Sure - suggestions...

[Simon B]

All right - some ideas I may get around to:

Ships -

UFO - basically a light or bunch of lights that follows a player (or other ship) around annoying the capt since it blocks the jump drive. Possible they could choose to have an escort role though. IFF name is "Unknown Object".

(Note - it is possible to have a ship with no visible model and just a flasher)

Doomsday machine - big and slow, powerful enough to take out a station or a planet.
(Related: have some systems sans stations/planets.) Would also suit a mission - you follow a trail of destroyed stations and rumour... hit it with lots of nukes...

Berserker - another robot death machine, I know we already have thargons. But but but - berserkers are a sci-fi canon...

Military Anaconda - with turrets. The anaconda is big, slow, and not very manouverable. Turrets are only sensible. Armoring them makes sense too... so it takes a lot of hits to take one out.

Systemships available:
By which I mean - no witchdrive.
This could create another path through the early game for players lucky enough to end up in a system with many dockable objects. One could fly a transport between them and an asteroid feild.

Missions:

Rich Tourist - you get a tourist as a passenger. They have no fixed destination and stay with the ship as long as the ride is "interesting". They also pay more for very interesting rides. If you have a cool ship, that helps: "Wait'll my friends hear I rode a Flangewort class Pedant!" Your rep also helps.

The planet descriptions go someplace towards that. But if you become a fugitive... engage in some piracy, get in a firefight, go on a mission... visit the graveyard, pulsar, etc.

The neet thing is that this is a way to make things which are otherwise a bit ho-hum more attractive. Suddenly you care that the blue wingnutoids live on a boring little planet, and you need to remember where the neerest hoopy casino is.

Occasionally pops into the bridge ... "can I fire the lasers? ... whoops... my bad... what does this button do?"


Planetfall...
Script - flying too close to a planet in a witchdrive ship is an offence. Police fly up from the world to shoo you off. But what if you have a permit (like those adders with role: shuttle?) Then - fly close enough and you land... perhaps you have to follow a beacon?


Item:
Thargon Wormhole projector
how do thargons get from place to place - especially considering that they can turn up between stars.

Perhaps thargons have controllable wormholes? A captured generator could trigger a wormhole ahead of the ship - B5 style... but players still cannot control the destination. Uses energy like ECM. Perhaps it displaces cargo?

Some carriers when destroyed could leave a wormhole behind as a death action... or the wormhole projector is on a special ship. Even if the device could not be recovered (as a mission?) this would justify how they appear.



<rant>
Collision boxes - did something happen in 1.7? In 1.69 I was able to fly between the spokes/rings of the torus station. It was a good shortcut to get to witchdrive range.
</rant>

[DaddyHoggy]

Still stalking.

I think you can make a model that's a point source (i.e.) tiny and then put a flasher on that - however I think Oolite (cleverly) calculates jump block range of a ship based on its mass which it calculates based partly on its size...

I wanted to do something similar but have a plain black ship that had flashers mounted slightly below the surface so you only saw them when they reached maximum "bloom" - but I wanted pure white flashers and that's not possible (it would seem).

I think the ORB ship (oxp) is mainly a flasher...

**

You can blow stations up and/or you can 'port them away great distances - the same with planets - but I think the nav scanner still knows where they are.

**

Military Anaconda - read "Status Quo" by Drew Wagar (find it on the wiki) and confirm your ideas...

**

System ships - nothing to stop you flogging your Cobby and buying a Worm or other non-WD based ship - install Hoopy, Black Monks, Your Ad Here and hope you get multiple dockable (but not saveable!) stations in the same system (although most are generated randomly so you'd need Frame's SAVE ANYWHERE oxp to make a career of this.

**

Rich tourist - all sounds possible to script....

**

Thargon Wormhole Generator - it's a great idea BUT mission/oxp scripted forced misjumps (which effectively this would be) is not possible in current Oolite code.

**

HTH

[Gunney_Plym]

Doomsday machine - big and slow, powerful enough to take out a station or a planet.

This is kind of where I was going to go with one of my ships (part of a work in progress). Depending on your legal rating your mission would either be attacking or defending a vessel that was itself attacking a station in Anachy or Feudal systems. The background story being that the 'advanced worlds' were fed up with the level of piracy.

A new set of enforcement ships have also being included in the plan as a counter to the increasingly sofisticated vessels being used by the pirates (especially if you have the renegades OXP installed ).

The original attacking ship was to be a modified heavy lifter but that design has had to be re-thought. A new design is in progress but work and real-life keeps getting in the way

That and the fact that I have yet to get my head around scripting the ooniverse

[Sarin]

another suggestions from me:

anti-missile rockets: faster, more maneuverable than normal missiles, but almost no warhead, usable only in destroying missiles. Comes in a pack.
pulse laser turret: auto targetting, but only with pulse laser. Mounts as normal weapon.

now my comments:

UFO: could be good for fun, but has to be destroyable.

