Oolite Darwin Awards

[Commander Trigg]

I just took the asteroid storm mission parked my ship close by and went at the target all guns blazing. I successfully took out the asteroid, but I hadn't considered the fact that an exploding asteroid has a blast radius...

[Diziet Sma]

I set the compass to the witchpoint beacon, lined it up and hit the jumpdrive. Then the phone rang.
Press Space, Commander!

Which means that you had a pretty good aiming with the compass!

Yeah. How can being that good be so unlucky?

Now if you'd had FarSun installed, you'd have had plenty of time up your sleeve to take the call...

[snork]

I just took the asteroid storm mission parked my ship close by and went at the target all guns blazing. I successfully took out the asteroid, but I hadn't considered the fact that an exploding asteroid has a blast radius...

hehe, only after the third time happening, I got suspicious and looked into the shipdata.plist : A purple Haze when killed will always turn into a q-bomb.

[Smivs]

Do near-misses count? Yesterday I foolishly left a Coriolis station carrying a ton of Slaves I'd forgotten to sell, and headed straight for the local SecCom station. They don't like 'Offenders', do they? Fifteen seconds of frantic running away and a Hyperspace jump just about saved me.

[Loxley]

Near misses? Sounds to me like you saved the situation with quick thinking and fast reactions. Good survival traits those.

If you'd died in a hail of plasma, now we'd be discussing your nomination.

[Gareth3377]

Well my story is a simple one (they usually are) of trying to help the galaxy out.

After a fine day of sightseeing and Tianave (spelling?) pulsar and purchasing the wonderful dashboard sticker I left monitoring station and headed to another star system - so far so good.

With 33t of computers and an amazing price of 101.3 cr I thought "credits in!"

I head towards the wonderful, profitable space station and engage my trusty docking computers. Profits ahoy!

However, I notice a yellow blip and think hmmm...let's investigate. I did - ooo a Tiger with a bounty of 74cr and it's running away. Hee hee easy credits.

Like a good citizen I engage at distance, hitting it several times with my mil laser. Sparks are flying, I'm in for a victory and suddenly a brace of missles hit my ship and we are stardust...

Greed and glory got in my way and an hour of play down the tube.

Moral of the story - trade first, save and be a hero later.

Love this game.

Cheers!

[Cody]

That's the way the trumble crumbles.

[snork]

I have recently died a lot.
I finally had enough money to buy a Boa Class Cruiser with NEU, but that left me at 35,000 credits cash only. So no military shield enhancement.

I had a hard time adjusting myself to this; read : not starting most heroic fights at every occasion.
With the BoaCC being slower than the Cobra3 I was used to anyway.

What I think qualifies as Darwin Award worthy was that when a little later I had made enough money and knew where the next TL-14 system was :
I had accepted two very nice cargo contracts that aimed for way beyond that TL-14 system, somewhere with no TL>13 in the vicinity.
I forgot that having the ship fitted with military shield enhancement takes time. 6+1/2 days.

As I had just started to build a transport reputation, I did not want to spoil that. I chose reloading and staying without mil. shield enhancement until after those contracts were fulfilled instead.

I am glad I am (for now) over this and can enjoy fighting again. Though I start to wonder what I should aim for now.

[Commander Trigg]

I was heading in-system after a particularly tough dog fight where I'd used up the last of my witchspace fuel and came across a group of about 10 vipers. Since I couldn't inject past them, I decided to kill the time with a little target practice on some nearby asteroids (as you do).

However, one of those asteroids happened to be housing a rock hermit...the next thing I knew, the vipers had switched to pursuit mode, my shields were gone and so was I.

[BlackKnight]

Yesterday I actaully managed to go about 3 hours without flying into any stations or ships, annoying any cops or falling foul of multiple bandit attacks.

But then I managed to knock out and salvage a frontier trader (Coyote class, I think?) and set off for the dredger ahead of it to prevent anyone shooting it up before it got there and I got my finders' fee...

"Ooh good," I thought, "Just one bandit here, and it's only a Vampire all alone in the black - should be no trouble..."

Except it was that variant with the malfing cloaking device, which wasn't the whole problem...

I managed to hit it enough times that the driver hit the Injectors and started zipping around at high speed...

