Oolite Bulletins

Wildefire Equipment Bay Shields (WEBS) System OXP ver. 1.1
Date: November 25th, 2012
Author: Wildeblood

Place the WEBS System OXP into your "AddOns" folder. The Wildefire Systems Type X-2 EBS (Equipment Bay Shields) System is available at any planet or station of technical level 6, for 250 credits. If your ship is threatened, bio-regenerative, nano-technological, rapidly-deployable, ablative shields (bags of heat absorbant goop) automatically fill your equipment bay in 1 second.

Change log:
1.1 (November 25th, 2012) Individual shield components no longer repaired by Thargoid's repair bots.
1.0 Re-created July 17th, 2012. Thanks to forum member "SandJ" for reminding me about this old experiment.

Download WEBS System OXP here.

I made this for Dragonfire last year, when he was nagging everyone else to contribute bits to "his" uber ship OXP. Then he was rude to me, so I never gave it to him. I accidentally deleted it back in January, then forgot that I had done so. In a discussion with SandJ last month about Beer Cooler he said he had had the same idea, and I said I'd already done it. So I went searching my HDD for it to send to him. After a day of poking about in dusty corners of my HDD I eventually remembered it had been deleted and no amount of searching would find it. Last night I re-created it for something to do. Such a little OXP, so much history.

What does it mean it fills your equipment bay?

Zireael wrote:

What does it mean it fills your equipment bay?

Literally that. It's "your last line of defence", for when your shields are gone, and those "x damaged" messages start to scroll up the screen; you know you've got to bail out, but before you can react the dreaded "Escape Pod damaged" message appears...

Say you've got 20 items of valuable equipment in your equipment bay, now you'll have 20 items of valuable equipment plus 100 ablative shields - the theory being that when damage occurs there is a 5/6 chance that one of the ablative shields will take the heat, rather than something useful. If you go to the F5 screen during a combat alert you'll see the 100 goop-filled bags deploy. (Personal aside: has anyone else here ever been in a car when the air-bags deployed? Not pleasant at all, but better than getting a mouthful of steering wheel.)

Do these shields get returned to a deployable state when you've survived and exited combat? Otherwise I can see this becoming rather expensive to replace after every piddly Sidewinder with a beam laser I dispatch.

BuggyBY wrote:

Do these shields get returned to a deployable state when you've survived and exited combat?

Sure they do, they're "bio-regenerative" - which I imagine means they use some fast-growing yeast, or somethin'. Did I not mention they were based on Beer Cooler technology?

The system stops working if the controller module gets damaged, but as long as that doesn't happen, those bags of yeast just keep on giving.

Wildeblood wrote:

If your ship is threatened, bio-regenerative, nano-technological, rapidly-deployable, ablative shields (bags of heat absorbant goop) automatically fill your equipment bay in 1 second.

Now that's my kind of explanation! - nice one

I like it!

A nice workaround for the lack of damage probability setting in 1.76, or, you could just install an animated HUD which has lots of invisible equipment controlling it, and they could take some of the heat away from any valuable real equipment...

1.77 is gonna rock!

I tried this out recently, and I had a couple of questions; but first, thanks very much for adding a very useful OXP to the Ooniverse! :)

1. How does this interact with the Self-Repair System (part of the [wiki]Repair Bots OXP[/wiki])? I think, although I can't be certain (and I'm afraid I lack the understanding of the coding behind the scenes to determine for myself) I might be wasting system repair charges on (presumably useless) fixes to damaged equipment bay shields.

2. Is it just me, or is this unreasonably underpriced? It seems like it is worth a great deal because the equipment bay contents are valuable (not to mention potentially life-saving), yet it costs only 150 Cr and has no maintenance costs thereafter.

3. Is there any way to prevent "Death by Yellow Text"? During a heated battle in which I got into quite a scrape, the middle part of my screen was constantly cluttered with "Equipment bay shield damaged"/"Equipment bay shield destroyed" warning messages. The messages themselves serve little purpose - if I wanted to check how many active shields I had left I could F5F5 - and they actually obscured my reticle unhelpfully.

Apologies if any of these questions have already been answered or if I've missed anything.

FeelGone wrote:

1. How does this interact with the Self-Repair System (part of the [wiki]Repair Bots OXP[/wiki])? I think, although I can't be certain (and I'm afraid I lack the understanding of the coding behind the scenes to determine for myself) I might be wasting system repair charges on (presumably useless) fixes to damaged equipment bay shields.

Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed in version 1.1.

FeelGone wrote:

2. Is it just me, or is this unreasonably underpriced? It seems like it is worth a great deal because the equipment bay contents are valuable (not to mention potentially life-saving), yet it costs only 150 Cr and has no maintenance costs thereafter.

Ooh, look, the price has almost doubled. ("It's people like you who spoil things for everyone.")

FeelGone wrote:

3. Is there any way to prevent "Death by Yellow Text"? During a heated battle in which I got into quite a scrape, the middle part of my screen was constantly cluttered with "Equipment bay shield damaged"/"Equipment bay shield destroyed" warning messages. The messages themselves serve little purpose - if I wanted to check how many active shields I had left I could F5F5 - and they actually obscured my reticle unhelpfully.

I know what you mean, but really that's your sign to stop fighting and bail out. Take that away and there's nothing to see at all.

Wildeblood wrote:

FeelGone wrote:

1. How does this interact with the Self-Repair System (part of the [wiki]Repair Bots OXP[/wiki])? I think, although I can't be certain (and I'm afraid I lack the understanding of the coding behind the scenes to determine for myself) I might be wasting system repair charges on (presumably useless) fixes to damaged equipment bay shields.

Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed in version 1.1.

Thanks very much for fixing this!

Any chance of somebody with a sense of derring-do giving this a try-out?

Current download is here: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p223260 (Dizzy's rescue: 2014)

Screen shots would be appreciated for the new Wiki page: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/WEBS_System

It would also be good to get some decisive answers to Chomwitt's query, which an experienced test-pilot might well manage!
- https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20958