very small room.
You are probably very close while the lamp on the crossing is outdoor and some meters above you. light "loses" (spreads) in cubic root energy.
But well a star is something quite different, yes it spreads even in cubic but it's still that bright that you won't see nothing in space without an extreme filter and while using this filter you won't see any other stars.
the sun has infinite lumen if me measure it by this.
any star has infinite lumen and i assume the light will be to us simply bright white light. and second, light mixes additive, colors mix subtractive.
A red dwarf hasn't a red filter.
That was a lot of off topic, at least it has nothing to do with
balance, stats, survey
But well i had to note my thoughts somewhere.
And i guess nozmajner you did that right, no question.
Even if i don't play Pioneer to be honest, i gave it some test runs for the recent models i made but that is already all.
It's to me no fun to play, pardon me (for once i feel really sorry), let's say it's caused by my bad eyesight, i can't read the small stuff anymore. at least this really annoys me most.
Else it a yes and no, i like and i dislike.
A lot of things have been improved that's a big YES.
Got lost a little in tid bits and details (not your models them i didn't judged and i won't)....
less is usually more and a little bit larger and less infos wouldn't harm.
certain screens look like a text adventure screen, or almost.
i didn't guess that this makes a better game, vice versa i guess.
but well just guess "gernot is an old gamer and still plays invaders"
i'm aware that i'm a dinosaurus of some sort.
we 8 bit gamers are soon extincted and then you guys have your peace.
whatever, i would have to play it to judge it proper.
We've got an experimental 3D cockpit in the works that you can turn on in the options, the sector view and other old screens are going to be reworked - once they're gone the old GUI will be entirely removed, the HUD with the control panel and buttons along the bottom will be removed too and there's a couple of threads discussing a new HUD design over on the developer forums. I#ll be glad when it's gone and that last link is broken so people stop thinking we're just a clone.