Diff main gun types & shield/ damage suggestion OXP idea

[JazHaz]

Confirmed as working in a technical sense.

But of course it requires the target ship to have an escape pod in the first place, which for OXP ships are rarer than you might think...

I dunno, I was thinking it could go well with the salvage missile. So you could go for those juicy traders and force the escape capsule to launch and then have a fat salvage available!

Of course its a bit of a one shot weapon when shot at the player who has an escape capsule. But if it hits a ship/player without an escape capsule then nothing happens. EDIT: maybe a small amount of damage caused but not much.

[caracal]

Of course its a bit of a one shot weapon when shot at the player who has an escape capsule. But if it hits a ship/player without an escape capsule then nothing happens. EDIT: maybe a small amount of damage caused but not much.

If you go down the "active denial" road, when the player is hit, it would send the message that energy levels were low, systems were critical, core breach imminent, but not actually reduce the energy or in any other way blow up the ship. If the player notices that nothing is actually wrong with his ship, he can ignore the weapon's hit; if not, and he does have an escape pod, he can eject, boo hoo, costs a thousand creds. If he doesn't have an escape capsule, he can soil himself, pray to his favorite deity, or in any other way prepare to meet his doom, then clean up once it doesn't come.

Now, while an OXP can send messages, I have no idea how much further it can go in simulating impending failure without actually doing it. One man's opinion only.

[Cmdr James]

This seems like a very strange weapon to me. It hits a ship, and somehow signals all the systems to report huge failures in an attempt to force an ejection.

I dont see how you would generically corrupt damage reporting for all ship types, and how this is delivered by missile (it docks with the ship, sends out a cable to a serial port on the side...?). The missile will presumably not survive the impact, so it must be some kind of energy pulse?

This is also a very powerful weapon, it is pretty much a single hit kill on any ship that has an escape capsule. I would think it should rather have say a 30% chance of forcing an ejection.

[Thargoid]

I guess in part it would depend on your concept of what the escape pod actually consists of. I recall that in the original game it was envisaged as a replacement cabin/cockpit and when triggered the whole lot went.

In Oolite from the models it's more a specific seperate mini-ship that the pilot makes his way into and launches (like a lifeboat).

The concept works in the former case, as it's just overriding the electronics to trigger the launch and the pilot just gets brought along as an unwilling passenger. The latter doesn't though in game-play sense, as noted it requires conscious physical action to get into the pod and launch.

[Cmdr James]

Some ships have more than one escape capsule, does this have any weird implications for the missile?

[Thargoid]

That would depend on how the function ship.abandonShip() has been coded up in that case I would say. Presumably it will launch all available pods?

[JensAyton]

If has_escape_pod > 1, one escape pod will be created for the crew and has_escape_pod - 1 escape pods will be created with “passenger” characters. (Technical note: this is one of several hard-coded character roles that are completely disjoint from characters.plist. They determine what happens on docking after scooping the pod and aren’t exposed to scripts. Something to think about post-MNSR…)