Fleetcarriers Defense Has Issues

In the recent beta for fleetcarriers I also took a look at them. Back in the first beta period I was filming one and being too close to it I blocked a landing pad. Being in outside camera view I did not notice the warnings and so the fleet carrier shot me down. That is not unexpected, but while that happened I had the feeling the first shots missed me. That was strange.

So now in the second beta I tried to reproduce exactly that. Find that spot where the automated lasers on the carrier just fail to shoot you down. After a few tries I found out, that you just need a fairly small ship and be really low above the main landing deck to be out of reach of the carriers guns. Here is a video showing how you can just sit there while the carrier tries to kill you:

There is a little additional trick to it: It works best with shields turned off - I only found that out after making the video, here you see my shields coming up and being shot off again. Every time the shields come up the hitbox of the ship gets a little bigger and the lasers hit, taking down the shields and causing a little hull damage to the ship. If the shields are kept down they never hit and you can sit there forever.

To get a nicer lasershow we tried this with multiple ships last weekend - and learned something new: The carrier does not try to fire at everyone. Until the first target is destroyed it continues shooting at whoever was there first. The others can pretty much do whatever they want around the carrier, it doesn't switch target. Bad for our planned graphic effect, but good to know. I once again have to thank all those great commanders of the Buur Pit community who always show up when there is a prospect to get blown up for science. Be sure to follow the linked youtube channel, I am pretty sure there will be some video of this experiment showing up soon.

This might become an interesting detail for gankers, I guess. If they bring a friend (do gankers have friends?) he could attract the gunfire of the carrier. And I asume this allows the actual ganker to happily do his mischief without being bothered by the powerful guns.

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.