PitBowl

Conservation ov Momentum shall not be denied to any man, regardless ov his race, status, gender or creed. -- https://totl.net/Rights/

I have tricked the BuurPit into a bit of scientific research. Some time ago commander Snert and myself did a few experiments of ramming ships and pushing away the other with that. Already then I noticed that the physical concept of "Conservation of Momentum" is implemented rather badly.

So I brought a relatively low massed ship and rammed his heavy Imperial Cutter. With this different masses, according to physics as we know it, I should hand over some momentum to the heavy ship and myself bounce backwards. Only if both ships have the same mass, the incoming ship should exactly come to a stop and hand over all of its momentum to the other. If you want to read up about that a bit, I recommend the all-knowing trash heap (does anyone else remember where this reference comes from, BTW?): Wikipedia - it has an article with nice illustrating animations.

But in Elite:Dangerous something else happens: My smaller ship always comes to a complete halt and tries to hand over all momentum to the heavy target, that shoots away. Except, it again hits something (like the ground), then it will give up all momentum again.

Also, I guess due to the netcode behind the game, it can take some time for the momentum to arrive. This is actually a noticeable delay, so after ramming I stand still and the target starts moving a little later.

So last weekend I accumulated my willing guinea pigs to try this: Arrange a lot of space ships like bowling pins and get someone to crash into that, to see the momentum distribute through the group. It turns out the first part is already extremely hard: herding a fleet of mad spaceship commanders to actually just park close enough to each other. It is even much less possible to archieve a dedicated formation, so we gave up on that relatively fast.

To have a reference at least in one of the three dimensions, we did this on a planet, just above the surface. Also it looks better seeing ships tumble in gravity. So here is some video footage of what happened:

Most parts are rather irrelevant for the science, but "Act 4" of this video actually shows the effect - even though just at the side of the screen because of my bad camera works. You can see the purple-pink-ugly-thing being crashed into...  it starts moving, shortly after that hitting the next ship. That stops the purple ship and accelerates the next.

Act 3 should actually have worked, but it did not - I can currently only assume that this is because the purple ship is trying to distribute its kinectic energy between multiple ships and this is just too much for the in-game physics model and it gives up.

So generally one could build upon this, but honestly: herding commanders is hard. Sadly the "just turn everything off and do nothing" part always fails to reach someone.

As the final we tried another idea we had in mind - and having so many people with the same type of ship in the same place was an opportunity: We played spaceship Jenga, by stacking all ships on top of each other, then switching all flight assist systems off and letting a ship at the bottom of the tower boost out of it. It is also in the Video.

Low Gravity Speedbowling?

Because there is so much to find out about this game, some commanders of our squadron decided to found a dedicated science division.

Where questionable ideas lead to great explosions…. Meet the

Boonlabs Scientific Suicide Squad

(B3S)

   

We are planning an event on the planet right below our home station on the next weekend.

Today I had a bit of time to work on one of the questions that came up in our discord (I assume it was CMDR PrimtimeCasual): Can I speedbowl there?

The B3S deployed one of its highly trained monkeys (me) to find this out. I have picked the obvious ship to analyze this question, an unengineered stock Anaconda. This thing can usually reach speeds that are otherwise only seen in plate tectonics.

Roughly 200km above ground I switched off all flight assist system, pushed the thrusters to "full up", pointed the nose roughly 60° to the ground and started accelerating.

Speed increased a lot slower than on the usual speedbowling worlds and the angle of accelaration felt a lot tighter, but you can speedbowl on worlds <1g it seems - just a lot slower. But still you reach speeds your ship is normally not capable of getting to.

Picture of proof:



As you may be able to see on this picture I have reached 1005m/s at the time of screenshooting. After that I was a bit busy to not crash into that mountain right in front of me. Not the best choice of speedbowling alley here maybe.

So I am now looking very much forward to see commanders showing up to next weeks event at multiple times the speed of sound.

Further research is required from dedicated speedbowlers to find out whether the mediocre speed I have reached is due to me being bad at this, due to the questionable choice of ship or due to low gravity. I can't wait to see your reports on this.

Virtualize Everything

Working in IT, the trend to virtualize everything can not be ignored. For example, all Google has is a single Raspberry Pi dangling from the wall outlet in some californian office building - everything else you see are virtual machines running on that bugger, and we all really hope they have a spare SD-Card somewhere.

Following this trend I decided to virtualize my reality. Last week I got my Oculus Rift S delivered and started testing it for example for playing Elite: Dangerous. Sure, there are other uses, but honestly: Who cares?

