Oolite planet list

Overview

Although this list was taken from Oolite the data applies well to the BBC Micro version of Classic Elite, and some other versions.

The format of the entries is:

# {system ID}. {name} ({coordinates}), { {IDs of nearby systems} } within 7.0 LY. Radius {radius of main planet} km.

{government}, {economy}. Pop. {population} B, Prod. {productivity} MCr. HC: {hub count}, TL: {tech level}, {inhabitant description}.

{system comments}

for example

# 7. Lave (20,173), {39,46,55,129,147,255} within 7.0 LY. Radius 4116 km.

Dictatorship, Rich Agri. Pop. 2.5 B, Prod. 7000 MCr. HC: 6, TL: 5, Human Colonials.

Lave is most famous for its vast rain forests and the Laveian tree grub.

Downloadable vector graphic PDF's of the 8 charts have also been created and can be downloaded from the links below.

Online interactive maps.
- OOlite Interactive Map courtesy of PhantorGorth. It does 2D & 3D modes for displaying the planet map and the planet data. Also there is a superb jump route calculator.
- OOliteInfo from Maaarcooose is also available which not only displays the galaxy maps and all planet data, but also allows modification of the seed numbers used to generate the galaxy data.

A spreadsheet of all galaxies can be downloaded in Excel format or Open Document format.

Notes on values

For OXP writers, note that references to a particular galaxy in Oolite (in a Planetinfo.plist entry for example), should subtract 1 from the galaxy number – Galaxy 1 is referred to as 0, etc. The Technology Level numbers shown in the lists are the numbers displayed to the player (range 1-15), and again subtract 1 from this number (range 0-14) to get the value entered into planetinfo.plist.

The "hub count" is the number of systems reachable from this system in a single jump: it will always match the number of systems in the "IDs of nearby systems" list.

The radius of the main planet as an in-game object is 1/100th of that listed by the system description.

The coordinates are in X, Y format, ranging from 0,0 (top left corner) to 255,255 (bottom right corner). When translated to the galactic maps, because they are rectangular rather than square, this means that an X coordinate step is 0.4 LY, but a Y coordinate step is only 0.2 LY

Where do these crazy names come from?

If you read through the source code and/or binary for either Elite or Oolite, you will not find any text containing the list of planets and their properties. The entire universe (including the famous edible poet) is constructed programmatically (using a truncated Fibonacci function) from a handful of seed numbers and the strings "ABOUSEITILETSTONLONUTHNOAL" (used by the planet description string) and " ' 'LEXEGEZACEBISOUSESARMAINDIREA'ERATENBERALAVETIEDORQUANTEISRION" which is used both by the planet description string and to generate all the system names in the 8 Galaxies (the single quotes indicate placeholders where the planet name generation can be terminated early). The algorithm was reverse-engineered from the original BBC disk by Christian Pinder, and implemented in Objective-C for Oolite. Further details are given in the discussion of Elite's random number generators.

In this spreadsheet (please note that this spreadsheet is in OpenDocument format) you can see some of the algorithms in action where they are used to calculate the names, positions, inhabitants and other parameters for all 256 planets for a selected Galaxy plus a plot of the Galaxy (Sorry, but no links between worlds are plotted). You can also use this to view what could have been if a different seed number was used for the Galaxies. UPDATE: It now calculates the planet descriptions and there is now a statistics sheet.

A related spreadsheet showing useful trading routes is also available for download.

There is also an interactive map of the Oolite Galaxies including route finding (by PhantorGorth). Also includes a 3D option. Works in Firefox, Chrome, IE9+, Safari (but not v6 on a Mac), Opera (the quick zoom has a side effects caused by Opera).