Oolite Bulletins

ArkanoiD wrote:

No cargo space? So it is possible to continue with my old dragster ship?
I wonder if there is a moment when i am forced to change it to something that can scoop cargo..

When I did Assassins I stopped trading completetely and did very little scooping, because I was earning enough credits as a hitman.

IIRC on one occasion I had to use my escape capsule to save my ass and clean my status, and being a bit of a scrooge, made sure my cargo hold was empty.

In between missions and newsflashes, I did a bit of scooping but it was only to keep myself occupied while waiting for the next "job", the payments are easily enough to carry out repairs, buy all the equipment you need without having to do any other credit earning

TGHC wrote:

ArkanoiD wrote:

No cargo space? So it is possible to continue with my old dragster ship?
I wonder if there is a moment when i am forced to change it to something that can scoop cargo..

When I did Assassins I stopped trading completetely and did very little scooping, because I was earning enough credits as a hitman.

IIRC on one occasion I had to use my escape capsule to save my ass and clean my status, and being a bit of a scrooge, made sure my cargo hold was empty.

In between missions and newsflashes, I did a bit of scooping but it was only to keep myself occupied while waiting for the next "job", the payments are easily enough to carry out repairs, buy all the equipment you need without having to do any other credit earning

I spend much for Q-mines - my ship is not E-bomb capable.
I gain some income on in-system precious metals trading from casino to main base.

ArkanoiD wrote:

I spend much for Q-mines - my ship is not E-bomb capable.
I gain some income on in-system precious metals trading from casino to main base.

Not E-Bomb capable? I thought all ships could carry an energy bomb.

Precious metal trading is fine, and so are furs with Hoopy, but you are at a disadvantage by not having a scoop, you can make a lot of profit from flotsum and jetsum, and the occasional escape capsule can give you up to 500Cr.

TGHC wrote:

ArkanoiD wrote:

I spend much for Q-mines - my ship is not E-bomb capable.
I gain some income on in-system precious metals trading from casino to main base.

Not E-Bomb capable? I thought all ships could carry an energy bomb.

Precious metal trading is fine, and so are furs with Hoopy, but you are at a disadvantage by not having a scoop, you can make a lot of profit from flotsum and jetsum, and the occasional escape capsule can give you up to 500Cr.

I have a scoop, i don't have cargo space.. so i cannot scoop even capsules.
I fly a dragster. 0.610LM - it means i almost instantly get out of any battle if i run on injectors

ArkanoiD wrote:

I fly a dragster. 0.610LM - it means i almost instantly get out of any battle if i run on injectors

You're missing out on all the fun then, hey but everyone to their own.

So what if a mission requires you to carry cargo or a passenger.

TGHC wrote:

ArkanoiD wrote:

I fly a dragster. 0.610LM - it means i almost instantly get out of any battle if i run on injectors

You're missing out on all the fun then, hey but everyone to their own.

So what if a mission requires you to carry cargo or a passenger.

IIRC, there is no one. All passenger missions allow me to take him to co-pilot seat.
And i've already completed cloaking device and lovecats wich required me to scoop things.

Well, i flew several hundreds light years on Anaconda. A complete opposite - you should fight, but you cannot run. I just wanted to try how it feels to do real bulk transport. 750t is enormous, though i had it almost fully loaded a couple of times.

Now i don't have transport contracts because my reputation degraded.
But it really reduces in-transit time for normal space and dragster is light so amount of fuel used by injectors is low. Battle tactics are quite specific - hit, run, return, hit again. I may look like one of those boyracers

BTW why there are no NPC dragsters?

..shouldn't there be some special handling of the case you destroy the Beatle repair facility?

I've also noticed that repair facility defense ship almost stopped attacking me when i approached the target and the repair station so i was able to destroy the first with my single laser without additional maneuvers. Is it intended behavior or AI bug?

Sounds like an AI bug. There should be some interceptors lurking near the w/s beacon and the main station and a large partol in the space lanes, but with your Dragster you'll probabley outrun them! There is a gap in the defences though as you approach the station.

Waiting near the fair wind are are group of Kraits with GuardAI. They (should) wait near the mark and attack you on sight. Ships launched by the repair base itself, use the native interceptorAI, occasionaly they will "go to sleep", but I think this is a game bug like the occassional "sleepy pirates" bug. You should find a fair number of Kraits with blue lasers are slicing your shields up though!

The fair wind itself is unpowered so can be destroyed fairly easily (once you find it in the group of other powered down ships). This should be a more difficult mission than the hit on the hockey team, but not too difficult as you are only about 20% into the OXP and I tried to make the difficulty curve faily steady.

PS : Have you managed to destroy the Facility itself ? It has twice the shields of a normal station and the Mine Sweeper Satailites should be knocking out any q-mines you deploy. You will become a fugitive with a massive bounty on your head for destroying the Fair Wind.

LittleBear wrote:

Sounds like an AI bug. There should be some interceptors lurking near the w/s beacon and the main station and a large partol in the space lanes, but with your Dragster you'll probabley outrun them! There is a gap in the defences though as you approach the station.

Waiting near the fair wind are are group of Kraits with GuardAI. They (should) wait near the mark and attack you on sight. Ships launched by the repair base itself, use the native interceptorAI, occasionaly they will "go to sleep", but I think this is a game bug like the occassional "sleepy pirates" bug. You should find a fair number of Kraits with blue lasers are slicing your shields up though!

