Elite / Frontier What was your most spectacular mis-jump?

Sir.Tj

The Moderator who shall not be Blamed....
Volunteer Moderator
Sir.Tj
zmurf said:
I used the targeting tunnel on a sun in another sun system and put the autopilot on it... then I accelerated the ship to as fast as possible without using all the fuel (entire cargo bay with extra fuel). After that I turned off the engines and let the ship drift in maximum accelerated time skip. When I noticed that the ship was a little off course I used the auto pilot to correct the heading and then turned off the engines again. I believe I had the correct to heading about 15-20 times.

I managed to fly through the system I had targeted. Unfortunately most of the systems in the ship was broken due to lack of service, so I couldn't stop the ship. But it was fun to have tested it and succeeded. :)
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Fantasctc, :D I always wondered if it was possible to fly from one system to another. I'm going to have to give it a try someday.
 

turwhitt

turwhitt
But bodies in other systems aren't targettable in the view window or the system map, so i still can't see how you managed this.
 

archamedes

A
to be honest, most times i have a misjump i immediatly relaod a previous savegame because i only ever stock fuel for the assigned destination and find I'm lost somewhere in the middle of nowhere, yet one time i decided to go on a discovery of other systems i had hundreds of hydrogen units on board, jumped from sol to barnards star and ended up somewhere near ross 154 so not much of a bad jump there.
 

M-Saunders

M
Hi!

zmurf said:
I used the targeting tunnel on a sun in another sun system and put the autopilot on it...
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As turwhitt says though, you can't target stars in other systems in that way. The game doesn't work like that. Maybe there's something I'm missing here, but what you've described is impossible!

Geraldine said:
That was the great thing about the Elite series. There was the potential (with that multitude of star systems) to hide lots of cool things throughout the game in far off systems.
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Braben talked about a "black hole" in the middle of the galaxy. I wonder if this one is legit? I mean, it might just do something silly like turn the screen black and make a funny noise, but that could be implemented in a few lines of assembly code. Given that a full, commented disassembly of Frontier doesn't exist yet, maybe there are still a few secrets lurking in the code?

Probably not, but I like to hope :)

M
 

archamedes

A
isnt there a real 6 million dollar bounty for anyone who can find this black hole? or was that just a pipe dream or dried up in the recession?
 

Geraldine

Geraldine
M-Saunders said:
Nope; completely different. Wormholes were the result of a math overflow bug allowing travel to distant systems:

http://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/wormholes.htm
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This is correct ;) This bug was removed from later versions of Frontier.

As for the Black Hole theory, I did search for that too, covering 1000s of star systems in and around the galactic core. I never found it. :eek:

Although it might have possibly been the Beta Lyrae system (-146, 85) which if you go there crashes the game. However, this was listed as a Contact Binary, if my memory serves.

More bugs listed here http://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/bugs.htm
 

Bounder

Bounder
A fully rendered galaxy, enabling real interstellar travel, is one if my big hopes for E4.

So far of course every version of Elite really only renders one system at a time - "hyperspacing" just dumps the current system and renders a different one. Essentially there's only one system, and a multitude of different sets that get swapped each time the curtain falls. The background is just that - a bitmap.

IIRC when you accelerate to the 'edge' of the system at 'max' speed your course curves round and you start heading back in (all versions AFAIK).

The other thing here i hope gets remedied in E4 is that speed limit - realistically i'd imagine the rate of acceleration would decrease only imperceptibly until one approached C, and then gradually top out.. not suddenly freeze!


...as for misjumps, once spent months coaxing a venerable old puma home across hundreds of ly, jumping a few at a time and skimming for fuel... limped it into the first base i reached on manual with half the thrusters out (can't recall if AP was working but you can't use it anyway with bust retros (and hey that's another thing for E4 - AP should adapt manouvring to compensate for damaged thrusters, not just ignore 'em and plough on regardless to certain doom!))

Halcyon days... :rolleyes:
 

boringnick

B
What the heck is this:

http://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/rumours.htm

I can remember there was a so called "Eternity Ship" in Final Frontier (in german: Ewigkeitsschiff). It was so huge, that it took about 20 seconds to pass it. It discovered this one on one of my first attempts playing this game. After this "discovery" I phoned a friend and told him about this ship. He said that there was a rumour about this thing, but no one believed it. Unfortunately I didn't saved the game state, because I was thinking that it is easy to find.

