Tionisla Orbital Graveyard

From Elite Wiki
A view of the graveyard plus station...

Legacy

"The best way to see the wreckplace at Tionisla is to approach it from the Sun (a reasonably safe thing to do since Tionisla, being a Democracy has few pirates in its system). Tionisla itself is a bright yellow world, and the cemetery is always between the planet and its star. As you fly close, the whole strange graveyard seems to be expanding from the circle of the world behind.

The first thing you see is a shimmering, silver disc, a double spiral of tiny bright points. It slowly turns: it's a galaxy in miniature, with the same intense blur of light at its centre, because here is where the biggest tombs are to be found.

Come closer and soon you can see that the stars in this galaxy are markers, great lumps of metal, heavily inscribed with the words and symbols of a thousand religions. The cemetery is a bizarre and moving sight. The markers are rarely less than a thousand feet across. There are chrome-alloy crosses, titanium Stars of David, duralium henges, and all the strange symbolic shapes of the worlds, and the minds and the faiths that have come to die in this star traveller's special place.

Tethered below this vast, rotating mausoleum is the dodecahedral shape of a 'Dodo' class space station, the home of the Cemetery Authorites. Here you go through security checks and get your visitor's visa. And as you stand in the queue, staring up through the translucent ceiling of the Customs Hall, you can see the battered, broken ships of many of the dead, still attached to the silent tomb that contains the body."

from Robert Holdstock's The Dark Wheel.

  • Dancing the Tionisla Two-Step is slang for dead.
YAH ad

The Missing Beacon

in the earlier versions there is no beacon at TOGY or at the dodecahedron station there (which would show up on an ASC), so it must be located by sight.

See lengthy discussion starting here.

OXP

This OXP adds the Graveyard to the Galaxy 1 system of Tionisla, as described in “The Dark Wheel” novella.

As in The Dark Wheel, the Orbital Graveyard is positioned between the planet and the sun. The Graveyard features long dead Commanders buried in their rusting ships, monuments, Crucifixes, Stars of David and other religious symbols. A Dodecahedron station is positioned nearby.

Naturally, Krait patrols will make short work of any Commander desecrating the monuments!

TOGY Memorials plug-in

This is a fourth TOGY oxp, adding memorials to deceased Commanders (unlike Lave's Monument.oxp, they are named!). The memorials take the form of a golden Starbird. Originally written by Smivs (2013), Phkb has updated it (2023) and put it on the in-game Expansions Manager.

The current version memorialises

Original BB Thread is here. It was originally written for the 1st edition of TOGY.

Selezen's Short Story

Jes Walker was half-way round her two-hourly patrol of the immense graving docks when the comms channel sounded. Flipping open the intercom, she answered, “Patrol 2 here, what’s up?”

“Walker, this is Ops,” came the supervisor’s voice. “Could you get over to Gamma section please? Beacon CT-5 has stopped transmitting.”

Walker raised her eyebrows, “On my way. What co-ordinates?”

“Five-four by one-nine.”

Walker acknowledged and wheeled her Krait class fighter around to head back to Gamma. Tionisla Orbital Graveyard wasn’t exactly a hive of action, as most of the inhabitants were dead, and the rest of the ships in the area were empty monuments to their late pilots. Oh, now and again a little event might come up, but on the whole these were usually identified before the patrol ships were called in. The yard did take up a lot of space though, so now and again something went wrong. This transponder loss was probably just a short-out on the power circuits.

Jes entered Gamma section, and lowered her speed to enter the yard space. She kept a close eye on the readouts as well as the screen, and so knew something was wrong as she arrived at the co-ordinates. She hailed ops.

“Ops here. What is it, Jes?”

“You did say 5-4 by 1-9, didn’t you?”

“Confirmed. What’s wrong?”

Jes cleared her throat. “Umm...the transponder isn’t working because it’s gone.

“What about the ship?”

“What ship?”

A pause. “Oh hells. Hang on and I’ll check the inventory.” The comms went dead briefly. “CT-5 is listed as a Cobra 3, registry LV251-V5, named Legacy. You’re sure there’s nothing there?”

“If there is, I just flew through it,” replied Walker.

Jes could hear the rhythmic sound of the ops officer tapping something on the console. “Damn,” he muttered. “I’ll log the Legacy as missing. Return to patrol, Jes.”

“Acknowledged,” she replied and vectored to her route again. It was surprising how many times young joyriders tried to acquire one of the tomb ships, but it was rare for them to succeed. Usually the sensor web caught them trying to move out.

