Oolite Bulletins

I'm wondering if this has been thought of before or if its even fesible, but envision this you just come out of witchspace lock on to the witchspace becon and it announces that there has been a vicious battle and that the dredgers are on their way because of many derilict ships. Now for most, this is a place to get some free fuel if you have the fuel collector, or perhaps a few easy kills (i'm not sure they count as kills never bothered to notice ) Also if you bother to chase down any stray cargo containers this is also a good way to make a little extra cash. My thought is, not unlike mining an asteriod, could you mine these derilict ships out of their cargo? You can transfer fuel from these ships is there a way to transfer the cargo form the derilict to your ship? You pop the cargo bay door open on a fully loaded anaconda (or whatever) and transfer as much as you could hold into your ship, that would be cool. But if you could see what they held, what was in their hold and pick and choose, that would be great! I believe that when a ship is destroyed everything that survives the destruction is jettisoned into space, so every once in a while a stray container floats by or the occasional escape pod. When you destroy the ship there is a loss of profit so to speak, you can grab the cargo that survives the explosion and it seems to only be a small portion of what the larger ships can carry but you lose the ship(to sell as salvage)as well as a portion of the cargo. If you could "mine" these ships take their fuel , cargo (at least as much as you can hold) and then sell the ship to the salvage dredgers you could maxamize the profits. I guess what I'm asking is there a way to fly close to a derilict ship, using the same kind of interaction as the fuel collector "hacking into "ships" computer system", have it show a cargo list, get a chance to pick the cargo I want and then dump the cargo preferrably into my fuel scoops!? I know that it's probably more likely to be a pirates tool than a free cargo miner in a vast derilict battlefield but I think I would still have a use for it as described or even a portion of it probably a far fetched dream but I had to ask

That's an interesting idea. As you say, the "traditional" way of extracting cargo from a derelict is to blow it up. If there was still cargo aboard, it will be floating free afterwards. (And if the cargo was already jettisoned before in order to appease the attacker, you would draw a blank.)

I can imagine a mechanism similar to the fuel extraction, where you would connect to the ship's computer and override the cargo bay doors, and the ship would begin to release its remaining containers. I would however attach three conditions to that:

1) The ship has to have still cargo left aboard. Very much like in the "traditional" setting, if the cargo has been jettisoned before, you don't find it anymore.

2) Oolite's normal limit on cargo is respected. Whenever a ship jettisons cargo or is blown up, the game engine creates only around 10% as much cargopods as the capacity of the ship, with an absolute maximum of 15 cargopods. Plundering a derelict should not allow you to break this rule.

3) You cannot pick your cargo. You can override the cargo bay doors, but not access the ship's manifest. The released cargopods will contain random commodities, just like all cargopods in the game.

With these three conditions fulfilled I think it would be a nice and balanced addition of the game.

Commander McLane wrote:

Oolite's normal limit on cargo is respected. Whenever a ship jettisons cargo or is blown up, the game engine creates only around 10% as much cargopods as the capacity of the ship, with an absolute maximum of 15 cargopods. Plundering a derelict should not allow you to break this rule.

I think that misses the point. What Slomoe was suggesting, I believe, is that it should be more rewarding for a player to salvage a ship's cargo neatly than it is to blow up the ship to extract the cargo. Otherwise there is little incentive; why not just laser the ship and scoop the flotsam if the reward is the same?

Wildeblood wrote:

...why not just laser the ship and scoop the flotsam...?

Yeah, that's the fun way!

Wildeblood wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Oolite's normal limit on cargo is respected. Whenever a ship jettisons cargo or is blown up, the game engine creates only around 10% as much cargopods as the capacity of the ship, with an absolute maximum of 15 cargopods. Plundering a derelict should not allow you to break this rule.

I think that misses the point. What Slomoe was suggesting, I believe, is that it should be more rewarding for a player to salvage a ship's cargo neatly than it is to blow up the ship to extract the cargo. Otherwise there is little incentive; why not just laser the ship and scoop the flotsam if the reward is the same?

Slomoe was quite explicit, I think: You don't want to laser the ship because you want to sell its hull to the Dredgers.

slomoe wrote:

When you destroy the ship there is a loss of profit so to speak, you can grab the cargo that survives the explosion and it seems to only be a small portion of what the larger ships can carry but you lose the ship(to sell as salvage)as well as a portion of the cargo. If you could "mine" these ships take their fuel , cargo (at least as much as you can hold) and then sell the ship to the salvage dredgers you could maxamize the profits.

