Oolite Bulletins

JazHaz wrote:

It will be interesting to see how many downloads you actually get of this.

Just hit 250

Smivs wrote:

JazHaz wrote:

It will be interesting to see how many downloads you actually get of this.

Just hit 250

Should be 251 now; and I really can't understand all the bad press (though admittedly it's not the prettiest ship I've flown).

By the way, has anyone noticed what a brilliant scooper the WonderWorm is? I added a scoop camera external view to shipdata.plist* as follows...
... and she picks up cleanly every time. I do prefer NumericHUDv3 to the standard WonderWorm HUD, however, as the former has a simplified 'scoop-sight' for accurate aiming. Just keep the little green dot on the cargo pod or whatever and in it comes, even flat out at 800. Though I loved Noomi in all her incarnations, the Boa Clipper can be a temperamental scooper sometimes, at less than half that speed -- I guess the basic Boa hull shape is to blame.

* for the benefit of the one Oolite player who knows even less about this than I do.

Ha, the Wonderworm has now been downloaded 500 times. Not many compared to some OXPs, but still a pretty good milestone for such a stupid ship!

After making my first 600.000-700.000 credits with endless trading i wonder if i can make it to get some day the sum of 2.500.000cr. For now i think i need the patience of steel to go on like this.

Did anyone make it to earn this sum on his own to be ready to buy the Wonderworm? Without cheating!
Please be true !

Greetings from Hawk

Endless trading? Milk runs, you mean?

Please tell me you've been taking on some hauling contracts as well.. there's far better money to be made that way.

Hi Diziet Sma. Don't know what ya mean with "Milk runs".

And I don't know how to make more Money than with trading between two planets - there and back, hour for hour. This is a boring way someone may think, please tell me a better way...
Hauling passengers from one end of the galaxy to another - ok, 5000-6000cr seems a lot at first sight for a delivery , but after 10-15 Galaxy Jumps, you have to overhaul your ship for thousands. At the end there is only a small Profit i think.

I would be grateful for a good tip to make better Money than with trading - to get at least the 2.5 millions

Hawk1975 wrote:

Did anyone make it to earn this sum on his own to be ready to buy the Wonderworm? Without cheating!
Please be true !

You should be able to make around 1000CR a trip on a standard Cobra, depending on the market obviously. I've made more than 1.5M just trading, no cheats. It helps if you just make trading the background to doing missions. Some missions have a nice payout. By the time you get to G4 you should have sizable bank.

Had you considered a little cheat to try the ship before you buy one? The WonderWorm is an extreme craft and you might find it is not quite what you think, although it is fun
Open the Config folder of the OXP and find the 'shipyard.plist' file. Open this with a text editor (don't use Notepad though, as it adds unwanted extra characters which break things), and change the 'chance' to 1 and the 'techlevel' to 1 as well. This will increase the number available in shipyards. Then change the price to something much lower that you can afford. As this is just for a test-drive you could buy one for 1Cr
If you already have the OXP installed, hold down the 'shift' key the first time you start the game to flush the cache otherwise changes won't take affect.

Hey Smivs,

I really hope that the (yours) wonderworm is worth (i know "worth" may be relative - i think it don't makes anyone immortal) the Price of 2.500.000 credits ... ???

No, i don't want to change something in the shipcost- or savefiles, neither to only for short trying this craft out.
To have to "fight" for the remaining only 1,8 million credits keeps this game at a good challenge for a long time. And when i think back into the days of my youth, playing Elite on the Amiga500 (end or mid 80's?) - there was no way to cheat anything...

Ha, OK. Good on you
I normally deplore 'cheating' but I often like to try out new ships which I have no intention of playing just to see what they are like. The method described above is an easy way to do this.
However if this is your main Commander's goal, then I totally approve of playing it straight. You'll have a lot of fun accumulating the cash.

Hawk1975 wrote:

Hi Diziet Sma. Don't know what ya mean with "Milk runs".

And I don't know how to make more Money than with trading between two planets - there and back, hour for hour.

Yes, that's what we usually refer to as "milk runs".. shuttling back and forth between a RI system and a PA system, computers in one direction, furs and booze in the other.. it's the only practical way for a new Jameson to make some decent credits, but once you've gotten some kit for your ship, there are far better (and far less boring!) ways to make much more money. Certainly if you have 600,000+ in the bank, you should have an iron ass by now, and can do so easily.

