Oolite Bulletins

We are in a code freeze with a stable release pending, so this is a moot point really

Now,this answer I can accept. Thank you!

And I do realize the dev team are real people, and not coding drones working for our convenience - in fact the previous outburst was because you're real people and so am I ...

I realize it is a moot point, as there are no new features being implemented in the next version of Oolite.
However, with regards to the cost of mode-switching laser, I think a high cost would be a deterrent, especially with the increased need for maintenance and time requirements to switch.

Think about it this way, you are a reasonably experienced commander piloting a new ship. You go to the equipment section of the shipyard to outfit your new Vampire Diamondback. You have just bought this expense ship and have limited money. You look through the catalog, and the salesman tells you about a new laser which can switch from working as a beam laser to a mining laser to a military laser.

It sounds neat, and then he tells you about the cost. You say, "Wait, you mean to tell me that this laser is more fragile than an ordinary mil laser and if I want to switch to a beam laser for dogfighting purposes it would take me several minutes for the laser to adjust."

The salesman smiles (very, very politely, in a patronizing way) at you, "There are a few small costs to using an omni-laser, Commander. But I am sure that you realize the benefits greatly outweigh the costs."

You look at him incredulously, "So you mean to tell me that if my ship got a gentle love tap from a pirate mamba's beam laser, I can count on going the rest of the trip through the anarchy with my forward mil laser burn out; and if I switch in a firefight to a beam laser, I will have nothing to fight back with except harsh language for ten minutes. Furthermore you say that I have to pay 30k for the privilege of installing this junk in case I want to fill my 18 ton cargo hold with mined metal ores, when I could buy six mil lasers for the same price. I would be better off spending my money on two mil lasers jury rigged by myself to be illegal dual lasers than this, they would be more reliable too." You begin to wonder if this salesman was born with this level of intelligence or whether he had to receive a lobotomy to be this idiotic and leave.

Cost changes nothing. Money is easily available in vast amounts to all but the newest commanders. A military laser is 6000. It is hard to imagine a meaningful ingame explanation for an omni-laser costing say 10 times this, and 60k is peanuts really.

If there were an omni-last I would suggest it should have drawbacks on each setting. Military setting to have shorter range, mining setting to have only 50% chance of generating boulders, beam laser to heat slightly faster. Something like that. You then have a decision point, do I really need the best of the best firepower (military), or do I really like mining, or do I want a compromise which is "almost all of the above" but not quite as good as any.

A workaround could be making a pylon mining drone, equipped with its own laser

Improving on that idea, add a tractor beam to the drone. Launch it at a targeted asteroid, it cuts it to splinters and heads back to the ship to be scooped for reuse on the next asteroid, drawing the splinters in.
Mining needs not to be painfully boring (as in opposed to just mildly so).

Cmdr James wrote:

Cost changes nothing. Money is easily available in vast amounts to all but the newest commanders. A military laser is 6000. It is hard to imagine a meaningful ingame explanation for an omni-laser costing say 10 times this, and 60k is peanuts really.

Are you sure about that? I realize most of the veterans say that they don't have money issues. But I have 1388 kills to my name, which while not huge, it is a sizable amount and I am not rich. Of course to be fair, my ship is a Vampire IV Diamondback and so I have around 900k in property. What I said was that: "I think a high cost would be a deterrent, especially with the increased need for maintenance and time requirements to switch." So it isn't just the high cost, but also the situation. I don't have tons of money for the simple reason that I fly hard random hits missions with npc shields on. If I have a bad contract (one where I get more than a few hits through my shields), I get spend 50% of my earnings, minimum, on repairs.

So an ultra expensive laser which breaks easily is a bad choice, especially since I only have a 18 ton cargo hold in which to mine. A smaller ship (i.e. one roughly sized somewhere between a cobra I and a python) with only one laser mount might want to use a laser that can function as both a mil and mining laser, provided they can afford it. A large ship which has only one mount, however, might want to limit itself to a mil laser, as it is better off running cargo contracts rather than scraping by on spare change earned mining asteroids.

