Plot an intercept course, Mr. Sulu!

[Uppeurs]

As a foreign fleet was skating by one of my probes, I noticed they were travelling in a direction that I could probably intercept.

I told my helmsman to plot an intercept course, but he was on his coffee break, so I had to pull out the ol' calculus book, blow the dust off, spend the next 10 minutes coughing, and figure out how to determine intercept vectors based on 3 dimentional positions and speeds.

I figured it out, but by then the foreign fleet had passed me and my intercept point would have been somewhere about 100000000000 light years away. I doubted they would keep going that far just for me.

The point of all this rambling is, I would like an automated intercept calculator.

Thanks.

[capjbadger]

CAN you even intercept a fleet in mid flight??

[wizz]

NOPE

[Uppeurs]

You cannot?

[Nuclearmin]

But... it would be great to have an applet whos calculating something...

If I have two probe coords or some more, maybe 10, like 512.34/453.23/35.32 I want to have an applet which "guesses" integer coords, coords which can probably be the target, coords who are like 345/342/45, no after-point-values.

Is anyone understanding what I've written here? If not, I'll try to make myself clearer.

Nuke

[darklim]

Can't intercept fleet.
That is true.
And i don't understand that...
But that say something about searching target using guess.
I think that is no good...

_________________
The Spam Master of the Spam Alliance

[Guest]

I understand what you are saying, and it's a beautiful idea.

I do not know if there is an applet that can factor three numbers into whole numbers, but my brother is a programmer and he says he can create a program that will do it. We will work on it and see what we can come up with. (For fun one day, he made a program that can encrypt and decrypt a vignierre cypher.)

I believe that you can do it using a calculator. Find out how the fleet is moving in the three planes. (For example +0.12/-0.02/+0.25) If you calculate these numbers into one set of coords, these three numbers will all become whole numbers at the same point. This will be your target coords. I don't know how likely it would be to get multiple destinations within the dimensions of the game, but it would vary widely under different circumstances.

For example, I do know that if the fleet is moving parallel to an axis, you would have too many hits to determine one likely set of coordinates.

If anyone finds any problem with my figuring, let me know. Otherwise I'll post when I come up with more.

[Achilles]

Sorry, that was me.

[darklim]

Why do you want to search that?

_________________
The Spam Master of the Spam Alliance

[Achilles]

And Uppeurs, it would be impossible to intercept a fleet in motion because between each point on an axis there are 100 individual points. To get to the coord next door it takes 30 minutes at warp 5. That means that there is space in between every usable point on an axis. When traveling, you are usually moving between coordinates, and fleets do not respond to each other unless they are at the exact same point (the target coords). You would have to have your fleet waiting at a decimal in order to meet it.

The exception is if they are traveling parallel to an axis, in which case they would travel through every point on the line.

[Achilles]

Wow. I need a beer after that.

[wizz]

i think its no prob to do some math yourself and get a rough idea of the destination.

even a program will not be able to do this job properly due to some basic problems.

so just calculate it like the anonymous guy told or use a spy probe to find out the exact target destination..

[Nuclearmin]

I think a program would be better than calculating by yourself. Last week a transwarp fly by my planet and with this applet I would have had a chance.

[Guest]

why cant there just be a button that makes a fleet follow an enermy fleet >:

[masterp]

sounds very good!

but only a button is to easy we are no newbies!

Greetings

[admin]

i think a javascript that calculates that would be nice. if you name it probes.js and put it in your spacetrace directory, it will be included in your probes screen. try the production.js -testing-script in
http://www.spacetrace.org/javascripts/
and modify it - its easy, if you know javascript

look here: http://forum.spacetrace.com/viewtopic.php?topic=340&forum=11

[ This Message was edited by: admin on 2003-06-26 22:44 ]

[admin]

there were some solutions already programmed by some players (i heard about an excel table where you could add the coords)

please post your solutions here and maybe someone knows enough javascript to do the probes.js

[promethius2]

If someone creates a progrm that allows us to intercept fleets, I will hug them. Imagine the possibilities.
_________________
Calvin: I'm a genius, but I'm a misunderstood genius.
Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you?
Calvin: Nobody thinks I'm a genius.

[Liderant]

you just can calculate a point of interception because probe data is inexact (it only measure to decimals). The only way to "intercept" fleets is to make them go in the same direction but in oposite sense, but anyway, nothing will happend, because for the battle to happend, the fleets can't be moving

[admin]

but: with the right calculations you can figure out to which (full) coords a fleet is flying to.

you can find out which full coords are all on a given flight vector

it would be nice if the players, that programmed that thing would paste the code here