Best ways to "search for" ships in missions?

[CmdrLUke]

Is there anywhere else but the space lane where one should look for ships which you're supposed to find in a mission? Is there a way to look in to the save file to see if the ships are there and/or if the mission is busted?

I'm doing the UPS courier "kill the ship and bring us the cargo" mission, but have not seen a single sign of the ship I'm supposed to look for. Once the mission said that the target was dead and to return the containers. Then once when I docked UPS said the mission had failed. I reloaded from a save file and kept on searching but that ship just doesn't seem to be there.

Any clues, or have others encountered missions where the ship(s) you're supposed to find just aren't there? This seems to be a recurring theme across many missions from differing OXPs....

[CmdrLUke]

Well I finally found the UPC courier ships, and here's how I did it: I kept hypering out of and back in to the system I was supposed to search, because I think entering a system is when the ships are generated "afresh." I know that doesn't work for all OXPs, but it seemed to work in this case. Kind of annoying that one has to do that to complete a mission...

[Eric Walch]

There is no general rule to were to expect a target ship. There are scripts that place it completely out of the space-lane with a direction towards it, so the player only can find it after some time. There are others that place it inside the lane with a script to leave it. Here the player has to travel fast with fuel-injectors after entering the system to be able to follow it.

However, most target ships are just put inside the space-lane and stay there. The UPS ship you are referring to is probably the boa. That one acts like a trader and is put at a random location in the lane and will dock at the end like any other trader. (When it docks, you get a briefing to go to another system to search the ship there)
In most systems the boa is easily found, but because of its bounty it sometimes gets attacked by police or bounty hunters. In the heat of the fight they can wander of from the space-lane. This only happens in systems with a lot of police and in that case you must re-enter the system or restart from a saved game.

Ships outside the space-lane can't be found unless they have a beacon.

To the question of the Harkovs: Probably you have to look closer to the planet. The space lane runs from the witchpoint to the planet. A lot of captains leave the space-lane to soon to go to the station. This leaves a "blind" spot near the planet in their searches.

For scripters there are actually two space lanes. One command puts the ships around a line between entry point and planet, the other uses a line from entry point to station. The general direction is the same, but at the end there is a difference. As player you never know and have to search both lanes.

And some ships go first to the planet and than to the station while other go straight to the station.

---
One general rule however is that (almost) all scripts reset the system when re-entering the system. So this could be a way to find the ship when it was lost.

[CmdrLUke]

Thanks, that was helpful. Yes, I was talking about the UPS boa. I was focusing only on the entry -> station lane since I got the advice to do that for RandomHits so assumed all mission targets were on that line. The times when I eventually did find the boa was when I ignored all other pirate activity and moved directly to the planet as fast as possible immediately upon entry to the system, the boa was always close to the planet. The boa was never very close to or even noticeably heading towards the station as far as I could tell.

In summary, for search missions:

+ don't dawdle, the target could move off the lane and get lost.

+ check both lanes, entry -> station and entry -> planet

+ check around the planet / station area

Thanks

[Micha]

As I currently find myself in the same situation (hunting down a dastardly rodent skulking in a 'barley' space-worthy Mosquito Sport, perhaps this could be the trigger for a new piece of equipment: the long-range scanner.
This scanner would scan an appreciable portion of the current system, and allow you to get a little bit of info about every ship in the scan-area. A ship you tag now gets locked onto your space compass.

Of course, such an advanced (but essential for bounty-hunters) system would cost a lot of money to install and would be hard to find as well.

[Thargoid]

As I currently find myself in the same situation (hunting down a dastardly rodent skulking in a 'barley' space-worthy Mosquito Sport, perhaps this could be the trigger for a new piece of equipment: the long-range scanner.
This scanner would scan an appreciable portion of the current system, and allow you to get a little bit of info about every ship in the scan-area. A ship you tag now gets locked onto your space compass.

Of course, such an advanced (but essential for bounty-hunters) system would cost a lot of money to install and would be hard to find as well.

Long range scanning is no problem. For example, see my Welcome OXP which does a count of various ship types within the whole system to determine whether the system is "safe" or not.

The tricky part would be transferring to the space compass (as the target ship's code needs to be set-up for that) and the "tagging" to choose that ship. The latter isn't impossible, but it would be complex (as OXPs cannot define/use new keyboard keys).

But (for me) the over-riding thing would be the motivation to do it. Yes it would make life simpler, but it would spoil the gameplay and make things too easy for the "search and destroy" type missions from things like Random Hits...

[Micha]

Long range scanning is no problem. For example, see my Welcome OXP which does a count of various ship types within the whole system to determine whether the system is "safe" or not.

