Morning, RazorbackSnr,
of course it's a bugger that Oolite 1.71.2 won't run on your system. I wasn't aware that it had grown so much since 1.65. (In fact, if I compare versions 1.65 and 1.71.2 on my Mac (I have kept 1.65 in a different folder), I amazingly discover that it has
shrunk. 1.65 has 30.9 MBs, 1.71.2 only 23.6 MBs. I guess, though, that this is
not the relevant measure. Probably due to the shaders the new version has to load more and/or bigger textures into memory.)
As far as Ionics is concerned:
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
RazorbackSnr wrote:Ionics is very, very interesting mission. Its just i meet the same 5 ships near the planet...
Well, no, it's not the
same ships, it's just new ships of the same kind. If you kill them all and return to the Link base, you will be informed that there are now 186 government ships left. If you do it again, you will be told that there are now 181 ships left. You get the idea. (And you have to kill all five of them before the next wave of five is created, so make sure you get them all.) Your goal is to reduce the number to, well, 0, in order to trigger the next part of the mission.
and that big daft weapons carrier which will not die without a Q-bomb enema.
Hmmm, I do remember that I frequently killed that weapons platform with simple laser fire. It just takes more than one round with your military laser (if you got only pulse lasers I think it may well be impossible). That's where aft, port and starboard lasers come in handy.
You also cant save in the Link base. Do i go into the Ramaza station. Wouldnt be a smart move would it..... Begebe? Zaria?
The HQ of the people im killing.
Yes, you can't save in non-main stations (although that is changing now, see
this thread). So, if you want to be on the safe side, you should occasionally dock with the system's main station and save there. The good thing is that you have to go over there all the time, anyway, because the government ships are created close to the main station, and head to the Link base from there. And by the way, if you kill them out of the stations range (and out of the range of any police vessels), even your legal status won't be affected, so you can stay perfectly clean all the time (this is a general rule in Oolite, committing crimes doesn't affect your legal rating, as long as the authorities don't watch). So yes, why don't got to the HQ of the people you're killing, as long as they don't know that you're killing them? That's the fun of being a secret agent, isn't it?
I quick save at every station to avoid heartbreak but after refuelling at the Link some SOB gave me the good news with an energy bomb. Do NPC's get E-bombs??? Could have been a collision.....
There was NOTHING on my scanner apart from a few whitetails.
Start AGAIN.
Yes, NPCs
can carry E-bombs, although only in
very rare occasions, and I don't think any ships from Ionics.oxp actually do. So probably in your case it was a collision, or a missile fired from close range. (The weapons platform has plasma turrets, IIRC. If you come too close, these tend to be very deadly, very quickly.)
In summary: Yes, it is a tedious task to reduce the government fleet to 0, in these waves of five by five, and I have to confess that myself I didn't particularly enjoy it when I did the mission. But, well, sometimes something just has to be completed in order to progress. So, kill'em all!
(You are aware that in Elite forward is the only way back, are you?)