That's way cooler than the dang black hole. The description has some resemblance to the "bubble drive" ships mentioned in the journals in FFE.
 

zmurf

zmurf
turwhitt said:
But bodies in other systems aren't targettable in the view window or the system map, so i still can't see how you managed this.
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You might actually be correct there. It's about 16-17 years ago I did this... So my memories of this might be a little incorrect. I did however talk to my brother about this yesterday who helped doing that journey. And he told me that we didn't target the sun in the target system. Instead we targeted the sun in the system we flew from and used as a reference point. Then he made a well estimated guess what direction we should fly.

Also... we didn't see the sun or any planets of system we flew to (and through). We only know that we passed through it by looking at de stellar map (The one you can look at to see how big of a miss jump you have done. Big purple blob that says "You are here"). So it is possible that there were no rendered system where we past. But both me and my brother is quite sure that the purple dot kept on moving outwards all the time.
 
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Sir.Tj

The Moderator who shall not be Blamed....
Volunteer Moderator
Sir.Tj
Thats a real shame if you can't travel from one system to another, would have loved to try it.

Would have been useful if you'd had a misjump close to a occupied system and could srtuggle back to a spaceport.
 

M-Saunders

M
boringnick said:
I can remember there was a so called "Eternity Ship" in Final Frontier (in german: Ewigkeitsschiff). It was so huge, that it took about 20 seconds to pass it.
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Sounds like someone came across a Long Range Cruiser and flew past it at 20km/h, and then the mists of time have played with his/her imagination :)

M
 

zmurf

zmurf
I just tested flying outward from the sun ... When I got to something like 100000AU the ship turned and started heading towards the centre again. How can it be that both me and my brother then clearly remember that we kept on flying? :S

well well.. Sorry about that. I was clearly wrong. Time must have played tricks on our memory. :(
 

Geraldine

Geraldine
Never Rains But It Pours

One thing I can confirm about mis-jumps is this. While stuck in inter-stellar space (with a junked drive), I tried broadcasting a distress signal. After a long time with the stardreamer set to max, all of a sudden the attack alarm goes off. Pirates were attacking me! Were the heck did they come from? My guess is that the game itself spawned them within a couple of AUs of my stricken ship. Yes, Frontier could be evil at times :rolleyes:
 

boringnick

B
Geraldine said:
I tried broadcasting a distress signal. After a long time with the stardreamer set to max, all of a sudden the attack alarm goes off. Pirates were attacking me! Were the heck did they come from? My guess is that the game itself spawned them within a couple of AUs of my stricken ship. Yes, Frontier could be evil at times :rolleyes:
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Maybe it's just coincidence, but I think the distress call attracts pirates in certain circumstances, or even makes the game create some. Not every time though.

I had the same stuff too - set stardreamer to the max in a pretty empty system, waited for a week or so, nothing happened, then activated the distress call, and the pirates attacked.
 

zmurf

zmurf
boringnick said:
Maybe it's just coincidence, but I think the distress call attracts pirates in certain circumstances, or even makes the game create some. Not every time though.

I had the same stuff too - set stardreamer to the max in a pretty empty system, waited for a week or so, nothing happened, then activated the distress call, and the pirates attacked.
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Yes... and some systems are much safer then others. For instance it's almost impossible to get attacked by pirates in Sol system...

Also I did some extended testing of my flying. I forced some miss jumps until I got a jump without destroying my engine and then accelerated to max and put the stardreamer on max. This resulted in the same result as my test in Sol system. Seems like the rendered part is a sphere that is about 200000AUs in diameter.
 

Bounder

Bounder
..so about 3.58 x 10^15 (3.5 quadrillion) double decker buses end to end, or a volume equal to 2.67 x 10^35 (2.6 hundred million billion quintillion) olympic sized swimming pools.


Gives a twinge of agoraphobia just thinking about it eh.. .
 

zmurf

zmurf
correct that... it seems that the "curve" happens at about 65000au... so the rendered part is more like 130000AUs in diameter...
 
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