Other than that my remark doesn't miss the point, but makes a point, namely that I find the idea good, but wouldn't want to see it as a circumvention of an internal Oolite mechanism in order to create a get-rich-quick scheme.

Commander McLane wrote:

Slomoe was quite explicit, I think: You don't want to laser the ship because you want to sell its hull to the Dredgers.

Slomoe was quite explicit, I think: you don't want to burn 90% of the cargo.

slomoe wrote:

When you destroy the ship there is a loss of profit so to speak, you can grab the cargo that survives the explosion and it seems to only be a small portion of what the larger ships can carry but you lose the ship(to sell as salvage)as well as a portion of the cargo.

So, is the appearance of derelict ships not part of the core game, but dependant on the Dredgers OXP? I thought if you tickled them just right ships would eject their escape capsule and become derelict without influence from the Dredgers OXP.

Secondly, if the salvagers aboard the dredgers had any sense/decency, they'd pay more for a hull with cargo inside than they would for a hull without cargo. So, again, where is the incentive for the player to do their job for them?

Wildeblood wrote:

you don't want to burn 90% of the cargo.

You may want or not want it, it's one of the rules of the game.

Wildeblood wrote:

So, is the appearance of derelict ships not part of the core game, but dependant on the Dredgers OXP?

Indeed, depending on what you mean with "appearance". Oolite itself does not spawn derelict ships. Dredgers.oxp does.

Non-derelict ships can become derelict if the pilot ejects. There is a small random chance for this to happen every time an escape pod is spawned from a ship. From my experience I'd say that it happens in about 1 in 5 cases of a pilot ejecting. In the other 4 cases the ship blows up anyway. That's precisely the reason why Dredgers.oxp creates additional derelicts. Otherwise they'd just be too rare.

Wildeblood wrote:

So, again, where is the incentive for the player to do their job for them?

I don't know. You'd have to ask the people who have installed Dredgers.oxp and are using it. I haven't. But I know there are players who have installed it, so obviously they feel incented.

Wildeblood wrote:

So, is the appearance of derelict ships not part of the core game, but dependant on the Dredgers OXP? I thought if you tickled them just right ships would eject their escape capsule and become derelict without influence from the Dredgers OXP.

Derelicts are not part of Dredgers OXP but are generally created by Oolite itself. Only, more than two Oolite versions back, those derelicts were unusable by Dredgers OXP and the oxp added some specific ones. In current Oolite the normal derelicts can be used by Dredgers OXP. In addition to the in system derelicts, the oxp adds some extra ships, selected by the general 'trader' role, and turns them into derelicts. In earlier versions I did this with the 'becomeUncontrolledThargon" command, until I was pointed to the fact that those derelicts had sometimes still pilots on board.
In the latest version I use the new command: abandonShip(), to create the derelicts. That way I get the exact behaviour as system generated derelicts. Even their escape pods should be somewhere around.

McLane wrote:

There is a small random chance for this to happen every time an escape pod is spawned from a ship. From my experience I'd say that it happens in about 1 in 5 cases of a pilot ejecting. In the other 4 cases the ship blows up anyway.

Since Oolite 1.75 this chance should be slightly higher than before. Not because there are more pods ejected, but they are ejected safer, so they have a lower change of colliding into the mother, shortly after launch

I like the idea of MORE than the standard KABOOM method of cargo release occurring through this method...

However, being a Ying and Yang kind of bird I'd also like the ship to try and report to Galcop computers that it's ready for inspection and boarding by officials. When it fails to find a signal, it will start to send a series of test transmissions with increasingly large power outputs and thus, the longer a pilot spends scooping the more likely that pirates/scavengers who have learned to intercept and recognise this test signal to mean somebody has cracked open a pinata and will make their way to the signal source...

