The Oolite NPC ecosystem (and other questions)

[Smivs]

Smivs sees a 'canon war' brewing, grins...

On a serious note I don't see why transmission range should be limited. As an example the Voyager probes (which are currently around 15 and 18 trillion kilometres from Earth - further than Pluto) transmit back to Earth using very modest 23w radios. True, you need an enormous dish to pick-up the signal, but in the Oolitey future I can happily expect that a ship could transmit to any point in a given solar-system.

[JazHaz]

[heresy alert] I don't really see TDW as canon, tbh. [/heresy alert]

Heretic! Burn him!

[cim]

However Elite canon (ie The Dark Wheel) suggests transmissions have a very long range. Consider the RemLok survival system:

Since help arrived within 20 seconds there - and tiny uncrewed drones, at that - it may not be that the range of the actual RemLok transmitter is that high. "Patrol sector near the sun" could be a description of direction, not distance.

Even assuming the drones were on a permanent standby patrol, 20 seconds is really not very long. The descriptions of the fight and the destruction of the escape pod in the previous chapter do suggest that Jason Ryder had managed to keep the Avalonia in one piece all the way from the witchpoint to the planet, or perhaps even to the station aegis: a detail - and a testament to his genuine skill as an Elite combateer - that I'd overlooked before.

As for TDW's canonicity... compare the descriptions of Elyssia Fields and her planet's history to the system info screen for Teorge.

On a serious note I don't see why transmission range should be limited.

Oh, there's no obvious reason for it - though perhaps if you were trying to send a distress call, your enemies are likely to be broadcasting static on the same frequency - the limitation is more for practical purposes. OXP missions aside, which can and do make special arrangements, how far from a ship's current position is it actually useful to send a distress call?
(Would it be useful for the player to be receiving NPC distress calls regardless of relative position?)

[JazHaz]

As for TDW's canonicity... compare the descriptions of Elyssia Fields and her planet's history to the system info screen for Teorge.

You mean "This planet is a tedious little planet.". Sounds about right to me. Clones would be quite tedious to deal with.

[cim]

As for TDW's canonicity... compare the descriptions of Elyssia Fields and her planet's history to the system info screen for Teorge.

You mean "This planet is a tedious little planet.". Sounds about right to me. Clones would be quite tedious to deal with.

I mean the description of Fields as "humanoid" with "olive skin", "dark hair", "hands", etc.

[JazHaz]

As for TDW's canonicity... compare the descriptions of Elyssia Fields and her planet's history to the system info screen for Teorge.

You mean "This planet is a tedious little planet.". Sounds about right to me. Clones would be quite tedious to deal with.

I mean the description of Fields as "humanoid" with "olive skin", "dark hair", "hands", etc.

Oh you must mean the black lobsters. Sounds like a writers error, or maybe the life descriptions hadn't yet been added to Elite when the book was written.

[Cody]

The next topic up for discussion in the Oolite DDF will be...

[Smivs]

<chuckles>

[cim]

The next topic up for discussion in the Oolite DDF will be...

Far less controversial than the other one, anyway...

One thing I've realised I missed off the populator discussion: Thargoids! In 1.77 one gets added to the initial system about 6% of the time. (10% or 3%, in fact, depending on whether the original inhabitants of the system before changes via planetinfo.plist or script were Colonials or not)

What I'm considering is having two types of Thargoid appearances (they'll both use the "thargoid" role to determine which ships are used):
thargoid-scout: a single warship is added, makes its way to the space lanes, and attacks. They won't appear near the normal witchpoint, or it'll be too hard to believe that the witchbuoy has survived this long. These ships can appear anywhere on something similar to the current frequency, but are a little more frequent in systems with a lower hub count.
thargoid-strike: a raiding party of thargoid warships is very rarely added to systems (once every few days), attacking strategic targets (stations, large freighters, etc.). The size of the party depends on whether the system is a bottleneck [1].
No: 1-2 ships. Barely distinguishable from scouts
Yes: 4-5 ships. Not something you'd want to meet early on, but if they appear every few days, considering that most systems aren't bottlenecks you'll probably only see them once every hundred trips at most.
Double: 10-15 ships. Major emergency, but double bottlenecks are very rare (I think Anbeen and Edorte are the only ones in G1. Other charts have more, but still not that many). Unless you're trying to hunt these down, seeing one will be a very rare occurrence.
Triple: the formula I used to get the previous numbers gives 30-50 ships. There are only two triple bottleneck systems (Esgelage and Erusat), and you'd have to visit them perhaps fifty times before you actually saw this invasion fleet, so it doesn't seem worth special-casing this down to a more sensible number. There'll be someone who actually wants to hunt them, I'm sure.

