Oolite Bulletins

Introducing the Fer-de-Lance 3G 'Delux-o-Tank' Variant:



At five times the cost of the 3G+(t) model, you get: an extra energy bank; increased energy recharge; more missile slots; slightly beefier turrets; and . . slightly reduced manoeuvrability and slightly reduced cargo capacity (but with no change in ship external size, because I am lazy). And taking out one of these tanks is indeed very hard - yet fear not, for it is (at present anyway) available only to the player (though it would be interesting to see how one of these fares against the top-end, NPC-only 3Gs . .).

The ship is available in the latest (viz., 6.3) version of the expansion pack, which is now available in the in-game manager. Finding one of these tanks to purchase, though, is a difficult proposition (even if you have the cash).

I'm afraid that I have not changed the external views. (See post above.) Should anyone want to do this or help me to do this, please drop me a line. In the meantime, I am working on making the game even easier by making missiles blow up when the player cloaks. You know, like they used to . .

What I'd really need is military scanner filtering though. None of your player versions can have it, but the NPCs can have the jammer. And this is the only reason I want the filter, as none of my other OXPs let NPCs have the jammer.
The military manta ray I'm flying has a turret on each side with weapon energy 25. While most of the other properties (except size I think - at least speed, weapon mounts, max energy, cargo and energy recharge) are worse than your 3G+(t) (ex-police), I wouldn't want to "upgrade" because of this. I've seen the military manta ray being generated with the military scanner filter once, but never again since.
The sensible thing to do would be to remove both jammer and filter from all ships, as these core features are unsupported. And I've read somewhere that the jamming doesn't work anyway if the player applies it. (How would an AI cope with it ?)

Anonymissimus:

Some things for me to think about there. I'll try to do so when I have the time.

For now, I'll just mention that actually the 'tank' version is beefier than the ex-police version (and the NPC-only police version). For the 'tank' has more energy, much better recharge rate (although actually I think I made have set the ex-police rate too low, by mistake . .or perhaps it was a favour to the player), and more missile slots. The only things the police models have over the tank are small: slightly greater manoeuvrablity; slightly greater speed; a bit more cargo capacity (not that they really need it); slightly more powerful turrets.

The 3G you really wants is the (NPC only!) 'Interstellar BugBlatter'! (And I think I'd better stop making variants now. It's getting silly!)

love the call-backs to the original 8-bit elite wireframe style in that new ferdy, really smashing stuff, looks as dangerous as hell!

Thanks, Griff! I'm flattered!

Am slowly working through Oolite equipment - currently on missiles.

I've put up a page for your Sweeper-resistant navy missile. Unsure what should go on it. Is there any lore, for example? Or are there special icons, or nice screen shots of missiles?

What is a "sweeper-resistant" missile?

New Missiles category page (see the Far Arms missiles for some nice examples) is here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Catego ... _%26_Bombs

Your new page is here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Sweepe ... vy_missile

My good Cholmondely,

Let me quote from the 3G OXP's equipment.plist:

Fast, powerful naval missile, designed for use against Thargoid mine-sweepers. Almost wholly ECM-immune.

Note that here I construe ECM - 'electronic counter-measures' - broadly, so as to include the pulses that Thargoid mine-sweepers emit. Those sweepers owe to my Extra Thargoids OXP. At present though I seem to allow the 3G OXP to offer those missiles even when Extra Thargoids is not installed. Perhaps I should change that. I suppose that what I decide to do here will effect what you put in your write-up. (Also: the aforementioned equipment file contains several entries for the missile, but there is in fact only one model of the missile; the extra entries are there to vary price and vary availability.)

Let me now give the properties of the missile. I start to do so via the shipdata entry for the missile.
To explain the comment on the last line: the missiles detonate via the following script function, which may (or may not - I am unsure) render the weapon_energy field wholly redundant.
Finally, two screenshots. First, the missile approaching a mine-sweeper.



Next, the scene a few second later:



I tried also to get a close up of the missile (and actually I've altered its appearance a bit since posting the above shipdata) but I don't see to find a way to do this. Even adding the missile to a 'demoships.plist' file does not make the missile appear in the 'library' part of Oolite (a library provided by an OXP?).

Put the missile in a shiplibrary.plist to have it appear in the Oolite Library. GO HERE for more information.

Nite Owl: sweet!