TL and optional_equipment

[Commander McLane]

I have seen a situation in a WIP OXP, where an equipment with TL 99 that is listed as optional_equipment for a specific ship, was offered as an extra equipment in the shipyard screen.

This seems buggy to me. Shouldn't the actual availability of optional equipment on ship variants in the shipyard screen depend on TL as well?

Hmmm. Now that I've written this it dawns on me that you could always find ships with pre-installed naval energy units even before finishing the mission, when their TL still was 99. So it's a feature, not a bug.

But it's still perhaps not what OXP writers would expect when creating equipment.plist and shipyard.plist. I was certainly surprised by it, although I understand it now.

[cim]

Shouldn't the actual availability of optional equipment on ship variants in the shipyard screen depend on TL as well?

It does, but this is capped to 15, so at the higher tech systems there's still a good chance of it being available.

In trunk, there is a better way to do this with with a condition script, rather than with the TL 99 hack, which can also be used to ban equipment from the shipyard if it's not available on the market (and various other permutations)