I am in galaxy 7 with the following OXPs:
assassins.oxp
genericHUD.oxp
griff_shipset_all_in_1.oxp
Naval Grid.oxp
RandomHits1.4.10.oxp
Stolen_ships.oxp (one I am currently working on)
My ship is a cobra MKIII with all of the native equipment (including cloaking device and naval energy unit) and some oxp equipment, (naval grid, mark transponder scanner)
I have 3405 kills
I was doing a mission from random hits and had decided that the quickest way to get to the planet was by doing jumps where I fly to the sun and collect fuel.
I had done about 4 or 5 jumps like this, then when I did my next jump I ended up between the two planets and surrounded by thargoids and navy battle bots with their drones. I was unsure about what happened but presumed it was part of the assassins oxp, so I proceded to destroy most of the thargoids and blew up the remaining ones with an energy bomb (because I was nearly dead). There were several navy droids and command ships left so I went towards them, they did not shot at me even though I was a fugitive because I killed their friends. (during the battle my cloaking device got damaged if that makes any difference). I have no idea what happened and I am currently still stuck between Xeusreor and Betierte. I do not want to close oolite because that will mean my progress will get lost and I dont want that to happen (sun jumping does not save the game). The thargoid robot is a deactivated one that I was flying away from very fast.
Not a bug - you have experienced what is known as a misjump. It happens very rarely, and is a hazard of space travel, leaving you stranded in the interstellar space between two systems. If you're lucky and it happens between some nearby systems, you might have enough fuel remaining to jump to a nearby planet; quite often though you don't.
I've never seen that message come up from using an escape pod before. I would assume that it's a 1.75 feature of using an escape pod in interstellar space, as I don't remember ever being able to do use it in 1.74... For where exactly would the escape pod go? There aren't any stations in interstellar space...
On the plus side, you now don't have a broken cloaking device! I seem to recall that you can't normally get it fixed, unless you have certain oxps...
then when I did my next jump I ended up between the two planets and surrounded by thargoids....
ummm........
I used my escape pod and this message came up that I have never seen before...]
Its all normal, intended behaviour. You fell victim to a misjump. Very likely thargoid technology that enables to destabilise a wormhole so that it collapses in midspace. You end up between two systems, often ambushed by the thargoids that 'highjacked' the wormhole. On long jumps it means you already spend most of your fuel in the wormhole creation and have no fuel left to create a new one.
And escape pods send you to the nearest station, but between two systems there is no station to go to.....
Or keep your fuel topped off and avoid jumps over ~4.4 LY distance. Also be very careful in your use of fuel injectors!
That should be 'over 3.5 LY distance', which is exactly half of your max fuel capacity. In other words: up to 3.2 LY you have definitely enough fuel left to finish the journey to your intended destination. If you jump further than that, you have to rely on other systems being closer to mid-jump. You may be lucky, but at other times you may not.
A 4.4 LY misjump dumps you in interstellar space with 2.6 LY of fuel left in your tanks (if you were full when you set out).
That's plenty to cover the ~2.2 LY left of your journey.
"Actually this is a common misconception... I do *not* in fact have a lot of time on my hands at all! I just have a very very very very bad sense of priorities."
--Dean C Engelhardt
A 4.4 LY misjump dumps you in interstellar space with 2.6 LY of fuel left in your tanks (if you were full when you set out).
That's plenty to cover the ~2.2 LY left of your journey.
Ah, you're right, of course. I forgot that you only need half as much fuel to get out of interstellar space than you needed to get into it.
Personally, I never go anywhere without at least one spare [wiki]Fuel Tank[/wiki].
In emergencies, you could always hope for some Interstellar Help.
If all else fails, the Fuel Collector even works in witchspace, although veryvery slowly.
Edit: As for rare occurrence, I'm amazed you've managed to rack up 3405 kills before getting your first misjump.
"Actually this is a common misconception... I do *not* in fact have a lot of time on my hands at all! I just have a very very very very bad sense of priorities."
--Dean C Engelhardt
As for rare occurrence, I'm amazed you've managed to rack up 3405 kills before getting your first misjump.
I'm at about 1200 kills with my current commander, and no misjumps. Actually, I can only remember having one for as long as I have played Oolite, but I may well be wrong here, (not counting self induced misjumps of course). Seemed to happen a lot more often on C64 Elite and Elite plus.
"A brilliant game of blasting and trading... Truly a mega-game... The game of a lifetime." (Gold Medal Award, Zzap!64 May 1985).
I still think the vanilla misjump should be classed as a bug, even though it's intended game behaviour. It's a flaw in the game design, because all too often all it represents is the player getting slapped with a big, fat, random "Ha ha, you're dead". Worse, this isn't immediately obvious: the player can waste a long time, getting increasingly desperate, trying to figure out what to do. Worse still, this slapping can happen after the player has just emerged victorious from the fight of his life.
There are OXP workarounds (fuel tanks, Behemoths etc.), but you can't guarantee that every player will have the correct OXPs installed. In my opinion it's something that needs fixed at the core level. I know we're in feature freeze, but I think there's a strong case for fixing this bad piece of game design at some point in the future.
A possible option could be, once the last Thargoid is destroyed, the player's wormhole (which the Bugs' dastardly wormhole-finagling technology had disrupted) reappears somewhere within scanner range of the player, and remains open for some short but (not too short) amount of time. The player can gamble on scooping up any floating dead Tharglets, but if they dawdle too long then they're stuck, and hell mend them (assuming they don't have enough fuel to make another witchjump).