[1] To see if a system is a bottleneck, consider only the systems within 7LY of the system. Then remove the original system. If the remaining systems are split into two disconnected groups, then it's a bottleneck. Lave is a bottleneck (groups "Zaonce" and "everything else"). They're really obvious on the map and not straightforward to describe formally... Double bottlenecks split into three disconnected groups.

[Disembodied]

Interesting! How will NPCs react to the presence of Thargoids, by the way? I have, in my time, been attacked by pirates AND Thargoids simultaneously ... although on one memorable occasion (during the Thargoid Plans mission, I think), I was able to scrape the pursuing bugs off onto a pack of pirates, which was gratifying.

Would it also be worthwhile factoring in some sort of in-system response to the larger Thargoid incursion, perhaps? Give the station a chance to launch a number of Vipers (and/or hunters? Navy Asps?), and send them out to intercept the bugs?

[Cody]

Yes, very interesting!

[Smivs]

Hmmm, 30-50 Thargoids! I'd better stock up on a few extra spray cans of 'Bug-R-Off'

[cim]

Interesting! How will NPCs react to the presence of Thargoids, by the way? I have, in my time, been attacked by pirates AND Thargoids simultaneously ...

Good point. Probably most ships should ignore their disagreements temporarily if a Thargoid ship starts attacking.

Would it also be worthwhile factoring in some sort of in-system response to the larger Thargoid incursion, perhaps? Give the station a chance to launch a number of Vipers (and/or hunters? Navy Asps?), and send them out to intercept the bugs?

I don't know. Anything below the double bottleneck event probably doesn't need a dedicated response - the normal spacelane traffic should be enough to take it down eventually.

Doubles I'm less sure about. On the one hand, if you know the formula, you realise that these attacks must be taking place every few days for the player to have any chance of being present at one at all. That implies a strong response force is available in-system (for that size of fleet, Viper Interceptors and Asps are probably the only suitable ships, and even then you'd need a lot of them). That sort of standing response force should be able to intimidate the local pirates into submission: we're looking at combining the typical patrols of a high-tech Corporate State into a single fighting unit.

On the other hand, most of them are not high-tech Corporate States. Maybe we should let the player be a hero or a coward in the unlikely event they see one of these invasions, and not worry too much about what happens when they aren't there - we can leave it to an OXP to fill in the standing military (unless I've missed some, there are only 19 double and 2 triple in total, so they would be logical places to focus on)

[Disembodied]

Probably most ships should ignore their disagreements temporarily if a Thargoid ship starts attacking.

Would that mean they would attack the Thargoid, or try to flee, or a mixture of both? Merchants and pirates might try to flee, but a hunter might try to fight ... or would this all just be taken care of by an evaluation of the odds?

Maybe we should let the player be a hero or a coward in the unlikely event they see one of these invasions, and not worry too much about what happens when they aren't there - we can leave it to an OXP to fill in the standing military (unless I've missed some, there are only 19 double and 2 triple in total, so they would be logical places to focus on)

Thinking about it, you're right - although it might be worth broadcasting a system-wide alert/distress call in the event of a major invasion, a little bit like the Nova mission: make something of an occasion of it for the player!

[CheeseRedux]

How will NPCs react to the presence of Thargoids, by the way? I have, in my time, been attacked by pirates AND Thargoids simultaneously ... although on one memorable occasion (during the Thargoid Plans mission, I think), I was able to scrape the pursuing bugs off onto a pack of pirates, which was gratifying.

That was a major gripe for me when I got Elite for the Amiga. There you'd frequently be attacked by a pack of pirates (in the usual player-centric way of Elite), and the packs would often contain a Thargoid. In other words, the once fearsome alien race hell-bent on destroying all of GalCop had been reduced to a mere pirate. It irked me so much that I actually sent them a letter (with some other, now long forgotten issues included for good measure), in duplicate to two different addresses. (It was impossible to determine which, if any, address was functional.) One was returned, the other made it and produced a reply.

Anyway, rambling aside: It is rather obvious that faced with a Thargoid — or at least a Thargoid group of a certain size and strength — all other vessels should abandon their quarrels. Not necessarily immediately (if the current target is spewing plasma and obviously on its last legs, a few more laser burst may be appropriate) nor necessarily to join forces against a common enemy (some may decide to leg it instead), but prolonged fighting while the alien menace is bearing down on them is just plain silly.

(Note: I haven't been playing in ages — prior to my recent re-installation my main commander had not been touched since October 2010, and the various experimental ones since April 2011 — so none of the above is based on current (or indeed previous) behaviour, but rather observations on how I see that the various NPC classes should interact.)