Oolite Bulletins

Ok, but as a player, I wouldn't know that it could be as simple as number of jumps. I didn't know that before it was said here. It's not in the manual. I always thought conduct would be important to the legal rating, like shooting down offenders or responding to maydays or something to bring it down. As a player, I "keep my nose clean" if I get an offender status or etc, and didn't realise distance was directly related. When I noted a drop with some jumps, I assumed it was something more complex like jurisdiction by sector or it taking time for police reports to travel.

But it just seems logical that if one has some sort of computer onboard to tell legal status of other ship's transponders and can give the amount of the bounty as soon as they're shot down, it would also be able to tell your own ship's legal rating and probably bounty. Or if you have the OXP that tells any bounty on a ship you have on ID at the moment, it seems logical that it could also tell your own bounty?

In any case, not like it's that useful a piece of data to know, it'd just be nifty. F5 to see if you have done something to tip over into offender or fugitive is generally enough to just play the game.

The self-Bounty Scanner would be the sort of thing I'd expect to find for sale at a Hacker Outpost. It might even require you to have a bounty on your head (read: not be clean) before it's offered for sale. And I'd expect it to be a bit more than the regular Bounty Scanner due to its questionable nature...so maybe 1-2k credits?

Ganelon wrote:

As a player, I "keep my nose clean" if I get an offender status or etc, and didn't realise distance was directly related. When I noted a drop with some jumps, I assumed it was something more complex like jurisdiction by sector or it taking time for police reports to travel.

The beauty of Elite/Oolite is that it encourages you to assume things and make sense of what you see. In fact, for many of us the game-play-in-your-head aspect is what we like most in Oolite. Personally I find your idea wonderful and immersive. And if a player has immersed himself in the game so much, is it really necessary to tell him how a certain aspect is technically realized? Doesn't that spoil the self-made backstory, thereby not adding, but subtracting something?

At the core of it there is a very simple mechanism (partly because Elite was written for computers with very little resources). But the player doesn't need to care about the mechanism. He can fill what he experiences with his imagination.

Oh, and if you want your personal conduct to count as well, the only thing you need to do is to install Anarchies.oxp. If you do that, and go pirate-killing, there is a chance that your bounty will get reduced for each kill (of course only if you had a bounty on your head in the first place).

Indeed, Anarchies is most useful like that! I remember one instance when I accidentally ended up changing from Offender to Fugitive in the middle of a high-tech Corporate State system which was swarming with police ships, with no fuel, and ended up spending a fair bit of time flying about hoping for some pirates to kill and mainly blasting as many asteroids as I could find to reduce my status so that I had half a chance to dock...

Commander McLane wrote:

. Personally I find your idea wonderful and immersive.

Well, it wasn't an idea in the sense of something being suggested. That's actually how I thought it *did* work. Ok, so I'm naive and fall prey rather easily to the illusions of the game.

I also spend a bit of time pouring over the vector maps studying the spaceways and regions and pondering ideas of the political and economic circumstances and in some cases looking for reasons why some regions have the names they do. That it sometimes *seems* to bear out, is probably just a combination of coincidence and imagination..

But oh well. I'll stick with it because it makes the game more fun than thinking of it as just a few random number generators and lines of clever code. Keep thinking that way and your spaceship could turn back into a computer.

Start doing cargo contracts and/or passenger contracts if you want to go on a fast sight-seeing tour of the Galaxy. It'll take you through/to places you'd never likely go otherwise.
And the quickest way to get there game-time is to make short hyperspace hops so you'll see even MORE of the Galaxy.

Switeck wrote:

And the quickest way to get there game-time is to make short hyperspace hops so you'll see even MORE of the Galaxy.

And dock as little as possible. And definitely don't use the auto-dock feature but dock manually. auto-docking looks fast but in game time it takes about 20 minutes. Manually docking should go much faster.
And the launch adds another 10 minutes.

I've done cargo and passenger runs. Good money, and a good way to end up in a totally different area of a galaxy. But usually the trip is rather hurried because of the deadline for the delivery, especially when you're doing several at once. Then part of the fun is the race against time. Not much time for sightseeing, though.

I like working up trade routes that go through a region or two, so I can run that route repeatedly and feel like I get to know that section of the map like the back of my hand. It pays enough to keep in a positive CR flow, but allows for going to every navigable location in a system, if you feel like it.

It depends on mood and what levels of action vs relaxation you're after in a given session.