Oolite Bulletins

This is my first time posting.

As a suggestion can someone make a Whichspace anomaly that spits you out in a random system in the galaxy that you are in.
Example: fly into a collapsing Witchspace cloud and you don't know where you will end up.
This could make Oolite even more intresting.
Or would this break the basic game?

Good idea, as long as its within the 7 LY limit.

Welcome aboard. Cmd. Cheyd's EWI can be useful - and unpredictable. Caveat emptor!

I was thinking of more than 7ly it would be an anomaly after all.
Just to throw you out of of the systems that you know???

There was some thought given a while back to reworking misjumps to pick a random distance to target system, a random jump direction, or occasionally a completely random destination.

So long as it can't be triggered from script and the jump time is as you'd expect for a 50 LY jump (three and a half months) I don't see it being exploitable to get around the 7LY limit. The first thing needed, though, would be to distinguish between "malfunction" and "Thargoid intervention" as causes for misjumps. At the moment the two are identical.

I think it would come under Malfunction category.
It was purely a suggestion.
I bow to those that know better.

cim wrote:

There was some thought given a while back to reworking misjumps to pick a random distance to target system, a random jump direction, or occasionally a completely random destination.

<grins>

Wolfsstar BH wrote:

I think it would come under Malfunction category.
It was purely a suggestion.

Yes, agreed. It would give those people who never buy the ship maintenance more of a reason to do so, too, if they could be thrown that far off course.

It's a good suggestion, but it needs some scaffolding we don't yet have in the core game. It would be possible - though not particularly easy - for someone to put together the anomaly as an OXP, though. All the necessary features exist.

I've actually written something like this. One of the things my (unreleased) 'Improbability Drive' OXP does, is drop the player into a wormhole than can land him/her anywhere within 7 LYs. And, if the player is really lucky/unlucky, the same thing immediately happens again upon arrival in the new system. The OXP is unfinished but that part of it works.

EDIT: I didn't know about the Emergency Witchspace Initiator OXP. I'll give it a go!

cim wrote:

There was some thought given a while back to reworking misjumps to pick a random distance to target system, a random jump direction, or occasionally a completely random destination.

So long as it can't be triggered from script and the jump time is as you'd expect for a 50 LY jump (three and a half months) I don't see it being exploitable to get around the 7LY limit. The first thing needed, though, would be to distinguish between "malfunction" and "Thargoid intervention" as causes for misjumps. At the moment the two are identical.

I'm against the player being "tossed" more than 7 LY from the start just because it would break the aesthetic of the 7 LY max jump limit. It would be rather cruel to do this even within a 7 LY radius often because it's still likely to drop the player too far from a system for them to jump to it with their remaining fuel. The original Elite on the Commodore 64 had misjumps that did drop you in a semi-random location within 7 LY of your start. I had to restart game almost every time that happened.

It is already possible to jump a random distance towards a particular target system that is within 7 LY via script, but it is rather hard to utilize in a "useful" manner I've found.

Switeck if it's an oxp you don't have to load it!
I don't mean being dumped in the middle of nowhere (a system would be nice, Witchspace a possibility)
Think of it as a mission to get back where you started from

Switeck wrote:

I'm against the player being "tossed" more than 7 LY from the start just because it would break the aesthetic of the 7 LY max jump limit. It would be rather cruel to do this even within a 7 LY radius often because it's still likely to drop the player too far from a system for them to jump to it with their remaining fuel

I don't see how that 'breaks the aesthetic' at all.. after all, this isn't some technological malfunction we're talking about, this is a genuine freakish space-time anomaly at work, such as might happen if your path just happened to blunder into a naturally occurring wormhole.. (anyway, a GalJump breaks the 7LY aesthetic by definition)

And why are you assuming that it dumps the player in deep space? From what I could see in the discussion above, the idea is that you end up "in system".. just a helluva long way away from where you expected to be, not to mention now being months late for several important appointments.

Diziet Sma wrote:

I don't see how that 'breaks the aesthetic' at all.. after all, this isn't some technological malfunction we're talking about, this is a genuine freakish space-time anomaly at work, such as might happen if your path just happened to blunder into a naturally occurring wormhole.. (anyway, a GalJump breaks the 7LY aesthetic by definition)

And why are you assuming that it dumps the player in deep space? From what I could see in the discussion above, the idea is that you end up "in system".. just a helluva long way away from where you expected to be, not to mention now being months late for several important appointments.

I misread the initial post that said TO a random system. But also I don't believe a Witchspace anomaly would typically cause the player to end up in the wrong system. There is too much empty space and so a random location is unlikely to be a system. Only if hyperspace jumps are somehow "self-correcting" would ships get pulled to a system when an anomaly occurs. Thargoids supposedly pull ships out of hyperspace and to their current location... or fight from inside hyperspace, depending on which interpretation of the original Elite and novels you believe. The witchspace beacon at systems may serve to pull ships to it as well, but that may only be to cause them to cluster within 25 km of it rather than be somewhere else in-system...like the other side of the sun!

While a GalJump breaks the 7LY aesthetic by definition, it is extremely hard to exploit it to go somewhere else in the same Galaxy Chart...plus it also breaks/ends all your cargo/passenger contracts when you do it. Plus that's normally a 1-shot device, so going back to the same Galaxy Chart using it is a hassle.

Wolfsstar BH wrote:

Switeck if it's an oxp you don't have to load it!

cim wrote:

So long as it can't be triggered from script and the jump time is as you'd expect for a 50 LY jump (three and a half months) I don't see it being exploitable to get around the 7LY limit.

If it can't be triggered or at least allowed from script, it can't be an OXP. I wouldn't want random jumps to >7LY to happen in regular Oolite.

no I would not like it to happen in regular Oolite but as an oxp you have the option!
It's just an idea for old hands to Oolite to stir things up!