They were not sleepy per se. They were flying around, occasionally even attacking me, but not really active. Not like those i met near the witchpoint beacon, those made me real trouble.

What about base destruction - shouldn't there be a mission variable keeping it from appearing again?

Odd!

Both versions have the same AI (except the ones by the station are told - wait here and attack the assassin when you see him and the ones by the beacon are told - fly about on patrol and attack the assassin when you see him). However, their are two different Configurations to the Defence Karits.

The "Interceptors" (by the beacon) have high top speed plus fuel injectors and are very nippy but low shields. The ones by the Base are "Mega Kraits" - slow and not as nippy but very tough shields. It maybe that because of the ship you are flying the Interceptors are more of a threat to you than the slower Mega Kraits. Playing in a Cobra though you would probabley have found the Mega Kraits more dangerous than the Interceptors. The Interceptors are as fast as your Dragster, but your Dragster is nearly twice as fast as the Mega Kraits! Interesting how the ship you fly effects the difficulty posed by different ships you encounter.

In your Dragster the slower Mega Kraits probabley coudn't "get a beed" on you and you were able to out-turn them. Playing in a Cobra III I found it the other way around. My shields could take the Interceptors attacks long enough for me to melt their low energy ships. But in a bulky Cobra the Mega Kraits could still hit me and it would take ages to get their shields down.

It shoudn't be possible for you to destroy the Base as it is tougher than a normal station. The fair wind won't appear again once destroyed.

LittleBear wrote:

Odd!

It shoudn't be possible for you to destroy the Base as it is tougher than a normal station. The fair wind won't appear again once destroyed.

He-he

it is not station_class or how it is called so it is not q-bomb resistant?

Want to know how i did that? Simple!

I flew out of the range of minesweepers, but let some defense ships follow me. Then dropped the bomb. Ka-boom - and chain reaction smashed it all, since minesweepers can only stop the bomb _before_ it exploded

Darn!

I knew giving it Station SCAN_CLASS doesn't protect it, as I found in playtesting that because of the hugh number of overlaping cascasdes (from 30 odd ships within 2 km of the station) a single mine would melt the Station even though its shields are twice the strength of a normal station! (as it gets hit with 30 q-mine blasts from the ships nearby) if you manage to get a q-mine off. The MineSweepers were meant to stop the player doing this! The repair base is the only Station in Oolite (so far) with so many parked ships nearby to allow you to set off this cascasde reaction. Mine sweepers only have a range of 5 km, so I gues it is possible to find a blind spot and blow the Base. Reckon I'll leave this unexpected feature in (but include a base-destroyed flag for the next version!)

There is no mission flag of "Base Destroyed" (although it would be easy to put one in) as I thought I had defended the station well enough to stop the player blowing it up.

Memo to Augeous Security Director: Deploy Mine Sweepers up to a range of 10 km to prevent Assassins in Dragsters doing this sort of thing!

EDIT : All the things in Assassins that I thought the player could destroy have flags to take them out of the game when destroyed, but I didn't add flags to the stations as I didn't figure on them being destroyed! I think the Repair Station is the station you could destroy, apart from the DeathBurger (that you are meant to, so is accounted for).

Wow, this is fun. Those mega-mambas are nasty. Spending a fortune on q-mines, and wishing I had more than 1 missile pod. I did run into some odd behaviour so far though.

1) I hyperspaced with cloaking device enabled. When I arrived at the hockey system and found the marks, they didn't turn red and I heard a whole lot of beeping. They wouldn't attack me, so I blasted them. I tried the same thing without cloaking device, and things happened as expected. Bit of a scrap. Goodbye hockey players.

2) With the mega mambas, they go into tumble mode when you turn on the cloaking device. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Didn't check what the AI was doing, I was too busy overheating my lasers.

So there's something going on between the mark transponder and the cloaking device, but I'm not quite sure what.

EDIT: I'm currently cruising through space with 3 mega mambas, none of which have fired at me since I q-mined their sisters about 5 minutes ago. Their AI is 'revenge1AI.plist' in state: 'ATTACK_SHIP'. Maybe they all have weapons malfunctions.

On 1) This is a known bug. The scipt disables the cloak for as long and you and a (living) mark are in the same system. However, if you enter the system cloaked (cheating!!), though the code disables the cloak, because you were cloaked before the device was disabled, Oolite keeps you cloaked. If you decloaked, you woudn't be able to recloak. The reason for the beeping is that the ships have spotted you and are locking on (switching their AI to ATTACK_SHIP), but they cannot find you (as you are cloaked) and so cannot attack (ie switch to performattack).

On 2) The Soin Sisters one aim in life is to kill you! If you cloak, they cannot see you, so wait where they are hoping you'll run out of energy and be forced to reappear. (in AI they are stuck between finding you and switching to attack ship, but cannot performattack as the cannot see you, so default to lurking as they are constatley getting a TARGET FOUND, followed by TARGET LOST as your ship flickers on and off whilst cloaked).

Regardless of AI all ships in Oolite will completely ignore a cloaked ship. Personally I think this makes the Cloaking Device way too Uber as it takes all the challenge out of the game!

On your edit: are you cloaked? If so no Oolite ship will attack you including the Soin Sisters. Ban the Cloak!