Green is a 'starboard hand light' signifying keep on this side, and keep this light on your starboard side. In the maritime world you have to remember to keep these on the opposite side when exiting a port, but if you noticed, they are reversed on the inside of the exit in Elite so they work also for vessels that are leaving.
Always have no idea the design decision of the square starport
- Thread starter jk2l
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Robert Maynard
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That's the approach I take and yes, I have noticed that the inner and outer lights are reversed - however there is no enforcement by the station if ships enter on the "wrong" side....
technical reasons for the slot being as small as possible and only one on the front face
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Reasons for not having a slot at each end
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- The slot needs to be on the axis of rotation otherwise it will be all over the place as you try and dock
- The entrance is protected by a force field and so needs to be as small as possible for power savings reasons
- Size was determined before the larger ships were built and now the ships are built for the entrance rather than the other way around
Reasons for not having a slot at each end
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- It would encourage racing
- people would go in the exit and out the entrance
- power plant (see spike) needs to be close to the axis of rotation (ie in a low grav environment
- experiments and production for some items is low gravity and needs to be on the axis of rotation
All of which could be avoided by waiting on him to clear the slot. So yes, it is about waiting.
But I guess in the maritime world you would also keep well clear of huge ships and let them pass first
Ah yes - the lights.... Do they signify "port" and "starboard" or "enter this side" and "no entry" (especially given that the Type 9 sakes up most of the slot....)?
They are port at starboard navigation lights as the Hauler has Red and Green lights on port and Starboard as well
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the spike is the master control tower of the station, supervising and coordinating the operations of each pad's control towers. It's certainly in the best position for monitoring ship movement within the station.
I agree with multiple points made here for the single slot.
1. Reason not to have two slots side by side - neither will be on the axis of rotation, which would make them go all over the place with the station's rotation. The entrance/exit only must be on the axis.
2. The Elite universe is not nice or organised. It's pretty lawless and unsupervised. So firstly, one entrance - much easier to defend/bottleneck for security scans, etc.
3. And secondly, the philosophy is not make a bunch of laws to prevent people doing stupid things - it's much more laissez faire. But if you do something stupid, and you end up killing someone else/screwing it up, they are utterly merciless and trigger-happy about blowing you to pieces. For all they know you're some psychotic criminal juiced up on stimulants, and they don't care about finding out if you're not. So no, they don't enforce you coming in on the wrong side. They don't even enforce a speed limit. If you're good enough, you can fly like a maniac all you want. If you do come speeding into the entrance and crash into someone though, and cause their ship's destruction - they'll blow you up immediately. They'll also blow up anyone who tries to enter the station without permission. God knows what you might be trying to do. Or loitering, because the station has business to do and you cluttering up their space beyond the time limit they gave you makes everyone else's life harder. Life is cheap.
I agree with multiple points made here for the single slot.
1. Reason not to have two slots side by side - neither will be on the axis of rotation, which would make them go all over the place with the station's rotation. The entrance/exit only must be on the axis.
2. The Elite universe is not nice or organised. It's pretty lawless and unsupervised. So firstly, one entrance - much easier to defend/bottleneck for security scans, etc.
3. And secondly, the philosophy is not make a bunch of laws to prevent people doing stupid things - it's much more laissez faire. But if you do something stupid, and you end up killing someone else/screwing it up, they are utterly merciless and trigger-happy about blowing you to pieces. For all they know you're some psychotic criminal juiced up on stimulants, and they don't care about finding out if you're not. So no, they don't enforce you coming in on the wrong side. They don't even enforce a speed limit. If you're good enough, you can fly like a maniac all you want. If you do come speeding into the entrance and crash into someone though, and cause their ship's destruction - they'll blow you up immediately. They'll also blow up anyone who tries to enter the station without permission. God knows what you might be trying to do. Or loitering, because the station has business to do and you cluttering up their space beyond the time limit they gave you makes everyone else's life harder. Life is cheap.
Oddly enough your point 3 for why it's like that has precedent in the real world - 'Panamax'
The Panama Canal is so important to world shipping that there is a maximum size for ships - called 'Panamax' - beyond which your ship won't fit through the Panama Canal. A ship that is too big is MUCH more expensive to run because it has to go around the tip of South America to get from Pacific to Altantic oceans, or go the long way round via the Indian Ocean. Either way it also has to then be capable of navigating at +40S latitude (the 'Roaring Forties') to round the capes SA and Africa.
