Oolite Bulletins

See in the wiki: Towbar.

This tool introducing a new way to make money: ship-mining!
Pull a derelict ship back to the dock to get your reward or mine it in the space.

Be careful when attacking a ship: slow your fire when the exthaust plume changing (or throwing sparks with CustomShields OXP) to avoid blowing it and stop immediately when you see the Escape capsule. Then approach to the derelict ship slowly to lock on the towbar.

Additional features:
- Ship Miner and Tug Drone extract ships without towing.
- Salvager Rankings: build your career up to 6000 salvaged ships.

New in v0.95:
-Parcels and urgent parcels can be found during ship mining.
-Audio and message warning if hit a derelict ship to stop fire in time.
-Laser Reductor limitation adjustable in $TowbarMaxReduct.
-Illegal cargo added into some ships with bounty.

Griff Prorotype Boa locked Towbar on Moray Medical Boat:


Payment in the dock:

Good idea - but that seems like a goodly (too good?) sum of cash.

BTW, are there any checks with this OXP? Can an adder tow an Anaconda? Does it affect the speed of the ship, or manoeuvrability?

I was wondering about the OXP equipment listed - does this OXP check what equipment OXPs you have installed, or will it pay you for stuff that doesn't exist in your Ooniverse

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Can an adder tow an Anaconda? Does it affect the speed of the ship, or manoeuvrability?

You can tow ships with maximum 1.6 times more mass than your ship, so an Adder can tow Adder only, a Moray can tow an Asp, a Cobra MkIII can tow a Python and only Anaconda can tow another Annie.

Speed and other parameters not affected (yet). The wiki page contain all informations about the mechanics: [wiki]Towbar[/wiki].

The cash will be adjusted if many user say it is too much. This is the initial release, some additions are already in my todo list, suggestions are welcomed.

Smivs wrote:

I was wondering about the OXP equipment listed - does this OXP check what equipment OXPs you have installed

Listed from the ship.equipment array which correct for the NPCs, surely contain installed equipments only. These are in my game and some of them awarded by the [wiki]ShipVersion[/wiki] OXP.

This Moray was v9 as you can see at the end of the name which get many eqs, so worth to target ships with high version numbers.

Norby wrote:

The cash will be adjusted if many user say it is too much. This is the initial release, some additions are already in my todo list, suggestions are welcomed.

It does seem very high: the player's getting Cr216 for undamaged fuel scoops, for example: that's slightly over 40% of the price for brand-new fuel scoops. It's hard to see where the profit is for the person you're selling this to: he's got to strip down the Moray, isolate and remove all the fittings; he's got to pay for equipment, space, time and personnel to do this. Then he's got to store all the stuff he's taken out that he can't instantly re-sell (and, undamaged or not, is he going to get the same price for a second-hand Fuel Scoop as he would for a brand-new one?), and find a customer for it, and then fit the thing to the new customer's ship, all within the selling price of Cr525, and make a profit.

There's not much of a sliding scale for the single biggest item, the ship's hull. An Adder gives Cr300, and an Anaconda gives Cr3300 - and in between you've got a Cobra III, which also gives Cr3300. A wider range, shifted down, would be better, I think. Obviously, in-game, the important thing is to balance the reward against the player's risk/time/effort invested - if it's really difficult and time-consuming to do, if the player has to face problems, if e.g. the injectors won't work while towing, as well as the Torus, and the ship becomes much harder to fly, then a larger reward could be justified (and if it didn't seem economically justifiable, then an extra bonus could be disguised by dropping the "You get X credits for Y alloys salvaged" and replacing it with "You get X credits for the salvaged hull of the ship", and hiding the actual workings). I wouldn't use in-game scales to set the values, as they're pretty screwy anyway: use things like how hard it is to find (or "find" ) the derelicts, and bring them in safely, and assign value accordingly.

Off the cuff, I'm thinking it might be an idea to divide all these amounts of money by 10 - so the player would get Cr400 for a salvaged Moray, and maybe only get close to Cr4000 for something like a top-of-the line Boa.

Basically, the aim would be to avoid giving the player easy money. There's nothing wrong with an occasional bonanza, but this shouldn't be something you could get on pretty much every trip. Making the towbar a one-shot item - you use it, and you lose it, at the very least until you dock again - might help balance things out, too, so the player can't just grab the first thing he finds, then dump it and get a better one, and then dump that when something even better comes along.

Hows about a licence/insurance? That way when things are quiet profits are eaten up, but when they're good your profits over the licence/insurance margin are very good? Just jumping in and making a random suggestion

I'm a bit reluctant to say this as you've clearly put a lot of effort onto this project, but I do wonder if it is not a bit over-complicated.
As has been pointed out, the 'rewards' at the moment seem a bit high, and also I question whether a scrapyard would go to the bother of doing such a detailed assessment of a ship before paying up. It seems that they have fully stripped the ship and given an individual value to every item. To do this would take a lot of time and therefore to be 'realistic' a goodly bit of time (like several days?) should be added to the ship's clock at the time of payment to reflect this.
Looking at a real-world analogy, taking an old car to the breakers, things are done very differently. Normally you would be offered a flat rate for an old car, varying a bit based on age and condition.
On a good day you might get say £200 for a runner that has maybe failed an MOT or equivalent statutory safety check. This car would have an intrinsic scrap value and quite a few parts that could be sold on. A total pile of junk might be worth about £50, just the scrap-metal value.
Considering that this car could have cost say £20 000 when new 10 years ago even the runner is only worth about 1% of its 'new' price. So a more realistic pricing/reward system might pay 1% of the cost of an equivalent new ship from the shipyard, or less if it is a total lemon. In other words a scrap Cobby 3 would be worth at best 150Cr, an Adder a mere 65Cr and even an Anaconda would only return 650Cr.
Whether it is worth salvaging for figures like this is open to debate, and of course these are more like boats/ships than cars, so maybe a better return is justifiable. I think 5% of the purchase price would be more realistic, making a salvaged Cobby 3 worth 750Cr. This is worthwhile while not being too silly, I think.

