Beacons on the Advanced Space Compass

[Switeck]

Just to throw another "idea" onto the table. As canonically there are supposed to be many "main stations" per system, could something like that be put into the game? Rather than just one Cori (or whatever) per system, have several spaced around the main planet orbit. On arrival into the system each ship gets assigned a main station as a "home port" whilst they are there (ie in code-terms all of the additional stations are just that, additional ones that are not main stations as far as the player ship and equipment is concerned). If that station is destroyed then the nearest of the sister stations takes on the role of the main station.

I view the "many main stations per system" in Oolite to be covered by OXP "secondary" stations...and people can add OXPs to do that as they see fit. Really poor anarchy systems should certainly have fewer such stations than rich industrial corporate state systems that are "hubs" to 5+ nearby systems.

A big deal is game balance -- with multiple "main" stations, you could possibly buy >63 TC of each commodity, drastically increasing your profit-per-hyperspace-jump. With a Python and at the single+normal main station, I find at rich industrial systems that I usually run out of cargo capacity after buying all the computers for sale and most of the luxuries. With a Boa 2, I can usually buy all the computers, luxuries, and machinery. If there was a SuperHub or other nearby secondary station (Sothis, Globe, Tori, or Nuit -- which I hacked so there's only 0 or 1 of those at a time) to the main station, I could fill up a Python with just computers or fill up a Boa 2 with mostly computers and the rest luxuries. A handy nearby Hoopy Casino can even buy my excess Luxuries (if the price is higher there) -- I visit that as another way to buy/sell Gold/Plat/Gems. Additional extra main stations or even the already-existing secondary stations with similar commodities.plist menus make it trivially easy (low risk, semi-low travel time) to fill up larger ship cargo bays at the best profit-wise prices, considerably reducing the difficulty of the trading element in Oolite. Even the starting Cobra 3 can gain benefit from such multiple stations to more quickly acquire and sell Gold/Plat/Gems. If even a single station significantly differed in prices, you could shuttle that around and make considerable profit before even needing to leave the system. As possibly-added OXPs, I consider that acceptable behavior. But the core game probably shouldn't see such a huge game balance change, otherwise even roughly how long it takes to get "Dangerous" and an iron ass ship becomes meaningless without the quantifier of what version of Oolite you're doing that with.

Current trunk now holds a command setTargetToRandomStation. When writing that command, carriers and stations that don't allow npc traffic are explicit excluded. That command could be used to randomly select a station when arriving at the planet. Last week I updated the wiki AI page with this command.

Could that not be applied as soon as the main station ceases to exist? So ships en route to the planet would turn around and set course immediately, rather than flying to the planet before turning around and (say) flying all the way back out to a constore or something?

Not very well. The NPC ships AI.plist script could check whether the main station exists on arriving at the system...but if the main station is getting replaced and the pointers are then set to the new "main" station, they'll miss the window where the main station was missing. A javascript .js file could be set up to change their AI.plist to alternate versions if the main station is/was/will be destroyed, but that will probably "break" a couple OXPs.

The main station having a sudden existence failure tends to cause a huge chain reaction of "bad things"(tm!) in Oolite's universe. We'll no doubt find more as time goes on.

Interestingly, Commies! OXP spawns a special station near the witchpoint buoy in a nova system (if it was previously a commie system of high enough tech level). Somehow that station seems more "resistant" to the overheating effects of the environment than my own hacked ship with extreme regen rate and heat_insulation = 10000;
I just wonder if that lone station may be forced into the current acting "main station" role due to the regular main station and planet being all blown up?