Doomsday: someone has been watching Star Trek eh? I just hope you don't have to do suicide run on this one...

Military Anaconda: there has to be limitations for turrets' weaponry. Like pulse laser only. And, destroyable turrets would make it fun to kill.

Tourist: Unless the tourist would do things like eject you or cargo, it's a good idea. He can eject himself tho

Planetfall: hmm...will Oolite EVER have planetary landing like FFE? It was good fun...

[Disembodied]

There are some entertaining offensive and defensive missiles and mines in the Missiles and Bombs OXP. Turreted weapons are I believe all plasma cannons... if you want a big, turret-bearing military ship, check out the Behemoth or the various Galactic navy ships!

The Tourist does sound interesting. I wonder how easy it would be to make randomised chatter, using a system akin to LittleBear's Random Hits generator? Or it could be a Hitchhiker... kind of like a Trumble, but with different effects, and much less likely to breed. There would need to be different ways of getting rid of them, too. Some might look for worlds that specialise in casinos, others might want Lethal Water or some form of Brandy...

[Simon B]

another suggestions from me:

anti-missile rockets: faster, more maneuverable than normal missiles, but almost no warhead, usable only in destroying missiles. Comes in a pack.
pulse laser turret: auto targetting, but only with pulse laser. Mounts as normal weapon.

Hard enough to target missiles as it is - anyway, I havn't found missiles to be much of a threat.

I note how NPCs can always tell if you have launched an ECM-hardened rig. But have you seen one of these circling the target for minutes at a time? You've got to force the target to dodge for the missile to impact - I've found they are mostly good for getting rid of surplus escorts - or when you really need to run away and some fracker has fuel injectors.

(Smeg! How many SF shows shall I rack up?)

now my comments:

UFO: could be good for fun, but has to be destroyable.

There has to be a way to get rid of it, sure. Also, there needs to be a reason to be glad it's there sometimes.

Say - if you are mining - UFO joins in: each time it shoots an asteroid it forms masses of splinters. Or - thargons attack, just when you are about lost, UFO takes them all out with some wonder toy. Player sits there going blibble.

Doomsday: someone has been watching Star Trek eh? I just hope you don't have to do suicide run on this one...

saayyy... solution could be to dive your ship into the beast, but eject at the last min...

Military Anaconda: there has to be limitations for turrets' weaponry. Like pulse laser only. And, destroyable turrets would make it fun to kill.

Already mentioned - turrets hold plasma guns.

I've thought of making a frangible ship so players could knock bit off it bit it looks hard to script - I mean, if an engine pod gets destroyed, you'd have to remove the drive plume as well. If a support strut is destrofed, what it's holding needs to spiral off as an intact bit of wreckage.

Tourist: Unless the tourist would do things like eject you or cargo, it's a good idea. He can eject himself tho :)

There's an idea.... if things get too exciting, the tourist could start ejecting cargo to distract attackers. (And maybe it works...)

Planetfall: hmm...will Oolite EVER have planetary landing like FFE? It was good fun...

There are all kinds of issues with a planetary landing. I was thinking that you get close enough, on beacon, and a docking sequence is initiated instead of a collision?

Or maybe a dockable object can lurk in the atmosphere... I can't get over the idea that planets need to be more useful than just big markers.

Another approach is to put a station at fuel-depth (or close to it) in a star - it's a refinery, and fuel is very cheap there.

[Simon B]

There are some entertaining offensive and defensive missiles and mines in the Missiles and Bombs OXP. Turreted weapons are I believe all plasma cannons... if you want a big, turret-bearing military ship, check out the Behemoth or the various Galactic navy ships!

Yes - seen those.

The Tourist does sound interesting. I wonder how easy it would be to make randomised chatter, using a system akin to LittleBear's Random Hits generator? Or it could be a Hitchhiker... kind of like a Trumble, but with different effects, and much less likely to breed. There would need to be different ways of getting rid of them, too. Some might look for worlds that specialise in casinos, others might want Lethal Water or some form of Brandy...

Well paying ones you want to keep - so if you know they like gambling you stay away. The poor payers you want to lose...
And so on - yeah.
Some ships allow more than one crew, so a hitchhiker is a good idea - though sometimes his towel catches on a control? I think such folk need to be a mixed blessing... there are advantages as well as disadvantages.

Ships outfitted with an escape capsule could get the odd freeloader: "c'mon, just to lowsquat, how about it? I can ride in the escape pod..." - though, this means that he could eject at the first sign of trouble.

Hitchikers, or tourists, con have unforseen consequences - spawning additional missions - say, this one happens to be the sproglet of some high muckamuck someplace. Loo after them - bring my kid back - isn't there a romance mission someplace?

[Simon B]

Doomsday machine - big and slow, powerful enough to take out a station or a planet.

