Miscellaneous Equipment Items

[Commander McLane]

In various versions of ELITE there used to be slightly different extra equipments. E.g. in AtariST-Elite there were "Retro Rockets", which were definitely not there in C64-Elite.

What did they do? If attached to your ship you could fire them when in danger. They were mounted heading to the front of your craft and when fired catapulted you about one scanner's diameter (so about 51000 m in Oolite-terms) backwards, out of the danger zone. IIRC one set of Retro Rockets were good for four shots, after that you had to replace them. And of course they had their price, but I don't recall the amount of cr.

Two questions deriving from that:

1) I guess one could bring them to the Ooniverse, just for the sake of all the old AtariST-players (and others, if they were implemented on other platforms, too?). But for firing they would need a keystroke to be defined. Especially asked to people close to Oolite development (Dajt, Winston, whoever): Is that doable? (And another unrelated question with which Arexack directed me to you here https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=3026: Is it possible to modify the code for equipment.plist and add something that makes conditions possible: You are only offered EQ_ITEM_2 if you already have EQ_ITEM_1 installed?)

2) I wonder whether there are other items out there, up to now limited to one or a couple of ELITE-distributions only, that could be brought back to life in Oolite?

[DaddyHoggy]

The Amiga version also had retro rockets - I rember using them to escape the Thargoids during the end of the Thargoid plans mission - I'd kill my engines and flip over and then hit the retros to blast back towards the planet because 20 thargoids proved "troublesome" to fight all in one go!

I remember they were pretty expensive for what they were - several thousand Crs. IIRC