Oolite Bulletins

Mad Hollander wrote:

1 all external equipment can be seen, theoretically, with an unarmed eye - look at the Dark Wheel novel in the very beginning.
2 hence it can be seen with a subsystem

Not all ships carry their missiles and mines externally.. just sayin'..

And there are plenty of people here who don't regard TDW as "canon" anyway.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Mad Hollander wrote:

1 all external equipment can be seen, theoretically, with an unarmed eye - look at the Dark Wheel novel in the very beginning.
2 hence it can be seen with a subsystem

Not all ships carry their missiles and mines externally.. just sayin'..

And there are plenty of people here who don't regard TDW as "canon" anyway.

I'm afraid I don't know what is "don't regard TDW as 'cannon'"

TDW = The Dark Wheel

Canon (not 'cannon' - note the spelling)

noun
1.
an ecclesiastical rule or law enacted by a council or other competent authority and, in the Roman Catholic Church, approved by the pope.
2.
the body of ecclesiastical law.
3.
the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art: the neoclassical canon.
4.
a fundamental principle or general rule: the canons of good behavior.
5.
a standard; criterion: the canons of taste.

Playing Devil's Advocate...

The NPC AI has a function to calculate odds (checkGroupOddsVersusTarget) so they can work out if they have a chance in a fight. It only seems fair that the player gets the same chance.

Have a look at  Cabal Common Library Doc OXPStrength - this does something similar to what you (Mad Hollander) are trying to achieve.

Tricky wrote:

The NPC AI has a function to calculate odds (checkGroupOddsVersusTarget) so they can work out if they have a chance in a fight. It only seems fair that the player gets the same chance.

While that's true, that function is strongly restricted about the information it can use. Until the NPC has had chance to observe the enemy in combat for a while, the function only uses publicly-available information on the ship class (so for instance it would know energy banks and speed but not ECM availability and laser type).

Once combat is underway the function gets more information but even then it's limited - e.g. it will know how many pylons are still loaded but not what type of missiles or mines they carry; or it will know if ECM is available but not if the ship has an escape pod; or it knows if the ship has injectors fitted, but not how much fuel it has left to use them with.

The combat check is itself a simplification - the NPC knows the full information about the target as soon as combat is started. It's intended to reflect the NPC being able to reassess the odds as they see the supposedly weak freighter open fire with a military laser, or the Asp turn out to only have a pulse laser - "ideally" it should actually only add those to the odds calculation once the ship making the odds check has seen them in use, but that would be a massive complexity and memory increase for a refinement which would usually have no in-game effect.