Oolite Bulletins

I found an example of why not to allow the AI to use energy bombs. I was taking another look at Frontier: Elite II, kitted out my Eagle Long Range Fighter with military drives, a shield booster, 5MW Pulse Laser, ECM, Radar Mapper and a couple of other odds and ends, and off I went into the black.

I'm having some fun getting into duels with fighter craft, and some medium pirate vessels, earning bounty and building up my Elite rating, and then I come across a Sidewinder with an energy bomb fitted. It's not like I could run away, so I try to shoot it. After a little while of firing back and forth, neither of us getting any headway, he gets frustrated and fires off his energy bomb. I have full health, but i'm only in a little Eagle, one shield gen. Game Over. Well that was fun... not.

it fixed the Override and Lawmaker missiles

what was wrong with them? I thought they worked great!

(the missiles & bombs I have is "Missiles and Bombs v2.2.oxp")

The Thargoid bomb just seems to divide into 4 slow-moving objects which diverge sort of randomly. They are far slower than a Thatgoid. Maybe I ought to get in close before deploying, but then I'd just shoot them (for free).

Zbond-Zbond wrote:

it fixed the Override and Lawmaker missiles

what was wrong with them? I thought they worked great!.

I only discovered one flaw with both missiles, but that starts only giving problems with trunk versions.

In future the command setTargetToFoundTarget will return a TARGET_LOST when there is no found target. I noticed this change in Oolite itself fixes problems with several existing bad AI scripts that send ships into attack mode without a target.

Both above missiles use this command on launch. In the past it was only a useless command in both missile scripts, but starting with 1.74 it will cause the missile to blow up on launch. This command can just be deleted in the AI of both missiles missiles.
With the current Oolite 1.73 there is no problem yet, and Ramirez is informed about this future problem.

My .02cr on E-bombs:

-Unlike Q-bombs, E-bombs generally can't be found as torpedo warheads.
-You only get one shot with an E-bomb.
-Large ships (Thargoid carriers, cruisers, battleships, Behemoths, ect) can survive an E-bomb detonation. That's not the case for Q-bombs.
-While it's no means a precision weapon, it's still fairly easy to ensure that hostiles get an E-bomb pasting and allies don't. Q-bombs are far more indiscriminate.
-E-bombs leave scoopage behind. Q-bombs leave nothing behind.
-It's suicidal to deploy a Q-bomb when you're out of fuel, and/or the injectors are disabled. The E-bomb is safer in that regard.
-Q-weapons take up valuable missile mounts. E-bombs don't.
-Raise your hand, paw, tentacle, pincher, or other grasping appendage if you upgraded your kill rating by Q-bombing the Orbital Graveyard. Now try cheating the rating by E-bombing it.

Those points made, I don't get the E-bomb hating, or the movement to ban them. It seems more than unreasonable to me.
To the points above, I never carry Q-bombs and related weapons. Though it's rarely fired, I make a point to always mount an E-bomb.

Please don't ban the E-bomb. Ban the Q-bomb instead.

Hawk wrote:

I was taking another look at Frontier: Elite II, kitted out my Eagle Long Range Fighter and off I went into the black.

Don't you mean into the "blue"?

OK, to bring this topic a little back on track. I've knocked together 3 new "bombs" so far during my quick playing about:

• One - deals energy damage to ships (less to Aliens), dependent on range.
• Two - the converse of one, deals less damage to regular ships than aliens.
• Three - has a range and energy dependent chance of just making surrounding ships go bang.

All draw on the ships energy banks, taking all but one bar of energy from them, with the more energy going in doing more damage.

But I'm not sure just the three are worth an OXP, so I was wondering if any of you clever people have inspiration for any more such weaponry that I can try and throw together before I release the OXP?[/color]

Thargoid wrote:

OK, to bring this topic a little back on track. I've knocked together 3 new "bombs" so far during my quick playing about

And how do they work? TAB key or pylon mounted?

Thargoid wrote:

Pylon - there's no other way for OXPs that's convenient in battle.

Unfortunately that won't convince me to upgrade to 1.74 then.

JazHaz wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

Pylon - there's no other way for OXPs that's convenient in battle.

Unfortunately that won't convince me to upgrade to 1.74 then.

Um… I announced two weeks ago that energy bombs will be in 1.74, but will be removed after the next stable release.

Ahruman wrote:

JazHaz wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

Pylon - there's no other way for OXPs that's convenient in battle.

Unfortunately that won't convince me to upgrade to 1.74 then.

Um… I announced two weeks ago that energy bombs will be in 1.74, but will be removed after the next stable release.

Yeah I know... just making my position clear, in case it went back to how it could have been....

Thargoid wrote:

The trunk E-Bomb is still in 1.74 (albeit with a little tweak required to the config as Ahruman says).

No, that’s not what I said. What I said is that it will be unchanged in 1.74.

I did notice a bug with e-bombs in 1.73.4... e-bombs shouldn't give you bountys or kill ratings, and they give you bounty at the very least.
That was always supposed to be the downside of the e-bomb, cost and not getting any elite rating or bounty from the kills...