Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

Well, yes. I just wanted to make sure that there is no double "if" here. We're not talking about two possibilities. Everything you have the NPCs have too. Period.

I wish people would stop saying that, because it’s not true. For starters, NPCs don’t have shields.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Well, yes. I just wanted to make sure that there is no double "if" here. We're not talking about two possibilities. Everything you have the NPCs have too. Period.

I wish people would stop saying that, because it’s not true. For starters, NPCs don’t have shields.

And they don't need fuel for hyperjumping. Yes, I know. The above statement is just the (very) short version for general use. Because they can have (and have) any other equipment. Which is especially true for any equipment added by OXPs, because the only practical way of scripting it is by using the available_to_all-key.

That some of the possible equipment may be of no use for NPCs, is another issue.

available_to_all only applies to player ships. Custom equipment is not automatically given to NPCs; their equipment is determined by the has_foo keys in their shipdata entries. Specifically, NPCs can have ECMs, fuel scoops, escape pods, energy bombs, cloaking devices, fuel injectors, military scanners, military jammers, shield boosters and shield enhancers (although I just noticed that the implementation of the last two needs modernization).

The ability for NPCs to carry arbitrary equipment is actually brand new in 1.71, but there’s no way to add other types of equipment at the moment.

Oh!

Honestly, I didn't know that they are confined to the has_foo items. And nobody has explained that yet as clearly as you now did.

So I apologize for spreading false information.

*****

The consequence of this is that a laser cooler would indeed favour the player only...

Thanks for the hint about avoiding the space lane. I am doing this and it works like a charm and takes much less time to get to the station.

Lestradae wrote:

A laser cooler would mean you can fire away forever.

That's not what I envisioned. I envisioned the cooler cools down the lasers 25% more than the current rate, giving one about 25% more shots before it overheats.

I did not envision an "absolute cooler" which gives you unlimited shots before overheating.

Once you learn to be accurate and sparing with your shots I'd say it's nicely balanced.

Anything that upsets that balance would damage combat and damage the game.

If you have something that only makes a tiny difference, so that the games doesn't get broken, will make such a small difference that there'd be no point having it!

bulrush wrote:

Thanks for the hint about avoiding the space lane. I am doing this and it works like a charm and takes much less time to get to the station.

That's fine, it's a good short term tactic to use when you are building up funds to bling your ship, and saves time of course, but to get to Elite you have to make your kills. If you add the sunskimmers OXP to your add ons, it will add a few more shipsoutdide of the normal space lanes, but not as many as you would in the normal space corridor.

Hmmm, I think sunskimmers just adds more ships on the route between witchpoint and sun (and probably between sun and station/planet). Both of them are normal spacelanes. I am not aware that the OXP adds anything outside the spacelanes.