Retrofitting pylons

[tinker]

I have not found any mention of this anywhere, so I'll ask the question.

Is there currently any way to add pylons to a ship like adding any other enhancements?

I do not mean editing the shipdat to change the max_missiles key, I mean paying out money at a shihpyard to get some engineers to add the pylons to this specific player ship.

The reason I ask is I bought myself a rusty fer de lance early on, and I have grown quite fond of it, decorated the cabin and everything, left it rusty on the outside so as not to attract to much attention from pirates etc. I use it as a garbage collector and taxi, not much cargo space, but I make a living with a few random hits on the way and ups pays the fuel costs, well almost. The only problem is having only 2 pylons and so much equipment is now pylon mounted, salvage missiles, fuel tanks etc., not to mention the required bombs and missiles. So I would like to retro fit a couple more pylons.

[DaddyHoggy]

I don't think it's currently possible - but it's an excellent idea! It's probably scriptable too - (or failing that - pick a price - decide how many extra pylons you want and edit the credits in save file and the number of missile pylons available in your ship data!)

[Commander McLane]

Not scriptable for the time being. Although it could probably be made scriptable. Would require the introduction of a read/write JavaScript player.ship.maxMissiles-property or something of the like. Feel free to suggest it at the appropriate place, if you like.

[Thargoid]

Or an equipment work-around for a multiple missile launcher on one pylon (kinda like Ramirez's chaff dispenser). Not ideal, but do-able with the current set-up.

**Wanders off pondering...**

[ClymAngus]

Or an equipment work-around for a multiple missile launcher on one pylon (kinda like Ramirez's chaff dispenser). Not ideal, but do-able with the current set-up.

**Wanders off pondering...**

Sort of like a rocket pod?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image ... et_pod.JPG

[Thargoid]

Along those lines yes, although given the size of Oolite missiles, one with somewhat less holes (methinks 3).

Had a ponder on this during my lunchtime walk, and it's certainly do-able and could be quite useful. But will probably limit it to normal and ECM hardened missiles, and max one rack of each per ship (or even one rack overall perhaps) to stop things getting stupidly uber...

Looks like I just found this weeks scripting inspiration/distraction from writing TCAT

[Micha]

To be honest, I'd always envisaged the missiles carried by Elite ships to be held internally with a firing tube - more like a torpedo than a fighter-planes' wing-mounted missile pylon.
As such it ought to be possible to purchase a 'missile bay extension' - using up some of the ships' cargo capacity.

Not entirely sure how that fits into the Oolite Universe though with fuel-tanks and whatnot being available now as pylon-mounted kit.

[Thargoid]

I know what you mean, but the in-game descriptions (both in the play itself and in the code/script) says they're pylon based.

To which my brain always reacts "well where are they on the external views?". And also the age-old argument about the volume of the ship vs the volume of it's max cargo gets even worse when you marry up the volume of most ships to the volume of their carried missiles if they were of the torpedo variety

[Thargoid]

OK, I've got a working 3-missile rack operational, just needs a little bit of modelling for when the empty rack is ejected. Once that's sorted it'll be ready for testing. At the moment you can have a rack on each pylon (they work fully independently), will probably put the uber question to a poll.

One minor glitch is that if there's an empty pylon preceding where it was when used it moves as far left as possible in the list, but I can't think of a way around that offhand.

Oh and due to how the trunk is coded it may need the multi targetting system, as after you launch a missile from the rack the next pylon gets selected (so you need to press "y" to go back to the rack).

[Thargoid]

The missile rack is available for comment here.

The missile strengths are toned down to stop it unbalancing the game by making player-ships too strong, but it's still a useful piece of kit I think until the pylon-addition capability is considered.

[Frame]

hmm reminds me of this

that was going to be dumbfire though...

[Thargoid]

And no reason why it still can't be, once you get done with the ongoing work and have your break.

The Rack was just a quick play to see how easy it would be to code something like that (as it turned out very easy, give or take the pylon-swapping glitch which I don't think there's any way around). There are similar (non-missile) weapons in legacy code, but using JS makes it a lot less of a complex code.

[Micha]

Oh and due to how the trunk is coded it may need the multi targetting system, as after you launch a missile from the rack the next pylon gets selected (so you need to press "y" to go back to the rack).

I've got a working hack to change missiles with 'y' at anytime and the corresponding changes to targetting and whatnot. My testing so far suggests that it works and plays nicely with the standard expansion equipment (multi-targetting & target-memory).
If anyone is interested I can turn it into a self-contained patch. Currently it's only for the dev-trunk but if there's interest I can see about porting it to 1.71 as well.
Alternatively I can build binaries for Windows XP and Ubuntu and make them available somewhere. Sorry, no OS-X.

[Commander McLane]

Alternatively I can build binaries for Windows XP and Ubuntu and make them available somewhere. Sorry, no OS-X.

I know this is not what you mean, but somehow I hear alarm-bells ringing here. If something gets changed in the trunk, then it has to get changed in all the trunk. I am strongly against implementing platform-dependent changes. I would rather like all of us to play the same basic game.

(On top of that I am also not sure yet whether I would like to see this particular piece of the basic game functionality to get changed, but of course this can simply be--and has been to a certain extent--debated here. Anyway, my point here is only the "Sorry, no OS-X.")

[RazorbackSnr]

Extra missiles for ships that only have one or two is a good idea(Asp II).
As long as there's a penalty like slower speed or something similar.

Huge cost only puts off the poor......