Oolite Bulletins

I've out run missiles in a Cobra Mk. III with fuel injectors.

Differing levels of AI? [long whistle] It'd take a long time to code but it's not a bad idea!

Not that long.... Maybe
if you only tweak reactiontimes, you'd be already halfway...

say ai=elite: best(default) reactiontimes, all the way down to harmless, when you insert a delay in msecs for every tactical/steering/... decision

harmless guys would act sluggish, clumsy, fire less accurate...

(talking out of my a***, I'm afraid...)

if there'd be some kind of ranking in the computer controlled ships you could add other behaviour too, harmless pirates being more weary to attack a deadly trader etc...
or when attacked rtaliate/run for it, depending the raank of opponent blahblahblah.

(Thinking about harmless GalCops fleeing for a Deadly or Elite Fugitiev, that'd be cool to watch...)

Darkbee wrote:

Missiles still have their worth... I usually use them to take out the pitiful little minions (sidewinders, mambas, morays etc.) whom I know usually do not have ECMs (that is, if I'm overwhelmed with ships). Having said that, for the first time the other day, I am pretty sure that I successfully employed the tactic of draining a pirate ship's energy banks sufficiently that upon activating its ECM (my having fired a missle on it) it promptly destroyed itself.

Thus depriving you of your credits!

Darkbee wrote:

I think that the problem is not the ECM but the missle. Perhaps I am just crap at the game, but I would consider myself pretty much a dead man if I had a missile fired upon myself and was without an ECM.

Missiles were *much* easier to shoot down in Elite. I think a great deal of that was the contrast; in Elite, they were very easy to pick out from the background. As such, you could take aim a couple seconds quicker. A much more significant portion, however, was a combination of a math error and the (0,0,0) is the player coordinate system. (That is, when you did a loop, from the game's perspective, your ship stayed rock steady, and the universe rotated around it.) Because of this, a simple loop would throw a missile off-course, sufficient that it would need to massively correct - and it'd over-correct. Suddenly, the missile's approaching very slowly, and you have time to pick it off.

Darkbee wrote:

On the subject of missiles; (sorry to the original author, I know that wasn't the topic of conversation) can you out-run a missile, assuming that you have one of the fastest ships with fuel injectors fitted, would anyone happen to know?

Let's just say that if your ship is traveling faster than about .749, launching a missile is a *bad* idea. I believe that means a Cobra MkIII with fuel injectors could outrun a missile, but a Python could not. (Well, technically, a Python could, but it'd take a lot of fuel.) Also, if I'm not mistaken, missiles retain their lock past radar range. So, if you really want to get free, hit the hyperspeed when it's available. After a time, you get far enough away that you'll be out of the system afore it gets to you. Also, missiles do not apparently recognize stars, planets, or stations as something to avoid.

tgape wrote:

Let's just say that if your ship is traveling faster than about .749, launching a missile is a *bad* idea. I believe that means a Cobra MkIII with fuel injectors could outrun a missile

s/could/can;


Yup. I think injectors are cheaper than ECM - I started a new pilot not so long ago and bought injectors, but not ECM, for a while at least. Outrunning missiles was eminently doable, if a little annoying.

But yeah, they maintain lock beyond radar range, which is a little . . . silly, I believe. Surely a ship, with all its power, should have a better radar range than a missile?

tgape wrote:

Thus depriving you of your credits!

Ah but, that's the point, if you are desperate enough then losing a few credits of bounty over dying is probably the better option.

tgape wrote:

Missiles were *much* easier to shoot down in Elite. I think a great deal of that was the contrast; in Elite, they were very easy to pick out from the background. As such, you could take aim a couple seconds quicker. A much more significant portion, however, was a combination of a math error and the (0,0,0) is the player coordinate system. (That is, when you did a loop, from the game's perspective, your ship stayed rock steady, and the universe rotated around it.) Because of this, a simple loop would throw a missile off-course, sufficient that it would need to massively correct - and it'd over-correct. Suddenly, the missile's approaching very slowly, and you have time to pick it off.

Interesting observations, I wasn't privvy the inner workings of the original but I did recall that I was much more successful at shooting down incoming missiles. However, I tend to think this is a tad unrealistic, just considering the modern day jet fighter model (and I am no expect here) but in my limited, flight sim only experience, missiles can generally only be evaded by doing one of two things:

1) Outrageously heinous manoeuvres, thus shaking the missile and having it lose its lock.

2) Use some sort of counter measures be it jamming or some sort of physical mechanism such as chaff or flares.

I don't think I've ever shot down an incoming missile in a flight sim, but then, usually, I can barely shoot down an enemy plane (using guns only) so perhaps that isn't saying much. How about using your missiles to take out missiles?

hmmm . . . Darkbee's onto something there. I'm thinking . . . .


'Phalanx'.

You can lock onto missiles?

Mirad Grameron wrote:

You can lock onto missiles?

In Oolite? Sure.

On a type 42 Destroyer? Absolutely.

I was wondering if I'd included enough customisability for people to define their own missile weaponry. Apparently I have:-

http://capnhack.com/hosting/oolite/Ooli ... le.oxp.zip

This adds a 300Cr Faulcon de Lacy HMX5 homing missile - hardened against ECMs both Naval and Thargoid - as an experiment.

NPCs will not (currently) use this sort of missile on you, but changing the 'roles' line of the shipdata description to 'missile EQ_HARDENED_MISSILE' will do that. I've now altered v1.50 to allow NPCs to choose specialist weapons 10% of the time - ie. 90% of the time they'll pick a missile with the role 'EQ_MISSILE' and the rest of the time a random one with a role of 'missile'.

Currently there's no provision for special icons in the HUD to represent special equipment - but I've already included this into v1.50 and the oxp has such a definition (in descriptions.plist).

Cool. But I don't know how to get at the source.

Mirad Grameron wrote:

Cool. But I don't know how to get at the source.

For Oolite's source code visit http://thor.acedragon.co.uk/viewcvs/trunk/

.. or install Subversion and svn checkout svn://thor.acedragon.co.uk/svn/repos/trunk/

For the source code for the expansion pack, ctrl-click the .oxp file and choose 'Show Package Contents' - or simply rename the .oxp file with a different file extension, I'd recommend '.oxp-folder'.