Oolite Bulletins

I've recently bought a Falcon S; but it needs a maintenance overhaul after every few jumps, even when I've not seen any combat. Is this the penalty I have to pay to fly such a cool ship, or is there a problem?

Hi Bazza! Yes, the maintenance bill on a Falcon S can rapidly get out of hand, eh?

If you read through the following thread, you will find detailed instructions on how to tweak a number of things in the Falcon, including fixing the (many) frangible sub-entities, which get so expensive to maintain.

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 6&start=15

Diziet Sma wrote:

Hi Bazza! Yes, the maintenance bill on a Falcon S can rapidly get out of hand, eh?

If you read through the following thread, you will find detailed instructions on how to tweak a number of things in the Falcon, including fixing the (many) frangible sub-entities, which get so expensive to maintain.

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 6&start=15

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for, although I'm a bit apprehensive as I've never tweaked a frangible before. I'll give it a go and let you know how it goes.

This post has taken me to Above Average! Hooray!

I too had that problem and gave up flying it, until I found the above answer. I think it is one of the coolest ships available to fly, and with a few other oxp's, probably puts it into the ubership category.
I still have to find that missing ship from from G1!

Bazza wrote:

it needs a maintenance overhaul after every few jumps, even when I've not seen any combat

Thargoid wrote:

I would expect it's losing sub-entities, either by script or by damage.

There's no scripting to cause damage, but it has several sub-entities located in positions highly susceptible to accidental docking damage, even if you don't have any combat damage.. that hulking great satellite dish sticking out the top is especially vulnerable to coming in a little too high.. and there are protruding side-entities which are easy to smash up during docking thanks to the pilot's viewpoint being offset so far to starboard.. the viewpoint makes both docking and scooping VERY easy to mess up.

Now, I tend to use the "scoop-cam" view that I added, for docking as well.. it makes it so much easier to line up on the slot.

I tried Diziet Sma's suggestion and that didn't really help, just increased the time for maintenance up to 5-6 jumps. So despite having a fun time with it for a while it's back to the ol' Military Stingray for me. Pirate Falcons are a pain to deal with; but it's very satisfying to see bits being blown off. Thanks for all the help, and a Happy New Year!

Bazza

Strange.. I get a lot longer than that between maintenance intervals.. I wonder if something went wrong with your changes? Just to humour me, could you try using this copy of the shipdata.plist from my Kestrel&FalxonOXP? (You'll need to rename it to get rid of the "(copy)" bit in the filename)

https://app.box.com/s/rx4qfk54gc7tjddidlin

Another Falcon/Faulcon question - it appears to me that the fore laser does not line up exactly in the centre of the target reticule, but slightly to the left. Is there a way to fix this please?

Yes, it can be, (kind of) if you want..

This is why you get this problem.. so as to make it look like the laser beam fires straight up the screen , it is mounted directly under the pilot's cupola, as you can see in these two screenshots, one taken from underneath the ship, and one from the scoop-cam position (the scoop-cam view is located where the green flasher can be seen, behind/between the mandibles in pic one):





Since the laser beam travels straight ahead, the beam is 24 metres to the right of the Falcon centreline, all the way out to the full range. You can see in pic two that the beam is slightly to the right of the dot in the centre of the crosshairs.. all the way out to maximum weapon range. Thus, especially at closer ranges, you need to aim to the left of the crosshairs to compensate, by how much depends on the distance. It does not help that the Target Reticle Sensitive device, which turns red to indicate you're on target, calculates from the ship centreline. This has recently been corrected in trunk, to calculate from the weapon position instead, but that won't make an appearance until 1.79 is officially released..

Until then, the problem is that the Targeting Reticle incorrectly indicates a lock when the target is off to the side of the laser-beam path, particularly at closer ranges:



If you like, I can relocate the laser to the ship centreline for you, which will allow the Target Reticle Sensitive to work correctly, but not only will the laser then appear to come from the left of your screen, but you will then need to aim to the right of the crosshairs instead, to hit your target, due to the fact that your viewpoint is offset 24 metres to the right.

However.. when you are on-target, the TRS indicator will change to red, instead of being slightly misleading, as it is now. The other possibility will then be for you to fight from the scoop-cam view instead, where everything will line up properly, with the laser coming down from the top of the screen, but you will also have the mandibles blocking part of your view..

So it's a bit of a compromise, whatever we do, at least until the TRS fix is released.. it's up to you. You can have the fix for the laser position if you want it, but the results will still be less than ideal for now.

The change to make to the shipdata.plist is: Here is a replacement shipdata.plist with the laser repositioned to the centreline.. it also has all my other patches, for turrets, frangibility, etc included. Just remove the "-laser_fix" bit from the filename and add it to the Kestrel and Falcon OXP Config folder. Don't forget to hold down the shift key until you see the spinning Cobra Mk III when you first start Oolite up, so the cache will be rebuilt.

https://app.box.com/s/9fme3mwjzqedf6dc6qof

I've now done some testing on a cross-chart cargo run, and I must say the centreline laser makes it a damn sight easier to hit targets..

The expected slight sights misalignment is there, but having an accurate targeting reticle more than makes up for it.