Oolite Bulletins

A Q-mine shouldn't destroy a space station, as the Q-mine works by doing somthing deeply unpleasant to a ship's witch-drive engine, causing it blow up.

As stations are designed just to orbit the planet, they don't have witch-drive engines and so would be q-bomb proof.

True the ships inside might blow up, causing the station to blow up, but perhaps the q-mine only works on powered up witch-drives or the field needs to reach the drive and it is blocked by the walls and shields of the station.

A nuclear missile would do the trick however. Perhaps one should be issued to blow up the thargoid space-station when this add-on to Thargoid wars is completed.

LittleBear wrote:

A Q-mine shouldn't destroy a space station, as the Q-mine works by doing somthing deeply unpleasant to a ship's witch-drive engine, causing it blow up.

Who installed witch-drives in all those asteroids?

Guess that a bug, but according to the Wikki this is how a q mine works!

LittleBear wrote:

A Q-mine shouldn't destroy a space station, as the Q-mine works by doing somthing deeply unpleasant to a ship's witch-drive engine, causing it blow up.

As stations are designed just to orbit the planet, they don't have witch-drive engines and so would be q-bomb proof.

True the ships inside might blow up, causing the station to blow up, but perhaps the q-mine only works on powered up witch-drives or the field needs to reach the drive and it is blocked by the walls and shields of the station..

That's the best conclusion, you convinced me. I readjust my views: stations should not blow up, heehee.

Random bump, sorry, but I'm all for thread recycling...

Odo987 wrote:

LittleBear wrote:

A Q-mine shouldn't destroy a space station, as the Q-mine works by doing somthing deeply unpleasant to a ship's witch-drive engine, causing it blow up.

Who installed witch-drives in all those asteroids?

I've been thinking about this for a while... I thought I remembered reading somewhere the excuse given was some sort of "resonance" with minerals contained in the asteroid. (Although I might have dreamt that up for all I know.)

If we take this as the reason, then it seems a bit bizarre that all asteroids have the same composition; so I was wondering if it would be possible to give the asteroids only a probability of contributing to the cascade? (I doubt anyone would want to simply make the 'roids blow up rather than contribute, it's such a great feature!) Say, give them an 85% chance of containing the necessary minerals? (Maybe shards and splinters could have smaller probabilities; smaller body -> contains less variety.)

Or, if it was possible to be really clever, you could say they have an X% chance of contributing, Y% of simply blowing up (but not contributing to the cascade itself), and Z% of doing nothing.

To make it consistent, it all depends on how dumped cargo behaves, something I don't know - do they contribute to a cascade as well? (I guess you would have to make up something to do with residual energy from the ship... )

I don't know if it's at all do-able, but I thought I'd mention it on the off chance.

P.S. Hello everyone!

Hi, Pause, and welcome.

Now, let's pause the technobabble even though there's pauseible reason to pause and think about it... The fact is that I don't think anyone will pause theeir ongoing works (or pause their lazy mode, for that matter) to do yet more asteroids... unless you do it yourself?
Well, I'll pause my punny rant. For now.

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Rant, rave, rage, witter

Hey, Maegil! Get your pause claws out of the new posters!

Welcome to the boards, Pause!

Captain Hesperus

Ho ho ho! Never heard any of those before...

I wasn't meaning to suggest any major updates or anything, I was just wondering if it was possible to put into a future build. I guess it could be a random probability at impact, or a parameter specified randomly for each asteroid as each system is generated. An idle thought that occurred to me the other day, that's all.

...Actually, I'd love to know how to do stuff to help - I might or might not try making an OXP, but I'd sure like to know how - but I've not a clue where to start. I've looked all over the wiki, and at all the stickies in the forum, but everything seems to assume you already have a basic grasp of what's being said. I have programming experience but nothing of this sort, just out-dated (but ever fashionable) science languages. Oh, and a few IF demos, never a full game though. I don't know where to start or what I'd need to make it work. Is there an "OXPs for Dummies" somewhere?

LittleBear wrote:

A Q-mine shouldn't destroy a space station, as the Q-mine works by doing somthing deeply unpleasant to a ship's witch-drive engine, causing it blow up.
As stations are designed just to orbit the planet, they don't have witch-drive engines and so would be q-bomb proof.

Hmmm. I've actually changed my mind on this one. It should be possible to blow up a station, but probably not just with 1 Q-bomb. Maybe it cope with 1 Q-bomb sphere, but if other ships close to it explode, or if you fire off more than 1 mine, creating more than one shpere of destruction, then perhaps it could blow up.
However, as it doesn't have a warp drive, perhaps it wouldn't create its own Blue Sphere of Death.

Considering the amount of fuel stocks in the station I'd actually expect it to explode with an extremely large radius that would make escaping it very hard.

Hi pause!

It is actually possible to blow up a station, but you cannot blow up the main station (think this is hard wired in). However an extra station added by an OXP can be destroyed by a q-mine blast if there are enough ships nearby to cause the station to be hit by overlapping cascades. This remains the case even if the station has stronger shields than the normal station. I found this out whilst writing Assassins.oxp. A single q-mine droped by the Repair Facility in the Beatle system will blow it sky high as there are loads of powered down ships as well as krait patrols nearby, so the Station gets 40 odd q-mine bursts in the face and its sheilds just can't cope!

To stop the player completing the mission with a single mine (too easy) I deployed Mine Sweeper Satilites which will fry any q-mines launched before they can blow up. It is possible though to get round this defence network, if you are cunning!

I also added a new Super Missile to Assassins which is powerful enough to destroy a station, but you can only use it to destroy a particular Weapons Platform as the "trumble inside" guidence system will only lock-on to a Balrog Dreadnaught rather than any old station.

On OXPing, its not too hard. The wiki has an OXP page, but often the easist way is to play an OXP mission (so you know what it does) and then look at the code. Have a play of Spyhunter and then look at Selezen's script. This OXP has about 5 stages so you should be able to follow how it works.

im not sure if this, but afaik, Q-bombs was included after the Status Quo fan fiction novel that described how a Q-bomb works...

So if that is the case, the Q-bomb should not work at all in orbit around planet since the planets mass allways locks your witchdrive, which means we are inside the planets strong gravitational influence...

and a planets mass is far larger than the moon where in the novel Status Quo, the Q-bomb was attempted to be deployed in order to show the population of lave and Gal Corp, what a terrible weapon it was..

Cheers Frame....

But in Status Quo the initial experiment takes place on a station. If we go by its interpretation then detonation only fails very close to large masses (probably only in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet).

The Q bomb came first, the novel followed.

LittleBear wrote:

I also added a new Super Missile to Assassins which is powerful enough to destroy a station, but you can only use it to destroy a particular Weapons Platform as the "trumble inside" guidence system will only lock-on to a Balrog Dreadnaught rather than any old station.

You provide a special missile for that? Hmm. I recently used Secret Developer Powers to summon a Balrog, out of curiosity, and killed it with just (four) military lasers. OK, the Vipers helped a bit, but they soon strayed too close. :-)



Edit: yes, the invulnerability of the main station is hard-coded. The ability to make specific entities invulnerable might be useful, but could also lead to a new überness escalation. Comments?