Oolite Bulletins

Trying to tie a couple of previous suggestions together, I've been thinking about salvaging ships. Here is my current idea.

Add a new type of missile to the game, call it a "remora" for now. When the pilot of an enemy ship ejects you can fire the remora at the abandoned ship and it will attach itself to the hull and override the now weakened security systems on the ship and send it to the GalCop station. When it docks you get the salvage value for the ship.

If you took the ship via piracy you don't get anything.

An extension this idea is to implement the "player can have multiple ships" request and when the ship docks it gets added to your fleet.

I like this idea but it might be a bit harder to implement than it seems because in the game engine the "player" is really a "ship" with extra routines tacked on rather than being its own type of entity and just having the current ship as an attribute. I think this means swapping ships means creating a new "player" and getting rid of the old one, but I'm not too sure yet.

I also considered piracy, but can't think of a relatively simple way to get the ship to go to a pirate station instead of a GalCop one, given none of the pirate station types are standard, and the player might not be supposed to know about them yet, etc, etc. I can't see a clean way to do the piracy thing because it's all done by OXPs so there is nothing that can be relied upon to be present.

I also thought about giving the choice of station to send the ship to, but the game engine can't ask questions while you're in flight yet.

Comments, suggestions?

Dajt - anything which gets ship salvage in is good in my books - the missile concept is good (similar but simpler than mine of a tracking missile that calls for tugs - as you don't need tugs (or a variation) installed).

Of course the weakened ship might not make it so you should still probably need to escort it in and make sure other opportunists don't use their own remora to override yours and thus claiming the salvage themselves.

If owning more than one ship is difficult/impossible how about having the option of having it repaired/stored at the station where the remora took it. Should you ever return to that station you can swap ships and your other ship goes into storage - effectively "SHIP_IN_STORAGE" becomes a piece of equipment that you can only use at a particular station (or stations if you do it more than once).

Hmmm, reading back all seems a bit woolly but you said you wanted thoughts so there was mine

My initial idea was the missile would send a message to the GalCop station and a "pilot boat" would bring out a pilot who would take the ship back.

I decided against this because it might make the piracy stuff harder to add in future, but if it doesn't I'm still open to the idea.

I could go either way on people stealing the hulk on its way in. If we don't want that to happen we can easily explain it away by saying the remora immediately registers the salvage with the station as soon as it has gained control of the hulk's systems. To implement stealing them would mean a lot of AI work and ships would have to be marked as hostile when they attack the hulk so you don't get penalised for defending it, even though they were not attacking you directly. I prefer to avoid all this for now.

The ship in storage thing is the same as owning multiple ships, so no saving there.

I forgot to mention that any ships you own but are not currently piloting will incur a periodic berthing fee from the station they're docked at. Paid in advance of course.

I've been looking at the "purchase a ship" code to see how it handles the swapover. It isn't trivial but it isn't too bad either.

One interesting thing I saw was that your legal status is tied to the ship so the ship's legal status will have to be saved along with all the other info. Perhaps it will reduce over time so if you leave the ship long enough the authorities will have forgotten about it.

one of the things i'd like to see implemented is having my own base. this may be a bit of a waste of time in the current multi-galaxy set up as a load of players wander all over, but my dream set-up would be our own galaxy (or another, no worries) set up properly (size etc) and all the in-fighting etc going on between moons/planets/stations etc. given that, you could buy components of bases (power units, turrets, repair robots, living sections, hangars etc) and mix/match a base as big and powerful as you wanted. obviiously this would mean a bit management as if you wanted uber gun/shield set up you'd need to buy more power units etc. then, you could control a bit of space, and others might attack you/your base in turf wars - scope for some major OXPs there, perhaps.

.....which is a long way of saying, if you wanted the ship to be part of your fleet you could send it to your own base instead which would be easier if you made the Remora only programmable to send a ship there.
now here's my nasty thought : supposing a pirate is down to his last dregs of power and ejects - if he's a ba$tard, he might just have fitted a bomb to the drive units/computers that triggers as soon as docking instructions are implemented - biiig damage to your base.

i don't think the "other stealing" bit is good as that might get a bit complicated, but if the ship's under simple guidance it would be an easy target for other pirate friends w/ a grudge, or opportunists that think it might have cargo. To prevent others doing that, perhaps the Remora could only launch against an abandoned ship (ie, white scanner flag) and once a Remora attaches and brings the ship "back to life" it's yellow again, meaning another Remora could not lock it up.

i love the whole idea of fleets, this is like the "X" series. the scope is for having traders making you money, fighters flying as wingmen etc, and introduces hiring of pilots...which again could lead to OXPs where you hire an unscrupulous git who turns against you and tries to take over your base etc.

in the original Elite, as you said, the legal status was tied in w/ the ship itself, and ejecting would clear your rating, so maybe this could have implications too - say you snag a lovely fer de lance : your repair robots could fix it and you got a nice ship...but if you're in it, you're now fugitive status and though you could clear this by a bit pirate-tw@ing etc what you *don't* know is whether or not that previous owner p155ed off rival gangs etc, who have that ship ID in their marked-for-death books, which could lead to some very nasty surprises, even if you clear your name legally.

also - how about a Super Remora, which would be 4x the price or whatever, but could take over the controls and add a new AI : you're in a fight against loads, snag a ship via a Remora : it would be cool (perhaps) if that remora could then implement a standard scanforenemyshipsAI (whatever that thing's called) which in effect would give you a wingman ~ then head off for your base only on green status (if it survives, we assume it's be pretty beat up if you've shot it up enough for a pilot to eject).

