Oolite Bulletins

Makandal wrote:

Correct Gimi. The only way to get the Funnelweb was to make short passes. I am in the military mission with the Hydra and the Leviathan and I proceed the same. I HATE the Hydra

If you already own a cloaking device, you can sneak very close to Hydras, Basilisks and Rattle Cutters and shoot off their extra lasers. Be careful not to destroy the whole ship. Then de-cloak and finish the sucker off while he can do very little to prevent you from blasting him to pieces.

With the military ships, quick reflexes are key. Their first salvo can be deadly, at least it can completely vaporize one of your shields. You have to get out of your current position fast, or you die right there. It's even worse if you have enough bad luck to encounter two of the ships at the same time, and possibly a bunch of normal pirates along with them. The impact of several lasers eating away your shields makes a quite distinctive, nasty noise. Personally, whenever I hear that noise, I press '0' first and assess the situation later. (And if I had no cloak, I'd press 'I' first, for a good couple of seconds.)

Commander McLane wrote:

If you already own a cloaking device, you can sneak very close to Hydras, Basilisks and Rattle Cutters and shoot off their extra lasers. Be careful not to destroy the whole ship. Then de-cloak and finish the sucker off while he can do very little to prevent you from blasting him to pieces.

One point of attention though. I found it stupid that a ship without lasers to defend itself stays 'attacking', so since a year, the ships have code that they might jump out of the system when low on energy, without weapons but still have some fuel. When fighting just one, this is no problem, you just follow him through the w-hole to finish the kill, but when doing the final battle, you want to stay in the system to kill the carrier. Than you must watch out to not accidentally follow a crippled hydra through the w-hole while chasing at close range

Do you actually know you're on the final battle?

It's years since I did Ionics, so I think I might have another go with a new commander, IIRC it was an excellent mission.

TGHC wrote:

Do you actually know you're on the final battle?

It's years since I did Ionics, so I think I might have another go with a new commander, IIRC it was an excellent mission.

I have no idea, but I did peak into the missiontext.plist when I suspected that something went wrong. From what I can see there I have some way to go yet. The Funnelweb is just a step on the way. The Hydra and the Basislisk are from another OXP. Military Fiasco I believe.

Hi. I wonder if someone can help me out, probably only a minor problem. I got started with Ionics, got the Funnelweb attack mission and killed it, got back to the station and docked, got 15 grand. All good stuff but the mission destination on Rimaza stayed there. I then went off to the Link place (no prompt, just thought I should try going back and forth a bit and got a message somewhere), docked at that place after jumping there and that appeared to be it; nothing else happened for quite a few jumps, the mission destination at Rimaza remained but nothing else happened. Makes me think I didn't do something properly or something's been missed, maybe something's interfering with, dunno, scripts or something (I'm not a computery type!). Since then I tried deleted six lines from the save file with the ionics variables in them and also the line with the mission destination, re-loaded the Ionics oxp and re-started the missions. I just got to Rimaza again after killing the Funnelweb and got 15 grand - the red cross once again stayed there. So, is this expected behavoiur? Ta. Richard.

Can't really remember exactly where you are, or what the expected behaviour is, but I'd suggest heading back to Zaria. I vaguely recall that stopping off either there or at Ramaza was the way to get the mission to proceed...

richard.a.p.smith wrote:

Hi. I wonder if someone can help me out, probably only a minor problem. I got started with Ionics, got the Funnelweb attack mission and killed it, got back to the station and docked, got 15 grand. All good stuff but the mission destination on Rimaza stayed there. I then went off to the Link place (no prompt, just thought I should try going back and forth a bit and got a message somewhere), docked at that place after jumping there and that appeared to be it; nothing else happened for quite a few jumps, the mission destination at Rimaza remained but nothing else happened.

I think its a bug that the destination stays on. It should have been erased after getting your reward. To get the next message you must dock at Zaria main station.

Thanks guys. I'll fly around a bit more. Presumably if I get fed up with it after the whole thing's finished, deleting the destination isn't a problem. Ta.

Killing the Funnelweb is not the end of the mission, you'll need to win the whole war against the Ramaza Government killing nearly 200 ships including a bunch of Ionics Weapons Platform ships that are about as tough as the Funnelweb. And that war will be in the Ramaza system again, so I think that's why it remained as an active target. The target indicator does disappear once you complete the whole mission.

Currently in the final battle (I think? CR-150 Weapons Platforms are launching in Ramaza...), but finding it rather tedious. For the next version, would it be possible to modify the script handling the launch of new vessels such that a new government/RLF/Link vessel is launched as soon as one is killed? At the moment it seems like they are launched in sets of five, but only when all of the previous set are killed. It's a bit annoying to sit there and wait for five minutes for a new set of sheep ships to kill.

I tried sitting next to the Coriolis station and picking them off as soon as they launched, but GalCop didn't seem to like that very much...

I'm playing through the mission currently and have had exactly that thought. It definitely needs to be faster paced at this stage and I've got the beginnings of an idea for a more interesting climatic finish with a couple of extra different endings.

Eric - how would you feel about me working on an update?

I posted, what, nearly six hours ago? The final "battle" still hasn't finished. I'd give up, but that would be a waste, now.

It's not like I've been sitting there, letting the RLF/Link ships do all the work either. I've made at least 90% of the kills.

Edit: Finally killed them all, ended up being more of a skeet shoot than anything else. Aside from racking up the kill count, the last part of the mission seems a bit pointless to me. No reward at all. After finishing the part that pays 15k, I might as well have not bothered.

Capt. Murphy wrote:

I'm playing through the mission currently and have had exactly that thought. It definitely needs to be faster paced at this stage and I've got the beginnings of an idea for a more interesting climatic finish with a couple of extra different endings.

Eric - how would you feel about me working on an update?

I always found that last mission a bit boring and stupid. Currently all my changes were implementing of new Oolite features, but not changing anything of the old behaviour, even when I found it stupid. Its not my initial work, so I did not want to change the basics.

I did change that the set of 5 is not just spawned around the station anymore, but really launch from the station. If Capt. Murphy has ideas for really improving, go ahead. The author, Galileo, once had a roadmap for a version 2.0 on the wiki. I think I removed that from the wiki, but its still in the readMe.

Thanks Eric,

I've already made a couple of adjustments to this.warProgress in my local copy to increase the pace of the war which seem to work nicely (Government vessels now spawn 10 at a time if there are less than 10 in play so there are always between 10 and 20 in flight at any time instead of 0 to 5 - done similar to the Link and RLF forces).

I'll going to finish the mission as it stands first and then start work on an initial overhaul to iron out a few oddities (why do all Ramazan pilots have the same name, and why do the forces appear to call a truce if the player leaves the system for hours/days/weeks/months and then immediately start scrapping again on the player's return) and make the end a little more interesting- but not a full implementation of Galileo's roadmap (not at this stage anyway).

Capt. Murphy wrote:

(why do all Ramazan pilots have the same name, ......

That was because it was impossible to create randomized pilots in Oolite. Before 1.75 you always had to define a seed value for characters. And by defining a seed, you completely defined the name and everything else. You could overwrite some values, but that was than also a fixed value. That prevented the flexible use of pilots. I hated that because it largely prevented the use of predefined pilots in a lot of situations, so I changed some code for 1.75.
1.75 now allows empty seed values, resulting in selecting a random seed. So, when making a 1.75+ version of ionics.oxp, you should change that part and allow some random names for those pilots.