You are welcome. But the only official example of a character was inside Oolite, introduced in version 1.65. Even this one was wrong and didn't set up a missionscreen. I don't think it ever showed his text. I noticed it while rewriting the stuff into JS. The character inside 1.71 does work and sets up a proper missionscreen when free, otherwise attaching its text below an existing one. I would advise not to use much text so it is possible for more than one character to put up a short text simultaneously. (like normal messages for escapepods). Just to prevent missionscreen clashing because you never know for sure you have the only scripted character on docking. When you want to display a full screen, just set up a variable and display a message like an ordinary message.That explains it then. Thanks!
On your earlier message of not always seeing an pilot escaping:
That is the biggest problem with those pilots. Just spawning an escapepod with a pilot always works, but the official way of letting the pilot jumping in the escapepod himself sometimes fails. But still, this is the most realistic approach. Whenever the remaining energy of a ship drops below the 10% the pilot starts thinking of abandoning ship. When he does, the ship turns into a hulk (white on your scanner). The big problem is that the pilot needs time to get into his pod. To extract a pilot you must give him time to bail ship. When shooting a small, low energy ship with military lasers the ship is often destructed with pilot on board. When energy drops below 10% one additionally laser-shot is often enough to completely vaporise the ship. Whenever I need to capture a pilot I made it a habit to keep a few seconds between shots from the moment on that is starts to throwing sparks.
Somehow this should become common knowledge among players. Maybe someone should write an oxp completely dedicated to "extracting" pilots from ships. UPS has several but none of the pilots is crucial. The only crucial ones are spawned as escape pods. Local_heroes also does spawn them to make sure a pilot ejects. Maybe this is wrong. Only capturing one is crucial for he mission. I think Svengali should change this and just accept that not all Harkovs than will produce the pods. It will be more realistic it the player realy has to extract the pods. And by giving the Harkovs a custom escapepod, the escapepod is still executing its script on scooping.
One final think about bailing pilots. I also witnessed several times an escaping pilot (two white blibs on the radar) and than the pilot smashed into pieces against his own hulk. Probably this is a general problem of ejection from ships that are wide on their tail (like the Boa-MK2 or Anaconda). Also with normal flying my Boa ejected cargo often hits my tail. To do it save I have to pull up my nose when ejecting stuff.
(hm, there is no emoticon for :thrilled: ).)