Oolite Bulletins

I'm a newbie with an "Average" rating but when I got attacked last night by two bogies I decided that I'd give it a go. They turned out to be a Krait and a Fer-de-Lance.

The Krait was no problem but the Fer-de-Lance - oh boy. At first, after I'd destroyed the Krait, he seemed to want to call it quits but I had loads of fuel and chased him a high speed until he ran out. Then we must have spent about five or ten minutes dogfighting. He was a real SOAB and it took dozens of hits from my military laser to take him down. He ejected at the last second and as I'd lost 3 tons of cargo in the battle (so I had space in the hold) I though "Right Sunshine, you're coming with me".

I took him back to the Space Station and his insurance paid me 250 credits for rescuing him.

RESCUING HIM!

He destroyed 3 tons of cargo (computers) and damaged my docking computers and compass. I wanted to see the b*****d hung, drawn and quartered.

The next time I meet sombody like him, he ain't coming home.

Renegade Pirates OXP attempts to redress this balance! Capturing Renegades pays a bounty of between 200 and 3000 credits (as does shooting them down). These pirates are tough cookies though!

Oolite has given that message as the Commander captured was clean. Somtimes a pirate has not yet aquired a criminal record as the police have not spotted him up to anything. Clean ships will somtimes attack you though if you are not clean (and the police will join in on their side). Bounty hunting in Oolite cuts both ways!

When you scoop an escape capsule, they are either good guys or bad guys, so you either rescue them or capture them. The rewards for rescuing are far higher than for capturing, probably because it's an insurance payout versus a "government" reward (ring of truth).

The Ferdie was possibly clean and you fired on him so he became an aggressor, the Scanner Targeting Enhancement will tell you if he is a friend or foe.

Good Hunting

Bear in mind, also, that the escape capsule is under it's own power and on the way to the nearest dockable entity, anyway, when you scoop it. All you saved him was a bit of a wait and some life support resources.

I am clean Commander and only take a shot on blips that are not red if they have a bounty on them. I get insurance money for 'rescuing' pirates I've shot down quite often.

Sounds realistic. His insurance paid me for not kiling him and if his policy is anything worth it also covers bribing local Gal-Cop to let him go with a clean slate. What do I care what happens to him after I see my credits. I've already proved myself a better pilot than him by downing him once. Just let him out and I'll bring him back in for some more credits if he should take to piracy again

(btw what's up with the escape sequence? I used it a lot when testing an oxp. It sends my ship off to the distance while I stand still )

I guess that is just that your ship is continuing forward, as the pod spins away. After a few seconds tumbling your pods own rockets fire up. I've always assumed the view is you looking out at your old ship from the pod's window.

LittleBear wrote:

I guess that is just that your ship is continuing forward, as the pod spins away. After a few seconds tumbling your pods own rockets fire up. I've always assumed the view is you looking out at your old ship from the pod's window.

I have tested it close to buoys and planets too and at zero velocity. I keep standing still and the ship takes off into the distance.

But your pod is being launched, so has some velocity in the direction it was launched. So your ship still disappears into the distance as your pod moves away from it.

LittleBear wrote:

But your pod is being launched, so has some velocity in the direction it was launched. So your ship still disappears into the distance as your pod moves away from it.

So you mean that my ship disappears into the distance because the pod moves? Well then what I described above can only be explained by the pod having some kind of crazy tractor beam, which drags not only debris, buoys, other ships, and stations but even planets and stars along with it as it goes. Since I, as I explained in above posts, stand still relatively to everything but my ship - a situation that would make it impossible to reach the station ever.

This is getting too nerdy

But. If the pod is shot out by some sort of ejection system giving it a speed of say 50 kph and the ship is stationary. Relative to the bouy the pod is moving at 50 kph and is also moving relative to the ship at 50 kph. So from your point of view in the pod it appears that the ship is moving away from you at high speed. Or maybe the ship is programed to fire its booster to full when the pod is ejected, in order to get the ship out of the way and reduce the risk of the pod hitting the abandoned ship.

Third time: The buoy, the planet, the sun, the debris everything stands completely still. The ship disappears into the horizon.

Nothing nerdy, no laws of action and reaction. Just an error in the game which makes the ship shoot off instead off the pod.

You're right - the ship is set to move off at 50m/s while the escape pod gets a small random vector. Should be changed in PlayerEntity.m to give the escape pod z = -50 m/s plust the random vector relative to the ship's existing velocity (which should by-and-large be unchanged since the escape pod's mass is so small).

It's not a progamming-error-bug - just an aspect-of-gameplay-that-can-confound-some-expectations-bug.

aegidian wrote:

It's not a progamming-error-bug - just an aspect-of-gameplay-that-can-confound-some-expectations-bug.

No problem. Just felt that I'd tried to explain myself a couple of times there.

Who uses those pods anyways? I'll go down defending my cargo before even thinking of hitting escape. I didn't notice the feature before using the escape pod because it was faster for reloading a saved game than restarting the entire application when testing oxps. Does one get to keep equipment? I might smell an exploit spending 900cr rather than 40k+ on repairing a Naval Energy Unit. Well if it's there it's probably only new to me

TGHC wrote:

The Ferdie was possibly clean and you fired on him so he became an aggressor, the Scanner Targeting Enhancement will tell you if he is a friend or foe.

I had that and my 'standard tactic' is to get a missile lock so I can see from the indicator in the gun sights which direction he's flown off in. I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed if he'd been clean.

Perhaps as LittleBear suggested he was a bad guy who hadn't got a record yet. He we a good pilot though and well equiped.