This is kind of where I was going to go with one of my ships (part of a work in progress). Depending on your legal rating your mission would either be attacking or defending a vessel that was itself attacking a station in Anachy or Feudal systems. The background story being that the 'advanced worlds' were fed up with the level of piracy.

Interesting

A new set of enforcement ships have also being included in the plan as a counter to the increasingly sofisticated vessels being used by the pirates (especially if you have the renegades OXP installed :!: ).

Have you seen the viper III model?

I see a lot of extra enforcement ships already.
The main thing keeping the galcop vipers is they are already pretty cool. It was ages before I produced a model that looked like it could be a police cruiser. I note that system ships should always outclass witchdrive ships where both are optimized for combat - they don't need to carry that bulky FTL drive around with them.

Now here's something - I've been using like_ship a lot - but I cannot seem to use this to get rid of a scanclass... likeship=galcop-viper, but scanclass=regular ship.

The NPC renegade is fine as I reckon the pilot has hijacked the transponder with the ship. But a player wouldn't get their hands on one with an intact transponder... or would they? Perhaps a police transponder could be one of the items in a salvage yard?

Can I get a player model renegade viper to switch it's flashers on and off on a player action? <sigh>

That and the fact that I have yet to get my head around scripting the ooniverse :?

I hear you. Oh how I hear you...

[Commander McLane]

Some nice ideas around here, although I think something of it is already there. E.g. the UFO's sound a lot like Orb. It would be a really nice, by the way, if somebody could adopt that abandoned OXP.

I like the tourism-idea. It could connect very well with the have-different-types-of-passenger-bays ideas which has been around here for quite a while.

I don't so much like the doomsday-machine idea. For the most part this is because it is so utterly unrealistic. Have you any idea how much it takes to get rid of a planet?

And for one special question:

Now here's something - I've been using like_ship a lot - but I cannot seem to use this to get rid of a scanclass... likeship=galcop-viper, but scanclass=regular ship.

What's your problem here?

Code: Select all

	<key>My-new-Ship</key>
	<dict>
		<key>ai_type</key>
		<string>route1TraderAI.plist</string>
		<key>like_ship</key>
		<string>viper</string>
		<key>name</key>
		<string>My cool private Viper</string>
		<key>roles</key>
		<string>anything but "police"</string>
		<key>scanClass</key>
		<string>CLASS_NEUTRAL</string>
	</dict>

and you're there.

[Eric Walch]

I don't so much like the doomsday-machine idea. For the most part this is because it is so utterly unrealistic. Have you any idea how much it takes to get rid of a planet?

It's quite easy: just send a request in triple-fold to any sub-station of the Vogonian fleet.

[Sarin]

Well...I wanted anti-missiles because ever since I installed RS, the star wars ships started using torpedoes...and these have bigger warhead than normal missiles, imune to ECM, and have long range so I always have to disengage from combat when they're fired at me...I'm gonna take a look at missoles and bombs oxp, maybe it'll help.

[LittleBear]

The Missile Anylser would be the kit you're looking for. . Whenever a non-standard missile is fired at you, this equipment locks the incoming missile as your target and displays the type of missile tracking you. Hit T to lock a missile on the incoming and M to launch as usual to send your anti-missile away. Any type of missile should be enough, but you could try the Intercepter from Missiles and Bombs as its very fast, cheap and although a light warhead more than enough to take out a missile.

[Eric Walch]

Well...I wanted anti-missiles because ever since I installed RS, the star wars ships started using torpedoes...and these have bigger warhead than normal missiles, imune to ECM, and have long range so I always have to disengage from combat when they're fired at me...I'm gonna take a look at missoles and bombs oxp, maybe it'll help.

As LB says, you can target the missile and fire a regular missile at the other. However, in my experience is regularly misses the target and it turns to follow the first missile. Often to slow.

Best solution is to change the settings of the proximity switch of the missile to already detonate at a greater distance.

But an even better solution is to use Thagoids Missile_Rack.oxp. This are slower and less powerful missiles allowing to mount 3 in the space of one pylon. Interception missiles work better head on, and than you don't need the speed.

I took the liberty to change the settings of the proximity switch of his missiles and added a new type with the name "Interception Missile Rack". You can download the tweaked version at:

Missile Rack.oxp

[Thargoid: Look at it, and when you like it, put it on your site. BTW, I shortened your script a little]

[Thargoid]

I was considering something very similar, having read this thread earlier.

Editted to add - Like the scripting update (why is it I missed such a simple way to do it? ). Will upload the new version next week when I'm back home and have de-jetlagged (due to fly home from Japan in 2 hours, now sat at Narita).

[FSOneblin]

if somebody could adopt that abandoned OXP.

Get kaks. I'm not sure about haveing the planets being landable like FFE (I have not played the game, could someone give direct me to a mac version for it?)

FSOneblin[/quote]