Oolite Bulletins

 Barrel Roll OXP

Barrel-rolling is a time-proven evasive tactic, when attacked, for those that can't afford or prefer not to fight back, or are facing overwhelming odds, and can't out-run their attackers.

But manually keeping a ship barrel-rolling for minutes to hours until the attacker(s) give up is a boring, mindless and even painful task.

With that in mind, Think of It as Evolution in Action Corporation would like to present Barrel Roll Governor, a software add-on to your ship's auto-pilot.

Once primed (by pressing <Shift>-<N> in the default keyboard configuration) and activated (by pressing <N> in the default keyboard configuration), this little add-on keeps the ship in a barrel-roll until de-activated (by pressing <N> again), leaving you to just adjust heading through your yaw controls now and then to keep going in the direction you want, but otherwise free to browse the Galactic Net, eat your doughnut, drink you tea, pet your cat, or do whatever your prefer to while the time away.

Available at Tech Level 9 and above systems for 300 credits.

License

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

Download

Available on the Expansion Manager and here.

... otherwise free to browse the Galactic Net, eat your doughnut, drink you tea, pet your cat, or do whatever your prefer to while the time away.

Well, we tried it.

Benedict brewed up a good pot of Yunnan, poured me a cup and then depressed our new 'Barrel-Roll' key on the astrogation board.

Bless me if the tea didn't end up everywhere - all over the monitors, the astrogation board ... not to mention Benedict and myself. My whiskers were fairly dripping. Thank heavens we had no guests on board at the time - I'd have been truly mortified!

When we finished clearing up the mess, I needed several good stiff gin-and-tonics to settle my nerves.

An excellent wheeze for evading the depredatory capitalists this gadget may well be, but for heavens sake drink your tea up first! And lay in a good stiff drink for recovery afterwards.

And ... I'd be truly amazed if any self-respecting feline stayed anywhere near enough to be petted.

I started a new commander, an Adder start, got a parcel contract in Lave to deliver a package at Begeabi for 465Cr +bonuses, with the expected sting in the tail of assassins after every jump and after every launch. After evading 32+ hostiles (couldn't really count them and ship.checkScanner returns at most 32 ships...) all the way from witchpoint to main station (no injectors, no lasers, standard shields), pressing the left and down keyboard arrow keys the whole time, I wrote this OXP.

Its effectiveness will depend on your ship maxRoll and maxPitch values, for an Adder (maxRoll=2.8, maxPitch=2.0), no shot would hit, with a Lira (maxRoll=0.9, maxPitch=0.5, and really large at 1106t), quite a few shots hit, but still less than shield recharge (it's an iron-ass though: Military Shield Enhancement, Naval Energy Unit and Naval Grid: energyRecharge of 9.1 and shield recharge of 4.4)

dybal wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 2:08 pm

... an Adder start, got a parcel contract in Lave to deliver a package at Begeabi for 465Cr +bonuses

In a stock Cobra III, that parcel contract is what I would call challenging! But it's a good start, if you can make it through!

Cody wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 5:17 pm

dybal wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 2:08 pm

... an Adder start, got a parcel contract in Lave to deliver a package at Begeabi for 465Cr +bonuses

In a stock Cobra III, that parcel contract is what I would call challenging! But it's a good start, if you can make it through!

I did, with two or three "press space, Commander" along the way... most of them due to missiles... I could evade the lasers, but I only managed to evade a missile one time, and one time I died as I tried to dock - so many followed me that even drawing their fire on the station to get it to launch the vipers to help were not enough (I should have move around a bit until more of then joined the fight before trying to dock).

It was fun, specially after I didn't have to keep pressing the arrow keys to maintain the barrel roll!

 Barrel Roll OXP v1.1 is available on the Expansion Manager and here.

Changes

• Changes price to make the equipment more accessible to new Jamesons.

dybal wrote: ↑Fri Nov 27, 2020 12:52 pm

 Barrel Roll OXP v1.1 is available on the Expansion Manager and here.

Changes

• Changes price to make the equipment more accessible to new Jamesons.

While I really enjoy my life captaining a ship around Ooniverse (and the barrel roll OXP has definitely extended that joy) I also find some room for improvement:

Currently the OXP behaves as if I were pressing roll and pitch, which is good but there is very little help setting the direction of spiral. I'd be happy if I could use the controls to manipulate the spiral center axis and thus better approach a desired position. Having to pulse-code on my keyboard feels clumsy.
Not being an OXP author I have no clue how difficult to achieve this is.

As a last resort, or additional feature it might help if the Barrel Roll OXP could launch the maneuver smooth enough so the axis of the ship before the barrel roll would actually become the axis of the spiraling, and fade out in a way that the spiral axis becomes the direction of the ship again.