Outside the graveyard, unseen by Walker or the ops officer, the burnt shell of beacon TC-5 tumbled towards Tionisla’s sun. Beyond its mournful shape, two red engine outlets glowed, visible for only a moment, briefly highlighting the neat writing etched into the carbon scoring of the transponder: “War Is Coming”

Then the glow faded, and the beacon drifted unseen; black on black.

By Selezen (1999) - see here

Download

Version 2 downloads

To give the player a choice, the oxp is split in 3 parts.

  • TOGY_Main. This is the main module with all the scripts in it. The module only contains simple monuments for maximum performance on old hardware.
  • TOGY_Monuments pack. This oxp only holds additional, complex monuments. When added together with the main oxp, it will replace part of the simple monuments by the more complex ones. Leave it uninstalled when every thing slows down while flying through the graveyard.
  • TOGY_Shipwreck pack. This oxp holds only rusty ships. It does the same as the Monument pack, but now replacing the simple monuments by rusty ships. Add this pack when you like the wrecks, but be aware that the rusty ships were never intended to be in a release version. Putting it in a separate pack is a bit of a compromise.
  • TOGY_Memorials pack. This oxp holds two monuments to Oolite board members who have sadly passed: Ironfirst and Svengali.

Download TionislaOrbitalGraveyard.oxz v2.7 (downloaded 432 times).
Download TionislaOrbitalGraveyard_Monuments.oxz v2.1 (downloaded 331 times).
Download TionislaOrbitalGraveyard_ShipWrecks.oxz v1.1 (downloaded 366 times).
Download TionislaOrbitalGraveyard_Memorials.oxz v2.0 (downloaded 0 times).

Version 1 downloads

You can download TOGY version 1.1 (includes the Main OXP and the Monuments OXP) Updated 14 February 2011.
Related files: TOGY_Shipwreck pack Adds alternative models to the graveyard. TOGY Memorials: TOGY Memorials v1.1

Basic TOGY without Monuments or Shipwrecks - for slower computers
Complete TOGY (showing response to BroadcastComms query of Cobra Graveship in green on right)

Version history

Version 2.7

  • Main pack - Changed beacon definition to be unpiloted.

Version 2.6

  • Main pack - Changed template for "togy_basic_monuments_template" to be "CLASS_CARGO", instead of "CLASS_ROCK".
  • TOGY Monuments - Changed scanClass for some monuments to "CLASS_CARGO".

Version 2.5

  • Main pack - Added beacon to Graveyard Dodo station. Tweaked name generation code to reduce the size of the code base.

Version 2.4

  • Main pack - updated texture for Dodo station with adjusted colours and gloss property added. Updated other ship models with new gloss property. Added some additional special monument names.

Version 2.3

  • Corrected some shader texture reference errors, and updated the Krait texture.

Version 2.2

  • Added some additional special monument names.

Version 2.1

  • Main pack - added missing alpha channel to Krait model.

Version 2.0 (Update by phkb)

  • Main pack
    • Replaced population routine to use systemWillPopulate JS function.
    • Replaced Dodec station model with Neolite Dodec from SFEP pack.
    • Replaced Krait Patrol ship with Griff Krait
    • Replaced Lancet with Griff/gsagostinho Fer-de-Lance
    • Replaced tourist ship with Griff Shuttle
    • Put the application of the scanner colour into shipdata rather than using shipSpawned.
    • All monuments will now have details of who the monument is for, accessed via a BroadcastComms MFD message "Query monument info".
  • Monuments
    • No changes to models, changed XML-style plist files to OpenStep format, added manifest.plist file.
  • Shipwrecks
    • Created rusty models of most core ships (including Anaconda, Python, Boa and Boa Class Cruiser)
    • Added possibility of having normally coloured ships added as graveships, with the idea being that these are new.

Version 1.1

  • At regular intervals there are tourist shuttle launches from the main station.
  • Broadcasts of ships are no longer silenced by the many objects, but always reach the player.
  • Removed all the rusty adders from the oxp.
  • Changed the colour of the monuments on the scanner from white to a more appropriate colour for a graveyard.
  • Updated all AI files.
  • Added a 1.75 ship-key that makes that killing a monument no longer count as a kill. (No longer boosting your score by q-bombing the graveyard on Oolite 1.75+)
  • Added several ship scripts for better fine-tuning all kind of behavior.

Version 1.0

Links

Copyright

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.


Version Released License Features Category Author(s) Feedback
2.7 2023-08-07 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Stations Ambience OXPs Selezen, Rxke, Arexack_Heretic, Eric Walch, Captain Kev, Svengali, Disembodied, Griff, gsagostinho, phkb Oolite BB

Gameplay and Balance indicator

Tag-colour-green.png

Retrieved from "https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php?title=Tionisla_Orbital_Graveyard&oldid=82717"