Finally, I don't think most commanders, even if they have millions, want to waste their money on ship equipment they known it makes no sense for them to buy.

I'm going to agree with Commander Wilmot.

This thing is overpriced, underperforming junk, and a worse than useless gimmick.
I'm better off fitting a tried and true combat laser, and mounting a railgun if I want to do some asteroid mining on the side. Mil laser + railgun costs less and it's far more reliable.

Commander Wilmot wrote:

Cmdr James wrote:

Cost changes nothing. Money is easily available in vast amounts to all but the newest commanders. A military laser is 6000. It is hard to imagine a meaningful ingame explanation for an omni-laser costing say 10 times this, and 60k is peanuts really.

Are you sure about that?

Yes, I am sure. It is easy to make it uneconomical. In fact unless people have huge cargo bays that they can never hope to fill, mining almost never makes economic sense, but that wasnt the point.

The point I am making, and I stand by, is that cost is no real barrier. Surely as someone flying a million credits worth of gear, you can see that money isnt really a problem?

Perhaps it's not such a great idea to have superlasers you can purchase, or buyable death stars for that matter. Either in game or in a parallel universe.

http://youtu.be/zIYJDVT7eCM

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

Perhaps it's not such a great idea to have superlasers you can purchase, or buyable death stars for that matter. Either in game or in a parallel universe.

I beg to disagree!

Elite was balanced to be played only with the Cobra Mk 3.
However, the Ooniverse currently has ships ranging from the tiny Adder with its single energy bank (64 energy cells), to beasts like the Thargoid Carrier with over 390 banks (25 000 cells) with a recharge rate of 100 - more than four times than a military laser's destructive power (24,5?).

Thus, Oolite should be a sandbox universe, but as long as there are arbitrary limits to the weaponry the player will be restricted to a niche participation, curtailed in its freedom to be whatever it pleases.

I do agree that a carrier or a mega ship may make the player nigh almighty, and that can reduce the fun factor for some (if not most) players... but some do like it so, and would very much love to have its own Super Star Destroyer or even a Death star.
If there is anything against this, it's that since (as of yet) there are no player carriers or battleships, there are also no missions designed for that kind of fire power (and vice-versa).


P.S.: I'm C&Ping and stitching together a little something called "Cargo Space Militarization Suite", a set of independent but complementary OXPs to load any ship's cargo bay with varying sizes of plasma accelerators, shield capacitors, energy banks, speed and/or internal fuel tanks (which will be used quite liberally to feed the rest of the equipment). If everything goes well I might release a beta for the first module after the weekend.

Not sure about the requires_cargo_space entry in equipment.plist, last time I bought an equipment stating that key was ages ago. And launched and docked again and can use the cargo space again. May be due to the oxp ship I am using, but does it really work?

Okti wrote:

Not sure about the requires_cargo_space entry in equipment.plist, last time I bought an equipment stating that key was ages ago. And launched and docked again and can use the cargo space again. May be due to the oxp ship I am using, but does it really work?

According to the Wiki's page on equipment.plist

NOTE: requires_cargo_space is only used to determine a condition to show an item on the list. Currently it uses no cargo space when bought. This makes it probably useless for other equipment than internal Oolite equipment that used this key.

cim wrote:

Okti wrote:

Not sure about the requires_cargo_space entry in equipment.plist, last time I bought an equipment stating that key was ages ago. And launched and docked again and can use the cargo space again. May be due to the oxp ship I am using, but does it really work?

According to the Wiki's page on equipment.plist

NOTE: requires_cargo_space is only used to determine a condition to show an item on the list. Currently it uses no cargo space when bought. This makes it probably useless for other equipment than internal Oolite equipment that used this key.

Yes that was my point, thanks.

Okti wrote:

Not sure about the requires_cargo_space entry in equipment.plist, last time I bought an equipment stating that key was ages ago. And launched and docked again and can use the cargo space again. May be due to the oxp ship I am using, but does it really work?

I hope so... I'm still working on it, and it's going well so far.

If it doesn't work, I'll try awarding some tons worth of [wiki=Oolite_JavaScript_Reference:_PlayerShip]useSpecialCargo[/wiki].