Some interesting ideas here.
spud42 wrote:suddenly the 6.8 Ly jump may not be obtainable.
Doing variable jump ranges properly would require some quite significant rewrites, especially around the route-planning code. It also opens the possibility that you could end up stuck in a system which doesn't offer servicing and perhaps in the worst case (no wormhole scanner either) have to spend hours of game time waiting for then blindly following wormholes until you got back to a system, all the time your ship deteriorating further. Probably better left to OXPs to implement by removing fuel on launch from station, if people want that possibility.
Disembodied wrote:Personally, I'd like to see some variation in maintenance costs based on a planet's economy, too
In Oolite there's already quite a strong correlation between the various parameters - government, economy, TL, productivity - from the original galaxy generation algorithm, so I think this would end up being very difficult to notice.
It should be possible to add enough scripting support to maintenance work that OXPs could adjust stations more significantly - or add OXP mechanics shops who are based in dodgy looking asteroids way off the lane, but happen to have one of the best specialists in Moray maintenance in the chart.
Venator Dha wrote:Especially if {performance drain} also affects NPC ships.
Unless the performance drain is extremely severe I don't think it would be particularly noticeable on an NPC ship. You rarely see them for long enough to tell the difference between a 3 and a 5 recharge rate, for instance, though that's a major difference on a player ship. That sort of thing would be easier to OXP - produce some scuffed textures and reduce the shipdata performance as a hard-coded thing.
(NPCs don't currently even have a service level property and it feels overly simulationist to add one)
Venator Dha wrote:A high SL ship gets better paying passengers for instance.
I like this idea. Probably should be most significant on passenger contracts, and least on cargo contracts.
Smivs wrote:Now I accept that a spaceship is a bit different in that a sudden failure could have far worse consequences than just a flat battery in the car, so I think we can assume therfore that in our ships much more equipment has a service schedule than that fitted to cars, and that this would be included in the servicing.
My thought would be that unlike a car, the ships probably have a lot of redundancy in the systems, to stop you getting a long list of catastrophic failures the first time you take hull damage. You buy an ASC, it comes with three or four receivers for the transponder signals. In this case:
- disruption = one receiver fails, brief pause in service while the system recalibrates; primary processing unit fails, pause while the backup processing unit powers up
- damage = all receivers have failed, but the processing units are intact (or vice versa), so it's cheaper to repair than buying a whole new one, but it's still not working right now.
Servicing would then include restoring failed redundant components to full order (which is why it gets noticeably more expensive the more equipment you pile onto your ship)
Then, as you have, parts like the "ship's alternator" might fail - initially, only until the backup alternator can take over, but if you continue to go without proper servicing, you'll eventually to get two disruptions hitting the same component before it recovers, and then it actually fails.
Redspear wrote:I'd imagine the most fun use of a 'tune up' in game would be a scenario where the player can't afford the time and/or credits for full maintainance and so gets a quick and dirty patch up instead.
This is the kind of thing I was going for with the idea. You get a mechanic in to fix the most obvious problems and plug in all the cables which have fallen out on sharp turns, but they don't have time to find or fix underlying problems, so while your ship now works to spec in theory it's only a matter of time before those cables fall out again. A dedicated courier (or other time-critical job, though courier is the only core game one) might well repeatedly patch-up their ship as time is money ... and then on the seventh long distance run the cables not only fall out but pull a significant chunk of processing card with them because no-one had time to properly sort out the overtension on them, and you have to either do a proper service at the nearest decent shipyard you can find, or try to complete the run with your ship very rapidly deteriorating around you.
ralph_hh wrote:If S/L is getting lower, you should be given a warning. It would be nice to know, if you are close to perfect or if you reach a level, where system failure is almost inevitable.
The idea is roughly:
- 70-100%: ship works perfectly, or so close you can't really tell
- 60-70%: minor degradation and cosmetic effects, also a big clue in that servicing starts being offered as an option
- 50-60%: more significant degradation and cosmetic effects, but you'll have been ignoring the servicing warnings for at least a few jumps and possibly more like ten or twenty by this point.
- 0-50%: severe degradation that shouldn't be possible to ignore; even the cosmetic effects start to have gameplay effects (e.g. flickering HUD items)
Adding an arrival report notice "your ship is now due for servicing" the first time you dock after reaching 70% should be straightforward too, and gives a hint even to those who are hanging out in systems too low tech to offer it on F3.
Gives you a chance to determine if you should fix it now or if it can wait two more jumps when you get to a TL14 system anyway.
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Might require some fine tuning so as not to cripple a new start, but would add another choice to the game.