Oolite Bulletins

Aye, captain, the lookout has spotted a fat frigate flying the Dutch flag. Argh, shall we show our colors?

What? I think it would be very interesting to come across an innocent trader and her escorts when suddenly they turn pirate and attack. Could it be done?

Q-ships, you mean? Yes, interesting... especially if they lured victims in with bogus distress calls.

Cody wrote:

Q-ships, you mean?

Que?

I'm going to poke around the patrolAI's to see how cops tag the player ship. On the other hand, no response to my query is probably not a good sign.

A Q-ship was a normal-looking freighter which in fact was heavily armed. They were used during both World Wars to lure and dispatch enemy vessels, particularly submarines.
I have been thinking a bit about this idea - I like it a lot. However it would not be easy to make it convincing as effectively you would need to turn a Trader into a Pirate, and switching roles is not currently possible. There may be some workaround that could give the same impression though.

CaptSolo wrote:

Could it be done?

ship.primaryRole is writable by script, and the AI would be possible to do (though making it respond sensibly in both "pirate" and "trader" states would probably require a substantial AI file). As things stand the need to do things in Javascript as well as just in AI would probably mean you had to add your own like_ships with an appropriate role, and handle population of them manually, rather than just using a worldscript to replace the AI on some normally-added traders, but that's manageable.

It's not as easy as it should be, but it's certainly possible.

cim wrote:

It's not as easy as it should be, but it's certainly possible.

Good... a new project for Solo is definitely on the cards then?

It's possible that this is the sort of thing (like Deep Space Pirates) that could be made rather more player-centric than the rest of the game. To be honest, it's only the player that matters, here, so it could be possible to clear out a space in-system and set up an ambush for the player. That could help. So could writing the AI so they don't attack unless there's only one target visible on the scanner - the justification would be, they're protective of their (very valuable) "Clean" status and don't want any witnesses to their foul deeds. You'd probably want some sort of "Har har!" type communication from the ship once they've attacked, so the player gets a clue as to what's happened and doesn't assume it's a bug.

Disembodied wrote:

So could writing the AI so they don't attack unless there's only one target visible on the scanner...

That's something I wanted to add to the  Green Gecko, so it never attacked if there were any Vipers about - but I thought of it too late.