Oolite Bulletins

Sorry, out of imagination here.
Anyone else got something for the chailce?

Like I said, it was in a book I was reading at the time (and I'm still ploughing into - too much American political bullshit proselytisation forcibly injected into a homage to a story I've never actually read ; getting tedious), and it appealed to me. But it does seem that no-one else can come up wi...

In Harry Harrison's In Our Hands, The Stars AKA The Daleth Effect the antigravity machine is invented by Arnie Klein, an Israeli scientist. But he tries to keep it secret and of course never patents it. The discovery eventually results in his death at the hands of spies trying to steal it and the l...

It uses very high-tech, possibly light-bending camouflage; while not being as invisible as some other examples, it does fit the definition of being "really hard to spot". Everyone knows the H2G2 story about the magician, the invisible mountain, and the suspicious new asteroid? That makes five: Rock...

Argh … OK. Five examples, please, of invisible aliens (or at least, aliens which are invisible to unaided humans). My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I remember spending the duration of a cigarette watching footage of multiple human "marines" in a fight with an alien in terrestrial jungles,...

OK, a few clues. hAVE WE HAD a Caps Lock Malfunction? Have we had the unavoidable Red Dwarf yet? OK, it's also occasionally a carrier (at least two StarBugs) but it's also got about 47 decks of cargo space, each large enough to lose a tyrannosaur or some other monstrosity in (unlike the so-called f...

I have a vague memory that there is an "SDL" limitation that it can only display one window, but I'm not sure if that is a secure memory. Come to think if of, the DosBox emulator produces a status window and a DosBox window, and I think that's bolted on top of SDL too. SDL 1.2, which is what we use...

The ship's design is as a freighter, for certain - they get mentioned at several points in Known Space stories. This one's individual history isn't discussed much - up until it's destruction. Which, for a supposedly indestructible hull, is a significant point. Niven must have regretted inventing ind...

It would be really super to be able to bung the MFD's on a second screen. Even with only the one physical display, your "anciliary data" window would only be an Alt-Tab away. Until you discover that switching back to the "flight and fight" window triggers the energy bomb (or whatever else is on the...

Well, you are US astronaut. As military pilot you have 6000 hours or so in your flight log, so measuring distances in nautical miles (1 NM = 1852 m), speed in knots (1 kt = 1 NM per hour or ≈ 0.52 m/s) and climb rates in feet per minute (1000 feet per minute is ≈ 5.08 m/s) is a part of your nature....

Is there really no way of transmogrifying an Elite saved Commander into an Oolite equivalent? There is, but it is by no means automatic. It is full manual labor and you have to basically reconstruct a save file based on the status of the old Elite commander. ... Which rather implies that someone, s...

You have only first K letter on ASC indeed, but having Navigation MFD you'll have full index like KOS-RJ / KOS-M etc on Navigation MFD panel. Just tested in Zaonce system - there are several orbiters in this rich high-tech system. I've made little use of the MFD system. Too much screen space used, ...

SF works where substantial parts of the plot are set aboard space FREIGHTERS. For the purposes of this question a freighter is a ship designed primarily to transport cargo, not passengers, from one place to another and it must be actually doing this for a substantial part of the work - I'm prepared...

Dan Dare had a personal spaceship, the Anastasia, though it's not clear if it was named for the real but dead Russian princess (retired with prejudice), or the fraudulent but alive (at the time of writing) imposter claiming her place. Damn, no - it was named for Dan's aunt. OK, try again. Many ships...

Disembodied wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 29, 2021 4:45 pm

But no MBP for Ellen MacArthur, as sadly she was born a year after the book was published.

That just goes to show what prescient writers Niven and Pournelle were.