Well I must say that at least I know how to spell derelict now and to be honest I was not only hopeing to be able to get more cargo but to be able to pick the more valuable stuff (depending on what system you were in) gold, platium, and gems don't take up much space and some cargo is almost not worth the bother in a smaller ship (like mine cobra mk III) Both Commander McLane and Wildeblood are right I was definitley hopeing that a "more rewarding" way was possible and I did not want to destroy the ship it was a get richer faster idea but as I said it would still be a great idea if you could get a full 15 tons of cargo and not have to chase all over space for it and still be able to salvage the ship. I do have the Dredgers OXP installed and just to point out when you do salvage the ship there is a message as the ship is taken into the dredger that you recieve "X" amount of credits for the "kind of ship" and "X" amount of its remaining cargo which is named it's not a smattering of different cargo types (like a random effect) but usually so many cargo containers of one thing. I'm totally backwards on anykind of coding or scripting but if someone wanted to make this i would definitely try it out I do thank you for your input, I do like this idea better than the as DaddyHoggy put it the KABOOM method, but if that is what I must do then that is what I will do

slomoe wrote:

...I was not only hopeing to be able to get more cargo but to be able to pick the more valuable stuff (depending on what system you were in) gold, platium, and gems don't take up much space and some cargo is almost not worth the bother in a smaller ship (like mine cobra mk III)...

This aspect of your idea is not possible, I'm afraid. Each type of cargo that comes in a container takes up a full ton of space on your ship when scooped. Only on your next docking it is stored in your safe, and the empty containers are discarded.

You'll notice that whenever you scoop a container with only 1g of gem stones, you lose a full ton of cargo capacity. This is just the way Oolite handles scooping.

I do understand that it is not possible to pick and choose what you get especially with gold, platinum, and gems , but the idea of getting to a certain distance from the derelict ship, launching a device or using the N button to activate some type of program to open the ships cargo bay doors and having it release up to 15 tonnes of cargopods (depending on the ship) would be great some ships do not have any cargo space so this would not work on them, but if they did have cargo and it was still on board then this would be able to access it without having to blow it up. Is it possible to, let say, if I pulled up next to a Boa , had at least 15 tonnes of empty cargo space in my ship and launched a device, or used the N button to open the cargo bay doors, they opened and if the derelict boa had the 15 tonnes of cargopods available would the said cargopods be jettisoned or could they be put into my fuel scoops and then automaticly into my cargo bay? and one last point I do have the Dredger OXP installed, but this should work anywhere you find a derelict, Dredger OXP or not.

P.S. just another weird thought maybe this idea could be used to rescue escape pods that didn't work right, even if there wasn't any cargo on board, or a ship calls to you that they are having a malfuction and can't escape kind've a search and rescue

Okay, I'm going to have a look into this and come up with something. It's not going to be a get-rich-quick device, because I find balance important, but it's going to add another nice flavour to the game.

I think it has to be integrated with the Fuel Collector. That makes sense for two reasons: first, it's a similar functionality, and in the end you'll have to scoop the cargo anyway. And second, from a scripting perspective, the Fuel Collector as it is now is also triggered by proximity to a derelict ship. If we want another functionality triggered also be proximity, the two of them have to play nice with each other.

I'm thinking about modifying the Fuel Collector script. When you get close to a derelict, your ship's computer screen would pop up and give you a choice of either trying to extract cargo or to extract fuel (maybe there are other possible choices as well?). After each extraction process there is a certain chance of the derelict to blow up. So in some cases you may be able to extract all its contents (cargo first and fuel later, or vice versa). But in other cases the derelict will not survive the tampering and you only keep what you got first. I think that's fair. Even now extracting fuel can cause the derelict to blow up sometimes.

I think another PM to Frame is due.

Commander McLane wrote:

Okay, I'm going to have a look into this and come up with something. It's not going to be a get-rich-quick device, because I find balance important, but it's going to add another nice flavour to the game.

I think it has to be integrated with the Fuel Collector. That makes sense for two reasons: first, it's a similar functionality, and in the end you'll have to scoop the cargo anyway. And second, from a scripting perspective, the Fuel Collector as it is now is also triggered by proximity to a derelict ship. If we want another functionality triggered also be proximity, the two of them have to play nice with each other.

I'm thinking about modifying the Fuel Collector script. When you get close to a derelict, your ship's computer screen would pop up and give you a choice of either trying to extract cargo or to extract fuel (maybe there are other possible choices as well?). After each extraction process there is a certain chance of the derelict to blow up. So in some cases you may be able to extract all its contents (cargo first and fuel later, or vice versa). But in other cases the derelict will not survive the tampering and you only keep what you got first. I think that's fair. Even now extracting fuel can cause the derelict to blow up sometimes.

I think another PM to Frame is due.

Excellent. I think you may have come up with a winner there CMcL.