Well, actually, he flew away with me chasing him at high speed until he was only just in scanner range...

Then he turned around and came straight back at me...

And by the time I realised he wanted to play Near-C Chicken with me, it was too late to get out of his way (even though I nearly pulled my joystick off the desk I yanked it so hard!)...

"Press Space, Commander"

[Loxley]

I'd like to nominate the two Thargoid captains I met at a witchpoint today.

I arrived in system to find a warship attacking the witchpoint beacon and an invader going after the fuel station. Killing Thargoids in my Adder being something I find highly amusing I, went on the offensive. I fired a quick burst at the warship attacking the beacon, whereupon he turned towards me and promptly blew up on crashing into the beacon. I then turned my attention to the invader only to see him careen into the fuel station.

Seriously, the bugs are going to have to do better if they want to win this war. They're also depriving me of much needed bounty payments.

[snork]

I have found me a new (to me) gameplay.

What you need is
- a large bunch of gold or platinum cargo contracts, a good bunch of additional passenge contracts won't hurt,
- play deep into the night or drinking beer, or both
- so you "miscalculate" and sell to much gold on the way.

Now I am hopping the systems in the vicinity of the target system, looking for gold itself or new gold contracts.
Those latter never appear (platinum contracts do) and it makes me wonder if Oolite "knows" about my situation.
I would not put this past our devs.

So I am busy hopping the nearby planets, searching for rock hermits, hoping for many ships I can blow up.

Time is running out, I am still 138 kg short, and for unknown reasons I am an offender now. I thought that police needs to be on the scanner for blowing innocent Anacondas up being considered offensive ?

It is kind of funny how dissatisfying "large amount of platinum scooped" can become.

[Switeck]

Yes, in fact the cargo contracts *ARE* based on how much the station already has for sale AND how much you are carrying. I'm pretty sure HyperCargo OXP would spoof/fool it though. I figured out ways to exploit that information to somewhat control what contracts I get...both in destination and payment amounts. As a result, I've had 5 contracts to the same planet and had single gold/plat/gems contracts with over 100k profit. If there's an upper limit on how many contracts you can have at once, it's definitely at least 15. It's advisable to have a couple short-ranged contracts mixed in, even for pitiful profit, along the way across the "galaxy" map...just to prevent your reputation from falling too low to continue getting gold/plat/gem contracts along the way. Many short jumps are also generally preferable to 6-7 LY ones, as shorter ones take far less time each. Two 4 LY jumps is probably about the same amount of time as one 6 LY jump. Usually, I find the numerous short hops and station visits make it impossible to maximize my cargo bay profits and instead I just fill up on whatever I think is marginally profitable. Cargo contracts end up being the primary profit-maker by far.

Interestingly, all but the very best 100+k profit cargo contracts take MORE game clock time than making similar profits from "milk runs" between Laedin and Xexedi.

[Squeek]

Not sure if this counts, but my friend was playing one time and so as not to break immersion we left the game running overnight.

We forgot to turn the engines off.

We ended up in deep space.

Very deep space.

when this particular friend comes over, I put on some form of headgear and play commander and, since he is the best flight-sim pilot I've ever seen, he flies. It's great to be young enough to do this stuff without looking TOO silly.

[Bugbear]

This is not really a Darwin but a story worth telling.

I'd started a new game and had saved up enough to get a beam laser and ECM.

On a computer run to a poor ag. system, I found myself under attack by 4 pirates.

Only having a front laser, running and sniping was no option so I had to duke it out.

Fortunately for me there was a friendly GalCop Viper in scanner range so in an effort to rebalance the odds, I made a beeline for him(her?).

As I had hoped, the Viper came to my assistance and after 10 minutes of dogfighting, the odds had been reduced 2 to one in my favour. It was me in a fairly standard Cobby, a Viper and an injector happy Krait.

The Krait was constantly shooting out to scanner range, turning and screaming back, firing its laser a couple of times, then shooting off again.

This happened about half a dozen times before I got a front row view of the Krait on injectors slicing through the Viper.

After all the help I had to avenge the Viper's death...two minutes later that crippled Krait was space debris and a canister of narcotics in my hold...