The OXP is neat (installed it yesterday, as a matter of fact). As you say, the tricky part would be additional key-commands, so I'd see this type of scanner more a code addition rather than a script. I'm more a coder than a scripter anyways - I guess it's time to take a look at the Oolite sources - seems I've found a couple of things recently

But (for me) the over-riding thing would be the motivation to do it. Yes it would make life simpler, but it would spoil the gameplay and make things too easy for the "search and destroy" type missions from things like Random Hits...

Well, it'd up to an individual as to whether or not they'd consider this 'cheating' and hence their decision to buy this piece of kit.

While on the one hand it's interesting to have to run around the various routes of the system to find your quarry it can be annoying if it happens to be hiding out in deep space. Hence my suggestion to make even the long range scanner limited - you'd still need to run several scans (from different positions) in order to cover the whole system.

[tinker]

One thing I find annoying about hunting for target ships is the time that you are rushing about trying to find the target and someone else takes him out, out of scanner range, but so is life.

One possible option might be a scanner missile, it flies straight in whatever direction you pointed it and reports back with a message whenever it scans anything listed in you mission list. The missile would have enough fuel to travel just outside your scanner range, say 30 km, and have a scan range the same as your ship, 25 km. So effectively you scan 55 km in one direction with one missile. While being relatively expensive the dead missile is also scoopable and can be refueled at minimal cost. Of course as it flew out of your scanner range you would have to find it first.

[Thargoid]

The problem there is "it scans anything listed in you mission list". The missile, range, scanning and scoopable are all very do-able (my drones do all that, although they're ships not missiles as they need to fire lasers too), but it's what you scan for that's the rub.

As almost all of the mission list targets are OXP-generated (I can only think of the constrictor built-in mission that isn't offhand, but there may be more), and so what you scan for depends on what OXPs are installed, what missions you are on and how the original authors have coded their OXPs.

To have a missile go for example forward 50km and then scan 25km (ie the very edge of it's scan zone touches the edge of the players) and report back via comms for a generic scan (police, pirates, aliens etc) would be possible though. Extracting something more specific from the mission list I think would be something of a challenge (especially as OXPs get updated and things change - always a danger of OXP interaction causing issues).

[0235]

iv got the Behemoth and the deep space dredger OXP and i cant find either anywhere

[Micha]

@Thargoid: I would see a long-range scanner as a more generic thing (ie, reporting back on number and types of ships) rather than mission-specific reporting. You'd still have to fly there and check it out yourself to get the detailed information. But at least you'd know that the ship-type you're hunting is in that general area. So even if it turns out not to be the actual ship you're after at least it gives you a hint.

[Thargoid]

@Thargoid: I would see a long-range scanner as a more generic thing (ie, reporting back on number and types of ships) rather than mission-specific reporting. You'd still have to fly there and check it out yourself to get the detailed information. But at least you'd know that the ship-type you're hunting is in that general area. So even if it turns out not to be the actual ship you're after at least it gives you a hint.

I'm coding it at the moment But real life and inspiration for Welcome Mat.oxp keep derailing me

[Micha]

No rush There was just discussion about making it mission-specific which I personally think would make it too much of a spoiler.

[Thargoid]

No rush There was just discussion about making it mission-specific which I personally think would make it too much of a spoiler.

I would tend to agree. But the probe missile idea is a good one, and is a nice challenge to code up. Once it's done if mission authors want to make customised variants then that's up to them...

The current one will fly 100km directly away from the player ship, doing a scan at the half-way and end points and reporting a count of what it finds before coming back for pick-up. Its longer range is at the expense of any destructive capabilities or reactivity to outside interference (e.g. getting fired upon).

[Eric Walch]

iv got the Behemoth and the deep space dredger OXP and i cant find either anywhere

Both are very rare in the normal space area but they will appear sometimes. The Behemoth fights mainly in witchspace. When you enter witchspace, there probably will be one there. When you also add the behemoth spacewar oxp, it becomes more likely to see them also in battle in normal space.

The deep space dredgers are normally found deep into deep space. You can encounter them in deep space with a 50% chance in systems with techlevel 7 or higher. However you must go really far away.

When you want to see the dredgers, you can also reload a saved game and and just fly at jumpspeed into deep space. It will take some time, but there will always be one in the first system after reloading an old game. Just keep on flying straight ahead into the emptiness.

EDIT:
And when you have the latest version of the dredgers (version 2.1), you can also buy salvage missiles. Those missiles can be fired on derelict ships (inactive ships that are white on the scanner). Some of those ships will reactivate and go straight towards the nearest dredger. When you follow them for a while and figure out his heading, you can often spot the dredger somewhere far away ahead.