New Fuel type - Ooptimax?

[DaddyHoggy]

Having been in a position today of being low on diesel and the nearest station being 1) Shell 2) only had diesel optimax left (and I'm not surprised at the prices they charge) I put my misery to good use and had an Oolite related thought.

Does anybody think it's a good idea - and if if they do would it be possible to do via OXP to add a new type of fuel to the game?

i.e. - A "filling" station outside the main station (based on Dr. Nil's Con-store design) painted in one of the colours found in some of the fuel related Ads from YAH that offers premium priced fuel that gives say 5% increase in top speed rounded up to the nearest 0.01 (so a Cobby3 would go from 0.35 to 0.37) and a better (more efficient burn in Witchfuel injection - again say 5%)

To water this potential bonus down I make the additional suggestions:

1) Limited number of stations selling the stuff so you must pick your trade routes carefully.

2) The stuff isn't always available even if the station is there.

3) The optimised fuel must be the only fuel present - so it doesn't work on your first fill up and as soon as you scoop non-ooptimax fuel (either from sun or other ships or canisters using the new OXP equipment additions) your performance returns to normal. However, does work with fuel tanks as they can be pre-filled with Ooptimax as well.

Have resisted urge (so far) to do this a a 'vert in YAH...

What do my fellow Ooliters think of my suggestion?

[Commander McLane]

I see some obstacles.

(1) You cannot supress the availability of normal fuel (EQ_FUEL), at least not without making changes to the game distribution iself. So normal fuel would always be for sale next to the Ooptimax.

(2) Let's for a moment set aside the question whether this Optimax-stuff really enhances performance or is a PR-thingy only , and assume you would get a higher top-speed. It would, however, be non-trivial to script the speed-increase with the current scripting methods. Of course you can take care of the issue which kind of fuel the player has got in his tanks by a couple of mission-variables, that's not the problem. Also the analogous increase in "normal" speed, "injector" speed and hyper ("J") speed is no problem at all, as only one property controls them all. In Javascript it's the player.maxSpeed (I guess starting from 1.72 it will be player.ship.maxSpeed) property. This one property does everything for you. It sets the maximum speed, and as injector speed and J-speed are just the maximum speed multiplied with some factor, it will set them accordingly. Only problem is: according to the wiki maxSpeed is read-only. So you can't set it to another value during the game. (Of course you can file a scripting request in order to overcome this obstacle.)

The rest of the stuff is scriptable.

So, what about making an excursion in the realms of scripting, DH?

[DaddyHoggy]

Moi? Script? One day, perhaps, when pigs fly and the price of bacon goes up <da da boom boom tsk>

[Thargoid]

Moi? Script? One day, perhaps, when pigs fly and the price of bacon goes up <da da boom boom tsk>

Come on, if I can do it (just about anyway) then anyone can...

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