Oolite Bulletins

Nope. Blast em soon's I get a scan lock from my Military Targeting System.

Oh dear... so you're not certain that the escape pod does in fact contain a pirate.

Oh, I do make certain that it came from a pirate ship. When I'm on the hunt, I said. If a civilian pilot might've ejected, a civilian was around which means that I musta been on a cargo run, which means I shoot and scoot.

Rese249er wrote:

Oh, I do make certain that it came from a pirate ship.

That doesn't guarantee that the pod contains a pirate though
Pirates often carry innocent slaves, and ocassionally have a wealthy hostage

Well, I have a couple counters for that.

A: Pirates would have slaves in a cargo pod.
B: More than likely to have a wealthy hostage somewhere else.
C: When it comes to pirates, I'm a ruthless [redacted for decency].

That doesn't explain the dozens of innocents I've rescued from ex-pirate-ship escape pods, or the vast amounts of insurance payouts some of them have earned me

Feck.

Yeah, I've scooped up escape pods containing a slave escaping from a pirate ship that I turned into debris and now I read about the hostages it explains an odd occurrence or three. Nice touch Just sometimes I find an escape pod or cargo pod that outruns me at full speed even with the Q-Charger yanging away Quite often I can still scoop them up by using the fuel injection to overtake and with cargo pods that's o.k. but with slaves or escape pods any mistake leaves awful smears on my ship. Messy business I found the answer is to find something else to do for a few minutes and an escape pod will eventually lose velocity. I think the cargo pods do too.

At this point I have a question At extreme distance from the planet a cargo pod's movement becomes far less smooth. Initially I thought that was due to floating point inaccuracy, but ships at the same distance seem to move smoothly - so it can't be that? What causes the pods to behave so?

Greyth wrote:

At this point I have a question At extreme distance from the planet a cargo pod's movement becomes far less smooth. Initially I thought that was due to floating point inaccuracy, but ships at the same distance seem to move smoothly - so it can't be that? What causes the pods to behave so?

+1 that question. Also, at "extreme" distances from the main station/main planet (e.g. on the opposite side of the star) the docking computer becomes useless because its movements are so jerky.

Floating point inaccuracy for a single-precision float will reach the level of +/-1m at an approximate distance from the origin of 10^7metres

For a ship 130m across, +/-1m on its position may just about be unnoticeable, especially if it's in flight, at the normal distances you observe it at. For a cargo pod 5m across it'll be very noticeable indeed when you come to scoop it up.

+/-1m of imprecision on every move will likewise probably mess up the docking computer really badly, since it aims very precisely at the docking corridor (and at docking computer low speeds and high framerates, you may be moving <1m per frame...)

Once I also scooped a slave hunter, but instead of handing him over, i sold him on the slave market for 99Cr, which is good considering the price for slaves at that point was 5 Cr/ton!

Disembodied wrote:

It's scant comfort but at least the prisoner you handed over is now out of circulation ...

Well, if they went back in circulation, I could hunt and sell them again! If they couldn't stand up to one of my attacks, they wouldn't be much of a danger to anyone!

El Viejo wrote:

Welcome aboard, HAL... ain't GalCop wonderful! I have been known to shoot-up the nav buoy of a station where that has happened!

And you survived?

HAL wrote:

And you survived?

Yeah... I survive many encounters with the forces of 'law and order'. I'm a contrabandista, by trade!

Gentlemen, I give you a way to stick it to the man with no loss of life... Prankster.oxp, modified and isolated from Armory OXP's Decoy Mine.

Proof that sometimes - just sometimes - the system works:

Some pilots have all the luck!