Hawk1975 wrote:

This is a boring way someone may think, please tell me a better way...
Hauling passengers from one end of the galaxy to another - ok, 5000-6000cr seems a lot at first sight for a delivery , but after 10-15 Galaxy Jumps, you have to overhaul your ship for thousands. At the end there is only a small Profit i think.

I would be grateful for a good tip to make better Money than with trading - to get at least the 2.5 millions

Ok.. so how does 60,000-70,000 for a single delivery sound? Or 100,000+ for a cross-chart run involving 2-3 drops?

You were on the right track there with the passenger-runs idea, although you didn't realise it..

Here's why.

Many, many really fat, juicy cargo and passenger contracts are out there, just waiting to be plucked.. but you don't ever get to see them, because you don't have any reputation in the business. The people with that kind of money to spend on a single delivery or trip aren't going to risk their precious cargo or their even more precious daughter on someone who's an unknown quantity.

So the first thing you need is an excellent reputation. You do that by taking on a series of those "I'll be lucky if I just break even" contracts that you gave up on. When you've done enough of them (less than 10!), you'll get to the point that your reputation is absolutely stellar.. and then you can sit there and watch the really lucrative jobs practically throwing themselves at you. But you can't just rest on your laurels.. if you don't keep up the regular deliveries, your reputation will fade over time, and you'll find you're back to the ho-hum contract offers again. However, once you build up your rep again, you're golden.

How do you know what your reputation is like? The easiest way is with Commander McLane's  Display Reputation OXP, which I thoroughly recommend installing. Something else you will need, if you don't have it yet, is the Advanced Navigational Array. This is essential for working out the fastest route between two systems. (The "least jumps" route is the slow route, in case you hadn't noticed yet). It might not seem like a big deal when you're only doing a single contract, but the nice thing about the very lucrative contracts is that they don't take up a lot of cargo-space.. once you get the hang of things, it's not hard to take on 3, 4, or even more at the same time (I believe the record is 15 simultaneous contracts running.. can you say, LOTS of credits? ).. and at that point, making sure you can hit all the deadlines before accepting another job becomes essential.

Along the way, if you haven't already done so, you'll become an expert at sunskimming and handling yourself in Anarchies and Feudal systems, too, because you'll be spending a lot of time in them.. unsurprisingly, Anarchies tend to be favourite destinations for high-paying contracts, due to the risk factor involved.. and for some reason, the fastest routes always seem to involve a lot of dangerous systems.

With the cargo contracts, it might seem that most of them are geared to ships like Boas, Pythons and Anacondas, (which they are), however.. there are enough <=35TC cargo contracts available to be able to get to a top reputation in a Cobra MkIII.. you just have to search a little harder for them. I've done it many times. In fact, I have a brand new Commander I'm just about to start on the contracts game.. he has about 15-20,000 worth of equipment, and 5,000 in cash, and has just accepted his first 35TC Narcotics contract to (naturally) an Anarchy system about 6 jumps away. He'll be lucky to make any profit, but he'll have climbed the first rung of the reputation ladder, which is the important thing.

A little more detail (and some other money-making suggestions) can be found in this post, and there's a discussion with a lot of tips and tricks for contract hauling in this thread. After you've read those, if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask..

Edit to add:
And when even contract work gets to the point where it's routine (yes, it happens!) then you can try out cim's  New Cargoes OXP for some real challenges! Or maybe become a Contrabandista, like Cody..

Diziet Sma wrote:

... it's the only practical way for a new Jameson to make some decent credits...

[German accent] Very interesting... but not so! [/German accent] (Anyone remember Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In?)
It's worth mentioning the parcel contracts - as with cargo contracts, as your rep increases, so do the rewards.

Heh.. I keep forgetting we have parcel contracts as well now.. and yes, reputation improves the payout for those, too.. (nice job on the accent, btw.. most convincing! ... and yes, I remember the show well..)

Cody wrote:

[German accent] Very interesting... but not so! [/German accent]

Diziet Sma wrote:

...nice job on the accent, btw.. most convincing!

<Chuckles> Perhaps this needs re-branding as Das VunderVorm!

Smivs wrote:

Die VunderVurm!

Fixed that for you.