Yes, a short summary might be better. I also think that the ship shouldn't be in the screen center, you could move it to the upper right corner instead. I think in most cases it is better to separate the text from the model.

@Smivs: Why reluctant? We (and specially the OXPers) need to talk with each other. Even if a request doesn't go in the OXP it's always good to suggest improvements.

Svengali wrote:

@Smivs: Why reluctant? We (and specially the OXPers) need to talk with each other. Even if a request doesn't go in the OXP it's always good to suggest improvements.

Ha, it's just that I know how much blood, sweat and tears go into making an OXP, and I didn't want to sound as though I was implying it was a waste of time or something similarly negative.
It's so easy to fall into the trap of over-complicating things when something simple may actually be better. I'm sure we've all been there - I know I have and I think with suitable tweaking this could be a very good, very popular OXP, so I was just concerned that I might sound a bit negative about it, which I'm not.

Thank you guys for the ideas! Now v0.7 released based on your requests,

Disembodied wrote:

where the profit is for the person you're selling this to: he's got to strip down the Moray, isolate and remove all the fittings; he's got to pay for equipment, space, time and personnel to do this.

You are right in the processing costs and many others so the v0.7 contain changes:
* payment reduced to max. 10% and 300Cr for equipments,
* hull payments widened and reduced (see in the  wiki),
* alloy amount hidden but still arrive into the market,
* disabling injectors was in my todo before, now maded,
* pitch rate very low when tow a ship (1/5 of the original).

Torus can not be disabled from js and I want to leave in as a solution for the long-range towing.
One-shot make the job a bit harder but a towbar is a simple tool in my eyes, I can not imagine why can not use it again so thank you but I skip this one.

ZygoUgo wrote:

Hows about a licence/insurance?

I do not understand what you suggest, please describe a bit more.
Stronger ships with high version or with more equipments pay more already.

Smivs wrote:

It seems that they have fully stripped the ship and given an individual value to every item. To do this would take a lot of time

I think the player can sell to a dealer who investigate only and pay without stripping the ship, so paying less is ok but adding clock time is not necessary.

The 1% of a new Annie is 6500Cr (you lost a zero somewhere ). Now the hull give about 3000Cr and if you are very lucky to get many costly cargo (in about every 10. ship) then can get up to 6000Cr in total, but in average can get 1-3000 credits depending on the size and the version of the ship. I would not like to push the average below this due to a derelict ship can be acquired mainly in combat where easily can get some damage to the owned equipments which need repairs and the reward should be more than the average repair cost.

Svengali wrote:

the ship shouldn't be in the screen center, you could move it to the upper right corner instead.

The ship placed with mission.runscreen for simplicity, move it to the corner need CCL calls, am I right?

Personally I prefer detailed equipment list due to good to know what was in my enemy after a fight.

Norby wrote:

The ship placed with mission.runscreen for simplicity, move it to the corner need CCL calls, am I right?

Either this or copy this part into your script. It doesn't make sense to grab the full set if you only need one method .-)

Norby wrote:

ZygoUgo wrote:

Hows about a licence/insurance?

I do not understand what you suggest, please describe a bit more.
Stronger ships with high version or with more equipments pay more already.

I think the suggestion is that the purchase of the Towbar also requires a license - perhaps the Towbar is a proper investment, that scavenger/salvager is a recognised role by Galcop - purchasing the Towbar requires the purchasing of an annual "Salvager's Hauling (Including Towing)" Permit which is valid for one full standard year, payable in advance and with no refund (if you remove the Towbar early).

Could there be a small chance that the Towbar breaks? Or that the ship you're towing is pulled apart by the tow either gradually, so it becomes less valuable the longer you tow it for, or destructively as it blows up behind you. No activity should be without an element of danger...

Norby wrote:

The ship placed with mission.runscreen for simplicity, move it to the corner need CCL calls, am I right?

Not necessarily: you get mission.displayModel as a reference to the ship object, and it has a position flag (the camera is at [0,0,0] facing [1,0,0,0]). For a one-off move to another position, just do mission.displayModel.position = [...]. CCL still if you want to actually animate it, though.

Incidentally, Norby, have you seen the salvage process at work in the [wiki]Deep Space Dredger[/wiki] OXP? There might be some ideas there you'd like ... one which does occur is that salvaged ships - or at least those towed in by unlicensed salvagers, to borrow ZygoUgo's suggestion - can't be taken to the main station (too many awkward questions, all those insurance papers, you'd have to prove that you weren't responsible for the pilot ejecting, etc.). You could have salvage stations, or dockable ships, where an unlicensed player has to take their salvage, and there might not be one in every system: perhaps they only hang about in a selection of the more unstable worlds. The licensed trade might be safer and easier, but the license costs a lot of money and the rewards aren't great: but there could be bigger money, with more effort and risk, being an unlicensed salvager.

Players might have to tow their salvage across several systems, refuelling on the way (perhaps sunskimming, perhaps parking their salvage somewhere quiet with a beacon on board, which might attract unwelcome attention, from pirates AND from the police, depending where you are). By making the process harder, by turning each salvaged ship into a mini-mission, that would justify higher financial rewards. The economics don't matter as much as the risk/effort-reward ratio in the game. Easy jobs should get low rewards, and hard ones should get higher rewards: the whys and wherefores can be explained away afterwards!