The setup started with some anger management requirements on my side, as my f...riendly USB port just wouldn't work with the headset. I sure have a USB 3.0 controller and why the f...rag does the headset always complain about the port not being usb threeish enough for it to run. That makes no sense. Well it didn't at first, until I learned that some of my ports are obviously on another controller, that is USB 2.0, of which I did not even know I owned it. Put it into a port marked as actually being USB 3.0 and it workes like a charm.

After some setup (log in to facebook! Aye! --- Measure your room for your safety! Aye, it's facebook, nobody has privacy concerns there --- Look, what the cameras are always seeing, when you are playing! Wait, what? this device is connected to my Facebook account; ah, whatever. --- and so on) it worked. The setup, though somewhat concerning for the IT-savvy, was excellently guided and easy to do.

And then it began: Find out how to start the game in VR. I expected this to be very hard, so put on my headset, ready to wrangle Steam and watch growing blue bars for hours. Okay, Steam, how do we go. And steam said: "Oh, you are wearing a VR headset. Should we start your game in VR mode?". Ah, yes. That's it, it worked. Instantly.

And then, the game is in 3D, you can look around and it feels as if you are in the hangar. For the first time I got a sense of scale in the game. And my Spaceships are huge. Not big, literally huge - I was blown away and just had to stare at my ship for a few minutes in awe before entering the cockpit.

And since then I spent all the time of rather dull flight looking around and it is so much better. I start noticing the details of my spaceships, and the level at which these are done in game is amazing. For example the "Krait Mk2" I own, is from now on and forever the "Hobo Ship" in my mind. Cables are just fixed to the ceiling with Ducttape or lying around openly.

This red cable going into that vent opening there? Why? I mean this is a space ship and this kind of cable management raises questions about the quality of the ship that is supposed to keep me alive at multiple times the speed of light in space.

But VR does more: It tricks your brain. Looking down, I got to see myself in game and my first thought was: Hey, you've lost some weight, this is great. Only a few seconds later I noticed, I am not looking at real-me, but some digital dude. 

I have a joystick and a thruster on a table - and these in game move precisely the way I move the real things. So the brain totally believes what it sees.

You may notice on that last picture, that the zipper of the jacket is a bit of to the left at the bottom. You won't be believe how often I already tried to shift it into the middle by pulling my real-world sweater sideways. 

As a summary: VR is fascinating, though expensive. And I feel a followup purchase of a new and better graphics card approaching - My GTX1060 can handle it, but in some situations reaches it's limits. 

Rescue Operations For Damaged Space Stations

In October 3305 I visited the space station "Titan's Daughter" for the first time - and warned about the dangerous location this has been built in. You can find my comments on that in the Article about the third part of the PitTrip. All warnings have been ignored and so the inevitable happend: The station got hit by something really hard and is now being evacuated.

With the increasing speciesism in the galaxy this was obivously blamed on our thargoid neighbours instantly. Even though no one has seen an attack happening news outlets around the galaxy know who is to blame for the damage from the first second; even though it is much more likely that a space station that close to an asteroid belt has just been hit by a rock. The green stains could even be hinting to the thargoids trying to extinguish fires in a disaster relief effort.

But we, as humans, have nothing better to do than attacking the helpers at first sight, forcing them into yet another war that will have no winners.

Titans daughter early 3306

Instead of playing wargames (It's a strange game... The only winning move is not to play) I decided to help in evacuating the station in distress. My Saud Krüger Orca class ship is perfectly equipped for this kind of operations, so I transferred it to the Taygeta System and started rescue operations by transferring passengers from Titan's Daughter to a nearby Rescue Megaship.

During operations like these radio comms a critical for success of the operation. Therefore it is of great importance for all commanders to keep radio discipline in voice channels and reduce the usual chatter. Prompt communication and efficient operations allowed me to do a roundtrip, evacuating 70 civilians from the station, within roughly five minutes. If many commanders participate in these missions, it should be possible to rescue all inhabitants from the station quickly.

Here is a video of such an operation

------ Game immersion barrier -------

Really, the in game athmosphere around these burning station is great. The voice acting from station personell really gives the feeling of a distress situation. And all the fire and explosions... WOW. If you are playing E:D, you should go there, it is a great part of the game.

And with the ongoing improvements of voice recognition I really hope we will be able to have in game bi-directional radio comms soon... the dialogues in this video are faked.