Oolite Bulletins

Does anyone know if there is any logic behind which ships appear where when you are looking to buy?

I don't have lots of funds, but I have enough to pick up the cheap Cobra Miner ship.

I noticed it on a milk run and by the time I had got the money together the ship had gone.

Given enough time, will more appear, or are they controlled by tech level (or something like).

Are there any extensions that would help in my hunt for my next ship.

As far as I know it is essentially random with restrictions. The main one being that a ship won't appear in a shipyard if its Tech Level (TL) is greater than the TL of the system.

On a side note, there are two problems with changing ships that compose badly:

- because the shipyard is randomly built, no OXP can tell where is what the player is looking for (see the "deterministic Oolite" thread),
- You really want to sell at top service level in order not to lose more of your hard-earned credits than you already are (resell value of ship is something like 30% of original value, so that's 50KCr lost for a Cobra Mk3).

It composes badly because you cannot perform a maintenance until the game offers it (based on the fact that the service level drops below 85%), and while you are looking for the desired ship, your service level does go down! As if it wasn't hard enough, there are also additional issues like the fact that maintenance is offered only in systems of TL 7 minimum, and not all of your current equipment may be transferred to your new ship ("portability" is a property of equipments).

Will.

The shipyard is controlled within the core game internally, OXPs can not modify nor get any info about the logic. Alternetive solutions are imaginable though.

For example a nice improvement could be in Station Dock Control if you could ask of the docked pilots whether his ship is for sale. In this way even if you see a wanted ship in the space flying towards a station you can follow it then talk with the pilot in the station.

Norby wrote:

For example a nice improvement could be in Station Dock Control if you could ask of the docked pilots whether his ship is for sale.

That's a great idea, Norby! I'll look into it!

Norby wrote:

For example a nice improvement could be in Station Dock Control if you could ask of the docked pilots whether his ship is for sale. In this way even if you see a wanted ship in the space flying towards a station you can follow it then talk with the pilot in the station.

That is a good idea - anything which can provide potential non-violent interactions with NPCs is worth considering!

Another approach might be to let the player put down a deposit on a ship. The ship is then held in that shipyard for a set period of time (perhaps based on the amount put down - a bigger deposit buys you more time?). If the player fails to make it back in time with the rest of the cash, though, then they lose (some? all of?) their deposit. Cancelling the sale before the time limit could be possible, but would have to be done in person (i.e. at that specific shipyard), and would still cost the player a percentage of the original deposit.

All that sounds easy in my head … now someone just needs to code it up, and we're golden!

IMO if we make it so that negotiations can fail we are kind of back to square one; always being able to buy the ship is also weird. So maybe Disembodied's idea could be a backup plan (more or less like a parcel contract except you lose your reservation credits if you're not there in time).

An even more ambitious idea would be to build the ship yourself: bring X tons of alloys, Y tons of computers, Z tons of machinery, etc. to a factory-rock-hermit. The quantities are fixed and depend on the market value of the ship, so the player would rather hunt for the best prices. It's perhaps more fitted to the towbar OXP that introduces a lot of the appropriate stuff already.

These don't have to be exclusive options - they could all work. Finding a pilot who is willing to sell their ship at a price the player is willing to pay might be quite rare …

There could be occasional ship auctions - Cim's New Cargoes could provide the mechanics. And having a ship custom-built could be an extreme version of buying a junker and getting it fixed up.