Hooray!
Sooo, after only
3 weeks in Oolite-time full of diverse adventures I can finally afford myself a Moray Medical Ship - no more hanging around in the Aegis* waiting for someone else to jump to one of the few presumably safe systems.
(made it as far as Ensoreus - no worth going there, there never were any ships available)
mining tales from the spacelane :
The most frustrating / longsome / driving-me-nuts moments were :
- when I actually survived a Thargoid invasion in the Ontiat system
- the next safe harbour was about 30,000 km away - only to later on that same savegame get rammed to death by some competing miner. 
- Somewhere along the road the income from the mining did not exceed the loss in ship resale value much - but after a while this was overcome.
- Or when I thought I finally had amassed the money for a Moray Medical Boat**, but then the only ones available in the Zaonce shipmarket came with (very) expensive equipment installed, so more mining runs were needed.
- And this idea about having me some company on my lonely mining trips turned out to not be such good an idea after all. Those darn purring rodents ate my precious radioactives!
And getting rid of them in a ship as slow and vulnerable as Zeke's Miner is challenging. So much that - me no being a seasoned sunskimmer - I started to wonder if it was possible at all. (it is)
I
did cheat a little, as in allowing my miner to be equipped with a scanner targeting enhancement, but should I play this again, - and I probably will when I'll have them shader bells and whistles available - I may choose to not do this, as without the STE the
game ship is probably feeling even more low-tec. And raising the urge to get another ship, making e.g. the Cobra1 more attractive in comparison to this miner.
On a replay I would also try to change Micha's RH-script so it only garantuees presence of at least one rock hermit
only at Zaonce.
One thing I am not really sure of is : I think I discovered it is possible to position one's own ship next to a rock hermit in a way that NPC ships attempting to dock will crash into the rock hermit.
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So this was a really nice change in gameplay, and Zaonce is a really good starting place. The ship being so slow, in other systems jump-driving out of the main station's / planet's masslocking zone can use up to 4 LY worth of witchdrive fuel. But not at Zaonce
So,
thank you Zeke for this oxp. I appreciate not just the differing style of gameplay, but also the clever use of already existing ships and oxps to provide fun game - everything well thought-out and balanced.
And for those of us looking for harder starting conditions, but maybe not as tedious as an Adder startgame can get, this may be perfect.
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on other oxps with this one :
I am not really really sure, but think it is
Switeck's Shipping oxp, that made the mining more interesting, as in more ships competing. I often had up to four other ships going after the splinters, including Cobra3-s and Boas, sometimes resulting in my miner being rammed, mostly to death. Recommended (the oxp)
One oxp I used that gave me difficulties (I think it is this one) is
Asteroid Storm - the very large asteroids in it for me slow down the game too much. In particular if they are spawned so close to the rock hermit that the latter will be "swallowed" by the rotating very large asteroid, this resulted in 4fps being displayed, but I think it was way lower than that. Blowing the huge asteroid to pieces sometimes had the framerate recover, sometimes not.
oxps that should be
no-no with this one (or ore-processor in general) imo. are : the
icesteroids and
graffiti asteroids - the ice boulders will not break into scoopable splinters, but sometimes contain already ore-processed stuff (I only ever saw alloys).
so long - snork
* is there a plural of Aegis ?
** I decided to skip the Cobra1 as it has little advantage over Zeke's miner equipped with Ore processor and RH-locator.
And I use my own ship pricing list that I originally came up with to go with Switeck's Adder-start savegames - Cobra1 and MorayMed are slightly cheaper, everything else considerably more expensive. (Cobra3 @ 300k credits)
