OWLT OS
- 3 Devlogs
- 4 Total hours
This is my very own OS that can be run in the web!
Ship #1
OWLT is basically a WebOS shaped like a Deep Space Network ground station. You acquire the carrier and then three consoles come up over a starfield, and you command a probe in orbit at Jupiter.
OWLT is the abbreviation for one-way light time. We type a verb into UPLINK and it is stamped with a send time, an arrival time and a resolution time in mission seconds. The rail counts the delay down, a marker crawls across the in-flight strip, and on the orbit plot you can watch the pip physically cross the gap between the two planets. Nothing on screen reports a value the spacecraft has not confirmed i.e. COMMANDED and ACKNOWLEDGED are separate readouts and they are allowed to disagree for an hour and a half.
Time is compressed so that we are not actually waiting 43 minutes but compression changes how mission time maps to wall time. There is no instant mode and there never will be.
The sky is generated from a seed phrase and the carrier tone is synthesised at runtime. There are four consoles so far with a settings console, an operator log, a DSKY calculator, progressive image downlink and a mission planner to come.
51m 2s logged
This is the final devlog for the WebOS 1 mission. The station has a voice now i.e. pressing a key at the boot gate runs a real acquisition sequence. Also, Keying the transmitter gives you a blip and forty-three minutes later the acknowledgement comes back as a two-tone chirp, so you can hear the round trip close even with every console shut.
I also rebuilt the oscilloscope after realising it looked wrong for a stupid reason. The phosphor was fading about five times faster than the beam could draw so only a fifth of the trace ever existed at once. Slowing the decay to match the sweep rate fixed it instantly and it now behaves like an actual CRT with the trace dimming behind the beam instead of disappearing.
1h 32m 5s logged
This is the second update on OWLT.
The clock is running now and the light time mechanic actually works. Type a “VERB” into UPLINK and the command takes 43 mission minutes to reach Jupiter.
None of that 43 minutes is invented. Both bodies are propagated on circular orbits and the separation comes out at 777 million kilometres and dividing by the speed of light gives 43:12. It drifts down by a second every eleven thousand mission seconds because Earth is closing on Jupiter at 27 km/s.
2h 0m 59s logged
I basically got the shell working today. There are three draggable consoles on a seeded starfield under a fixed instrument rail and a boot gate that holds until you acquire the carrier.
The part that took the longest and was the most difficult was working out the fact that a console shoved off the right edge has to be resized when the window itself resizes.
