Oolite Bulletins

If someone would be so kind as to supply some code to make the 249th ignore the player ship, I might publish a "Friend of the 249th" OXP. A piece of equipment to be installed, forced to deactivate if you hit Fugitive status.

You could make it part of the main OXP. Not a lot of point keeping it separate.

Don't know if it's do-able: help them out a few times, build some cred with them... maybe they ignore you when you're running dirty?

El Viejo wrote:

Don't know if it's do-able: help them out a few times, build some cred with them... maybe they ignore you when you're running dirty?

That would be preferable...

Rese249er wrote:

If someone would be so kind as to supply some code to make the 249th ignore the player ship, I might publish a "Friend of the 249th" OXP. A piece of equipment to be installed, forced to deactivate if you hit Fugitive status.

Erm, that's kind of cheating, isn't it? One of the things that go along with choosing to be a Fugitive is having to deal with GalCops, and Bounty Hunters. I liked this oxp just the way you intended it, but that's just me.

I think he means if you're just an offender, they'll ignore you, but if you become a fugitive, you're fair game. At the moment they go for every poor Commander who's got a parking-ticket.

No, you misunderstand. The equipment stops functioning if you're fugitive, thus making you fair game to the 249th.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Dizzy.

That sounds more like a new "Uber Weapon" to me. Maybe I'm not understanding either. How is it that a fugitive's ship stops functioning just so the 249th can blast them out of space?

Umm.. it's not their ship that stops functioning.. the device that tells the 249th to leave them alone stops functioning.. like the way the Escape Pod Locator stops functioning when you become an offender..

Rese249er wrote:

No, you misunderstand. The equipment stops functioning if you're fugitive, thus making you fair game to the 249th.

Okay. I didn't think it sounded right the way I was reading it.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Umm.. it's not their ship that stops functioning.. the device that tells the 249th to leave them alone stops functioning.. like the way the Escape Pod Locator stops functioning when you become an offender..

Thank you, Dizzy.

Hold that thought! All of you! I'm currently rewriting all the system AIs to conform with an OXP that should do what you are talking about. Actually I started this in response to Rese249er PMing me about such a thing for the 249th.

Tricky, I'm not sure I understand how to use this... Is there only one "friendly" group?

In other news, I'm hoping to get some suggestions on the 249th's Mobile HQ capital ship. The design challenge I recently posted was a search for a particular type of escort, since I plan to modify the spawning script to deploy the MHQ capship with a chance of showing up at any multigov system within a 3ly cluster near a democratic system with Factions OXP installed, essentially adding a new clean faction to that OXP. Without Factions, I plan to have it in only democratic systems.


EDIT: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ ... t-carriers
This is a design I pulled from Google as a rough example of the type of ship architecture I'm looking for. Specifically, the simple rectangular shape and roughly-manufactured appearance, as this carrier is, at least within the Ooniverse in my own head, built with donated materials from mining 249th members, while the R&D department hand-built the manufacturing drones reprogrammed a Nanite Repair System to assemble and maintain the carrier.

How big is the ship intended to be?

It appears to have landing bays. Will this be for player and NPC ships?

One suggestion that I would make is that you carefully consider both the energy level and recharge rate as I have found with some large capital type ships previously that you can install a military laser or two on a very weak ship and simply shoot at the capital ship from distance until it is destroyed effectively making a large powerful ship an easy kill.

What I believe that you would want is that the presence of a capital ship would instil a sense of apprehension or fear (Much more like a black monk ship).
If the ship will be too sow and not manoeuvrable enough to perform a dogfighting role, (As I expect is and should be the case), then the provision of strong shields, a good recharge rate and the ability to launch a number of defensive fighters would help to rebalance things.

Shipbuilder wrote:

It appears to have landing bays. Will this be for player and NPC ships?

In Oolite a docking bay is a docking bay. There is no difference in this regard between player and NPCs. And while you can prevent stations from randomly launching ships via the has_npc_traffic key, there's nothing to prevent either player or NPCs from docking.