Oolite Bulletins

Now that we can control the size of the market of a station, could we also control the size of the ship shop through shipdata?

For example for Random Hits I could envision a small shipyard with max 5 ships for sale.

Hmm. I see that quite a lot ships are being sold per station, but the number is still limited and often enough you have to look for some time, before you get your dream deal.

It would be a nice OXP to make things a bit more challenging, but I for my part ain't lured by this idea at this point.

Ooops. This isn't a OXP suggestion threat. Stupid, sexy View active topics link. As always. I'm all in favour for more customisation. (Even if I was mistaken with the idea for an OXP in the beginning, who know what ingenius OXP could get possible with this!)

In deed, a customization feature in question. We can argue about individual oxp later, but as a personal opinion, stations that are smaller than the main station should have smaller shipyards. This could also make it possible to create some dedicated shipyard stations with more ships than the main station.

I dunno if this should be a core function or oxp, i like the idea though.

The shipshop could be expanded based on things the player currently achieved ( like doing some good trading ).
The shipshop could be expanded if the resources in the system get low in number / or very high in price ( simulating npc selling their ships )
The shipshop could be limited when there are a lot of pirates in the system ( npc buying ships to leave the system )
The shipshop could be expanded on a large station and/or high TL
The shipshop could be expanded on stations selling 'carriers' ( to fill them with identical ships for example )

Snoopers news :
current top 3 largest shipshops within 20 Lj :
1 system a 85 ships
2 system b 35 ships
3 system c 20 ships

And larger dedicated shipshop stations nice!

Currently core allows to turn the ship shop on or off. No other control, except from ships themselves, which can be limited. It has to be a core feature that allows setting the maximum size of the ship shop per station.

I'm sorry, but I keep reading it as chip shop. Please think of another name, before I try to order pie and mushies!

Do not be sorry, every ship shop above TL 7 has a chip shop with all your needs

So the core only supplies on/off, i sometimes asked myself why some stations had hardly any ships et all, is it based on TL?

cbr wrote:

... why some stations had hardly any ships et all, is it based on TL?

I was at a TL13 main station the other night which had no ships (or chips) for sale.

Hm. Perhaps it's only me, and perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't really consider the ship market (better, Cody?) to be part of the gameplay. Buying and selling ships isn't something that is done regularly, because it's probably the quickest way to lose money. It's not playing the game, it's more like upgrading (or downgrading) the game, something you plan carefully by studying the specs of the available core and OXP ships. Perhaps you'll think about creating your own OXP ship. Either way, it's not something you do spontaneously on some remote OXP station!

But even if you change ships relatively often - for reasons I can't imagine - the number of stations you visit will still be large compared to the number of ship changes (if only to earn money for the next ship). So, long story short, is it really important how many ships are available at a given station?

When i dock at a station i always look at ship shop, always curious to see what they have for sale and for what price.
Its kinda part of the experience of visiting a station.

Fritz wrote:

So, long story short, is it really important how many ships are available at a given station?

It's an ambiance thing for me. For example I consider SpaceBar to be a relatively small station with a bar and a small market place. For some reason it also has a standard size shipyard, which sort of breaks the illusion. Especially, if there are many pages of ships for sale. They must have some hyper cargo storage or something. Not a big thing really and if it requires some big change, then definitely not worth it. But if it's not a big change, then it's more possibilities for customization and that's always good in my book.

Accepted!

I don't have any OXP stations installed, and I never looked if there are ships for sale at rock hermits. But I just did, and there don't seem to be any.

No ship markets at rock hermits. I don't use any OXP stations either, but what spara says is valid.

Cody wrote:

No ship markets at rock hermits. I don't use any OXP stations either, but what spara says is valid.

Indeed I would like to have more control over the appearance of my own oxp ship at the shipyard.

Fritz wrote:

I don't really consider the ship market to be part of the gameplay

It might be for some players eg the broke adder start.

Fritz wrote:

Either way, it's not something you do spontaneously on some remote OXP station

What if I don't want my oxp ship appearing at the patrol station?

spara wrote:

No other control, except from ships themselves, which can be limited.

Is this controlled by "chance = 0.5;"?

Stormrider wrote:

spara wrote:

No other control, except from ships themselves, which can be limited.

Is this controlled by "chance = 0.5;"?

Chance, techlevel and condition_script. Chance is the pooled weight probability for the ship to appear, techlevel is the minimum techlevel of the station and condition_scripts let's you flexibly allow/block the ship from shipyards in any scriptable way you desire.

Edit: Not actually certain about the chance, since I don't know the basics of the ships for sale generation. It also affects the pre-installed extra equipment.