Silent Running (engine kill)

[pagroove]

In the A virtuous misfortune by Dylan Smith (first story in Alien Items) it is mentioned that the crew goes to 'silent running'. Would this be possible. Maybe an oxp which enables you to kill the engine and only when enemy ships come within visual range that they can see you? Also the other way round would be possible. You enter an 'asteroid' field only to realize that it's a trap. Although I believe this is basically what pirate traps does? But engine kill would be a nice feature.

Of course when you shut of the engine it would require some time to startup again making you a sitting duck.

[Commander McLane]

A very nice idea, but I don't know how it could be realized.

Scan class cannot be changed by script, I don't know off the top of my head whether the scanner blip colours can. But that wouldn't change anything about the mass locking capability.

Of course, silently running NPCs (in an asteroid field or elsewhere) could be realized by using a derelict ship and replacing it with a working variant when something gets close. That should be well doable.

For the player ship there had to be some other solution, and it would be more difficult. A silent running of the player ship would only be noticeable by a total lack of response of other ships to the player ship's presence. This is difficult to script, as there are many entities for instance sending comms messages to the player ship only on proximity. One example would be fuel stations and satellites who call you even by name. I have changed my personal copy in a way that they at least ignore me when I'm cloaked, because I've always found it strange to be greeted by fuel stations when I'm invisible to every other entity. But of course other scan and attack patterns are affected. For instance, a silent running player ship should not be detected by pirates other than on close proximity. That one would be at least a little tricky.

So, for the player ship it would be technically difficult, I think. But still, I love the idea. And for NPCs it should be doable. Not as a general feature for all NPCs, but as a customary feature during a mission, for example. (In order to perform the exchange between a derelict and a working version of a ship, both have to have unique roles, which for instance all the vanilla ships don't. And you can't replace a derelict "pirate" with a non-derelict "pirate". Chances are that a derelict Asp would come to life as a Python. )

[pagroove]

I knew this would be difficult. It would be a nice feature though.

[cim]

Of course, silently running NPCs (in an asteroid field or elsewhere) could be realized by using a derelict ship and replacing it with a working variant when something gets close. That should be well doable.

There's an ambush using precisely that method in one of the Rescue Stations missions. It works pretty well.

The tricky thing with silent running is that it only really works if you're somewhere one extra white blip isn't going to draw attention. Otherwise anything bigger than an escort craft is pretty distinctive as soon as it gets in scanner range (and while they're less much noticeable when not trailing engine flares, visual range is greater than scanner range for a Cobra III)

Another problem is that player speed isn't writable by script, so enforcing the shutdown would be tricky. But you could drop the player to no shields and 1 energy bank for silent running; that'd be vulnerable enough. Give a few seconds of boosted shield+energy recharge when you power up again.

Easiest way to implement player hiding, I think:
- you can only hide at condition green, of course
- when you do, the game awards you a cloaking device and activates it
- if you accelerate, or a ship gets within spotDistance (determined by the amount of nearby cover?), the cloaking device deactivates (and is removed if you didn't own one anyway), and your energy and shields get set to low values.