Cargo Teleporter: trading goods without docking

[cim]

Viewing the market of other stations doesn't work in Oolite 1.80

It will in 1.82, though.

That comment started me thinking. NPCs don't have a cargo manifest and their specific cargo type is only decided at the moment they dump it.

This is no longer true in 1.80 - all NPC cargo is allocated in advance and can be read by ship.cargoList

How would a freighter/carrier differ from an NPC freighter with manifest?

There are a few AI bits which work differently for stations and might affect interactions with it, though I think everything should still work. Stations must also have a dock sub-entity, though that can be a metre across, buried inside it, and set to refuse both docking and launching (along with "private" allegiance so NPCs don't even consider it for docking), so that's not too big a deal.

I think a station docking with another station should be fine in the general case, but if the player did somehow manage to get docked to the inner station before it docked with the outer station things would get very messy.

Long-Range Cruisers & Lynx Bulk Carriers from FE2, anyone?

There's the [wiki]Bulk_Haulers[/wiki] OXP