- I too don't like the idea of an indestructible hermit, when they are blown up that easily in vanilla. It might be possible to make them indestructible in OXPs (and it is a very good measure taken as a place holder of a later implemented feature), but its a matter of personal taste and I for my part don't like it. Spara already strengthened them with shields? Sounds good.
- Suddenly returning back to life is just silly.
Spara's Idea of a delayed respawn is the best concerning this matter.- Respawning it at a different location sounds logical as there were reasons why it blew up at the old location. I wouldn't rebuild my station there. This is a nice feature, but not important IMO. Spara, you mentioned a simple way to implement it. Go for it, but if you hit a wall, you are excused (by me at least XP) to implement other elements.
- In case you implement the delayed respawn countdown, just an idea: You could delay it further in stable systems, like coperate or democratic systems, as building a new pirate base there might be tougher.
- Concerning the length of the countdown overall, I wonder (storywise in oolite) how hard it is to find a usable asteroid, how long it does take to hollow it out and how advanced the insides are. Griff's hermit model looks, well, expensive and as if it took quite a while to build. What if we ignore that look and say: The pirates sought and found a stable asteroid, enwrapped it with a stabilizing but yet thin net, you don't see under the dust, hollowed it out, than parked a stolen boa, maybe two or three on the inside and connected them to each other to form the bases make shift interior. Then they installed a few landing pads in the inside, but in vacuum, and a few airlocks for person and cargo transfer.
I could see such a base getting operational within very few weeks, maybe even only within one. I you wanted an excuse to respawn them within a week, here you would have one.
EDIT:
The pirate hermits were destroyable in vanilla, therefore every stable OXP should check if there currently is a pirate hermit or not, while ingame. The only thing I can think off, how hindering the respawn might break something, is that they respawned instantly after entering a system or reloading the state. If something in vanilla IS dependent on the presence of a pirate hermit, this >something< might not second guess the hermits existence. But I can't think of anything like that. I also don't know of any OXPs, that would be dependant on this. A contract with the hermit as endpoint would be something like that, for example.Option 2. is more complicated and might produce some compatibility issues, for example systems without hermits. I'm tempted to test the second option.
Maybe the others know of some OXPs, that might give you trouble.
EDIT2: Is there anyway to calculate, if there is a pirate hermit in a certain system form some other system? If there isn't, this is good news, as it would make it more unlikely something like a pirate cove being a target of a mission. (There is still the danger of a list of hermits being hardcoded.)
Is it possible to pass the role of the pirate hermit to a chaotic hermit (or another type in this system) for as long the rebuild takes place? Maybe by creating new types of hermits and exchanging a chaotic/neutral/mining one with one of that types, to catch missions involving the p.hermit. This type would be a pirate one ingame wise, but on the outside wouldn't launch pirates, wouldn't be targeted by GalCop (do police vipers even attack real pirate hermits?) or other enemies and has the other (non-pirate, for example neutral) market. But it wouldn't attack pirates either. The pirates lost there base and so long they don't have a new one, they do there non-standard business over here. (On the other side this might trigger all other OXPs, that would have behaved and stayed quite until the real deal this there again). Well, its just an idea, if you were looking for one.
. New version (0.4) to test.
I assume, the pirates really started firing at me after I had already docked...
When debugging, I put beacons to all hermits so I can monitor them. I forgot to remove the beacons...
. That worthless pirate scum just can't shoot straight, I suppose. Maybe I'll just double the energy of the station. Recharge ratio is quite high already.
. If it's rare, then it not bad. It would just be one of those things that could happen.