Also most airports where built to an assumed maximum size of aircraft in the 60s; aircraft much bigger & heavier than the A380 can be built, but it would be very expensive to upgrade airports worldwide to handle them.
Coriolis Stations were built in an era where the most common ships were Cobras, and the largest vessels were Pythons, Anacondas and the now-retired Boas. The T9 and Clipper hadn't even been thought of.
One odd thing is why the Dodec stations vanished, they had slots that were narrower but taller - I doubt you could have got a T9 into one.
Did they? Shame though, I've always like the Dodo stations.
One could also argue that the shield thingy that is able to retain the atmosphere but let the ships pass through requires a masive amount of power to run.
Guns. Giant guns. Lots of them.
Guns. Giant guns. Lots of them.
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But I guess in the maritime world you would also keep well clear of huge ships and let them pass first
That's an interesting one. Under maritime law / the Rules of the Road, the size of a vessel shouldn't matter. If someone has right of way, they have the right of way, even if yours is a supertanker and they are a rowing boat. However, the reality of it is that.... (the rowing boat gets out of the way
)edit: there are some exceptions: such as when a large vessel is constrained in some way, such as by its draught in a narrow channel - this can give it right of way - but in most cases the same rules are intended to apply to all.
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Thinking about it, is the reason it's a slot rather than a simple circle is for traffic control reasons? You can put green lights on one side of a slot, red on the other (and reverse them on the inner side of the slot) to provide a 'correct' entrance and exit in moving three-dimensional space. It's easy and intuitive for pilots to see and understand, and for traffic controllers to call out instructions. If it was a circle, then it's much harder to give people a relative position. Even sticking green and red lights on opposite sides of the circle is a bit fuzzy. Because a slot has defined 'sides'. Even if you wanted to take advantage of the structural advantages of an elliptical slot (which wouldn't be as good as a circle, but would have some of the advantages of a slot), that would throw up other issues - a slot is the same 'height' all along its length, so a ship knows it can be a 'left' and 'right' of centre without any problems... it only has to worry about clearance from the edges - with an ellipse, it narrows towards the edges so pilots in big or tall ships would naturally drift towards the centre out of fear, defeating the traffic control idea. The entrance really has to be the same height all along its length for consistency and so there's no fuzzy vagueness about whether a ship will fit through it 'about a 1/3 of the way along its length, but not any further'.
As an aside, I imagine there's probably specific jargon to talk about the 'sides' of a slot, since left and right wouldn't work from a rotating slot that can be entered either way up from both directions. The most obvious way to distinguish the sides of the slot would be 'Outbound' and 'Inbound', tying the colour to specify the side to its function, regardless of whether you're inside or outside the station.
I also now can't get the ridiculous image of a bunch of harassed exhausted traffic controllers in the spike watching the entrance:
'Adder departing outbound from pad 37... clear of slot... Sidewinder entering inbound to pad 9... clear of slot... oh god why stop there?... Type 6 entering inbound to pad 42... clear of slot... what the... Cobra entering OUTBOUND to pad 7... clear of slot, near collision with Sidewinder... some of these commanders where'd they learn to f - OH GOD TYPE 9 TYPE 9 TYPE 9'
As an aside, I imagine there's probably specific jargon to talk about the 'sides' of a slot, since left and right wouldn't work from a rotating slot that can be entered either way up from both directions. The most obvious way to distinguish the sides of the slot would be 'Outbound' and 'Inbound', tying the colour to specify the side to its function, regardless of whether you're inside or outside the station.
I also now can't get the ridiculous image of a bunch of harassed exhausted traffic controllers in the spike watching the entrance:
'Adder departing outbound from pad 37... clear of slot... Sidewinder entering inbound to pad 9... clear of slot... oh god why stop there?... Type 6 entering inbound to pad 42... clear of slot... what the... Cobra entering OUTBOUND to pad 7... clear of slot, near collision with Sidewinder... some of these commanders where'd they learn to f - OH GOD TYPE 9 TYPE 9 TYPE 9'
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