What if you can turn you main drive on and off ?

[Commander McLane]

I recall running across something called a "treasure asteroid" once. So I got my starboard mining laser all lined up, shot it and it broke up into several very active pirate ships. LOL

But before that (if they actually were ships before the asteroid got shot), they weren't showing as ships on the scanner. The asteroid was still a white blip.

The treasuroid is an easter egg from cargo & wrecks.oxp (and probably rather some test object that the author only forgot to remove before releasing the OXP). There are no ships prior to blowing it up, they are only created at the time.

[Commander McLane]

I like the idea, although there would have to be an asteroid field to hide in. There would also need to be something else there in the field to masslock the player, otherwise chances are they'd just torus straight on through and never notice.

Something which may be of interest in this discussion is a personal patch I have for Oolite which mass-locks on mass, rather than active drives (as per the original Elite).

Does this mean that ordinary asteroids are locking you too? And what about boulders? Splinters? Cargopods? Escape pods?

[Micha]

Does this mean that ordinary asteroids are locking you too? And what about boulders? Splinters? Cargopods? Escape pods?

My patch mass-locks on everything above a certain mass threshold (in code-terms, size, since we don't distinguish between mass & size). I can't remember which side boulders fall into it, but cargo-pods, escape-capsules, and splinters do NOT mass-lock, bigger things do.

[pagroove]

It would be still cool if you can do this. Maybe also turning your Transponder off. Of course to effectively hide your ship has to be small. enough.