Oolite Bulletins

I have the escape pod locator installed to allow me to track the pod when a target manages to get away after a hit. When I scoop a black box, audio message - scanning escape pod for signs of life - is issued. How does the system distinguish between a black box and an escape pod? And what can be done to change this behaviour? It's not a problem, it's just an annoyance that in the heat of battle, I think I caught the bloke that I was after.

ozhank wrote:

How does the system distinguish between a black box and an escape pod?

One contains a pilot.

You've got a combination of things from two different OXPs leading this situation.

• The 'scanning for signs of life' message is generated by BGS
• The black boxes are added by Rescue Stations

It's a little difficult to be sure, since either of those OXPs could be not doing enough checking here, but I'm guessing that probably it's a case of BGS not checking for a pilot before playing the message. I think also that BGS predates Rescue Stations by some time, so it has always been under the impression there was only one kind of pod. Rescue Stations, (I'm guessing for game-engine reasons) treats black boxes as similar to pods, but without a pilot.

(@ mods.. as an OXP issue, perhaps this thread could be moved to the relevant section?)

Diziet Sma wrote:

similar to pods, but without a pilot.

I think the black box does have a "pilot" as that was the only way I could find at the time to get it to run a script on docking if and only if it was still in the hold.

cim wrote:

I think the black box does have a "pilot" ...

I am not sure. When I take a quick look into shipdata, i find two black box entries. One explicit contains a pilot, but the other very explicit has none: With that code set, even a pilot of a ship can't climb into the pod when it is ejected. No idea though when which box is used as I never installed the oxp.

Eric Walch wrote:

No idea though when which box is used as I never installed the oxp.

I think the unpiloted one is used for the black box missions, and the piloted one for loose ones on the spacelanes.