Scanner problems...and some more including fiasco.oxp

[Screet]

And when the MASC'M would work as designed, it would feel like cheating as no other ship would be able to see or target the player. You just could kill anything without other ships fighting back.

And selling its counter measurement is kind of spoiling any future use of it with missions. Currently it does nothing as there are no NPC ships out there that have the MASC'M.

Both equipment parts appear to work in some sense:
- rarely an NPC ship appears as cargo on the scanner, obviously because the filtering got that ship even though it uses MASC.
- MASC for the player works as a missile jammer - which in my eyes is too powerful, as it does work passively without energy usage. A player with MASC can easily take on a condor which did not deplete it's missile resources because the condor is unable to use missiles against the player. On the other hand...I still don't like the Condors very much, especially because they are more often in the hands of pirates than doing what they should do...

Concerning the mission ideas, yes, I think that both eq parts could be nice for such a thing, however the player should then get a less powerful version of MASC that needs to be activated and consumes energy, similar to ECM.

On the other hand, missiles in this game are pretty strange. I've even seen missiles unable to hit Thargoid terrorizer frigates, but instead were circling them. Furthermore, if the player has the ECM button well reachable on the stick, the launching ship usually gets destroyed by it's own missiles. Same applies for a player launching non-hardened missiles - the NPCs use their ECM instantly and thus often kill the player with his own missile.

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[Svengali]

On the other hand, missiles in this game are pretty strange. I've even seen missiles unable to hit Thargoid terrorizer frigates, but instead were circling them.

Yupp. If you want to change it, change the accuracy in shipdata.plist. Then you will see that the missiles are some really nice toys.

Furthermore, if the player has the ECM button well reachable on the stick, the launching ship usually gets destroyed by it's own missiles. Same applies for a player launching non-hardened missiles - the NPCs use their ECM instantly and thus often kill the player with his own missile.

You are joking, eh? Player often killed, because a NPC has used its ECM, haha. The wrong forum here, Screet. Better place it here.

[Screet]

Yupp. If you want to change it, change the accuracy in shipdata.plist. Then you will see that the missiles are some really nice toys.

That sounds nice - I'll give it a try...

You are joking, eh? Player often killed, because a NPC has used its ECM, haha. The wrong forum here, Screet. Better place it here.

No, really, I've not been joking. At that time I was flying a ship where a single missile hit would destroy it...and when I scooped up some non-hardened missiles and ran into a larger group of hostiles, I thought it would be nice to have them drain their energy or even get hit...but as soon as I launched it, ECM yelled and I was dead from the blast. That happened a few times, until I decided not to use such toys, even if I find them for free.

Surely the mistake was to fire a non-hardened missile at targets with ECM...but at that point I did not know which ones do carry it and remembered the nice energy drain ECM causes....and I still I have trouble seeing the point of firing missiles at weak targets (which are the ones without ECM), as a little bit of laser light can take these out pretty easily while it's the tougher ones that I wanted to run or lose energy, in order to ease up the fight...

Concerning missiles...can someone explain why there are even weaker missile racks with standard missiles, but none with salvage? That's the point where I would see use for short-range missiles.

Few minutes ago I had some more fleet action vs. thargoids and thought I should give it a try: fly with injectors ahead of the navy and fire one of those on the enemy fleet before it comes into range. Interesting results:
- if not fired from very close range and head-on, the missile is too slow to hit a thargoid (if that only accounts for cascade missiles, I believe it's good!)
- if fired head-on, they do very nice fireworks, most navy ships turned around, however a frigate just proceeded into the blast range, thus increasing the fireworks and having me do it common style again

Anyway...the best idea for such fleets is, to shoot them normally, so that there will be many Thargons floating in space afterwards...find a place with 20+ and no navy around and use an e-bomb...easiest money you can get for cleaning up However, often the navy ships are in range, then it's just the decision to ignore all those credits or do some target practice with the lasers...

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[Frame]

Oolites native missiles, standard missiles

Does not cause damage (detonate) when destroyed by an ECM,

however, hard heads have a 10% chance of being destroyed by ECM, and 5% chance of doing damage when that occours..

so you could also just have had really really bad luck...

[Screet]

Oolites native missiles, standard missiles

Does not cause damage (detonate) when destroyed by an ECM,

however, hard heads have a 10% chance of being destroyed by ECM, and 5% chance of doing damage when that occours..

so you could also just have had really really bad luck...

Now that's strange...I am quite sure they were standard missiles...and I had even lost a random hits kill when I hit my ECM on him launching a missile! I could be wrong concerning non-hardened, but then it would be a continuation of my strange luck in a really weird thing (remember my post complaining that the pods.oxp destroys my scoops before I can fill a 25 tons cargo hold EVERY time?). When I tried ECM on a condors missiles, it really was very ineffective, though sometimes blowing up multiple missiles...and condors do launch massive volleys.

Furthermore, if the first ECM pulse does not get them and ECM fires multiple pulses...the missile should already be far enough from the launcher?

Seems I've to load my old Merlin commander once more and do some testing tomorrow...as the other ships I did fly were usually able to survive a single missile, while the Merlin blew up on such occasions (still that ship is too powerful, due to the problem others have hitting it, especially those with multiple lasers).

I've been asked if that could have been e-bombs destroying me when I launched my missiles...but I wasn't firing at that moment and I only remember being bombed as a result of severely damaging another ship with my lasers...unless they would use an e-bomb as a result of receiving "energy low" after using their ECM. And I'd still count that as a weird sort of luck...but then, at least, my initial idea to drain their energy with missiles would have worked With my boa class cruiser and without naval energy unit, the ECM did horrible things, especially when the shields have been hit and I continued to fire my lasers...thus this appears to be a more matching explanation to me than the hardhead one.

When I test it with my old commander and manage to reproduce the result, can I find out via the log what happened?

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[Thargoid]

Concerning missiles...can someone explain why there are even weaker missile racks with standard missiles, but none with salvage? That's the point where I would see use for short-range missiles.

They were designed to allow ships with low numbers of missile pylons to still be offensively useful as player ships, but also so as not to unbalance the game by effectively multiplying the missile count completely by 3.

There are no salvage missile racks as the salvage missiles came into being after the missile racks did, and also they (the salvage missiles) were written by someone else (Eric I think, or possibly Svengali) whereas the missile racks are mine.

As you say above though, with your weird occurrences relating to random number generation, it does seem to me like either your installation is messed up somewhere, or there's a weird interaction between the game and your hardware. That or you've got incredibly bad luck