Hi dajt

Great job you're doing, looking at ther code.

My suggestion for something that I believe might be a lot easier to implement and add much more to the game than towing ships is: Allow for ship changes from scripts. I don't know exactly how, but it would be nice to have some sort of slot for a stored player ship.

Think of missions you have to undertake in a borrowed ship.

And it would be crucial to Sidewinder Commander...

Sidewinder Commander. The commander is hired by the navy as a Sidewinder pilot. They store his

ship while he works his way up in the navy ranks by completing missions from millitary bases and

carriers in ever cooler naval ships. Mostly very short intensely battle oriented missions like carrier

defense or interstellar raid. The pay is lousy but there's lots of action and zero expenses. Instead of

paying for gear you are given equipment according to the mission and of course matching your

expendability (rank) with the expendability of your gear to the navy. I.e. you will only get a beam laser

equipped sidewinder with nothing else to begin with and have to balance your play between letting

others with better equipment take more of the heat in large battles, while still trying to grap some

glory in order to advance in rank and get better equipped.

A zillion other suggestions coming up

So far I have it so when a pilot ejects the ship is marked as a hulk, a potential salvage target.

You can purchase and fire the remora salvage harpoon and when it hits the hulk it changes its AI to go to the GalCop station and then docks.

Whats missing?

No check to see if the target is a hulk or not - you can fire the missile at anything right now. This should be easy enough.

No money or penalty when the ship docks. This should not be too hard either, although I'm not sure how to check if the ship was taken via piracy or not.

No way to keep the ship.

The plan for multiple ships is you fly one at a time, the others are all docked whereever you left them. When you dock somewhere you have another ship, you can swap ships. You have to pay periodic berthing fees for all docked ships.

I have no plans for having your ships escort you, or to allow AI scripts to fly the other ships for you. This 2nd thing wouldn't work in Oolite like it did in X because all systems in X are modelled all the time so traders can do at least abstract trading, whereas in Oolite only the system the player is in actually exists.

dajt wrote:

The plan for multiple ships is you fly one at a time, the others are all docked whereever you left them. When you dock somewhere you have another ship, you can swap ships. You have to pay periodic berthing fees for all docked ships.

Sounds good

If the ship change/storage gets accessible through scripts I'm sure it will be used for a lot of really nice things.

dajt wrote:

I have no plans for having your ships escort you, or to allow AI scripts to fly the other ships for you. This 2nd thing wouldn't work in Oolite like it did in X because all systems in X are modelled all the time so traders can do at least abstract trading, whereas in Oolite only the system the player is in actually exists.

I do have some ideas on how this might be addressed coming up.

So If I could own several ships, and have some pilots out and about with them earning me extra credits etc, I could send my mother in law from Lave to Galaxy 8 in a very slow ship, to collect or deliver a package?

Made some progress tonight. Now the sequence of events is:

1. Find yourself an abandoned ship.
2. Fire the REMORA at it.
3. If the REMORA hits it sends a signal to the GalCop station to launch a pilot boat to carry a pilot out to fetch the wreck.
4. The pilot boat comes out and "drops off a pilot" who gets abord the wreck and flys it back to the station. The pilot boat also returns to the station.

Some ideas:

* The pilot boat should escort the wreck back to help protect the pilot onboard.
* The player should pay a hefty fee for getting the pilot transported out, and to compensate for the danger of flying the wreck back.
* Add a chance that an ejecting captain sets a self destruct sequence on their ship so it can't be salvaged.
* Have the game calculate the chances of the wreck making it safely back to the station if you hyperspace out of the system before it has docked.

@Dajt - I like the suggestions and the sequence of events - I think the chances of a self destruct being set should be quite small - if it happens too often + the hefty fee will put people off. I'm sure this will come out sensibly in playtesting!

Keep up the good work.

while we're all talking about the ship itself : what's the deal about its cargo?? do you get that too, or mebbes forfeit it to the other pilot? that could be their gamble in offering the service, a fixed price + the cargo, which might be worthless or fabulous.

salvage rights, yup.

so are there possibilities to check for targetShiptype or self.shiptype for AIs or for equipment scripting playerShiptype? (which returns the ship identkey.)
I know about scanForShipWithRole etc, so there is one example.

What happens if you capture a NP ship? Like a renegade one with the big guns?

I figure the remora won't work on them.
That or you get a monetary salvage fee.

That was one of the problems that made me lose interest in this feature a bit.

It became clear to me that the design of the game didn't suit this idea, and NP ships is a good example of that.

Another is the salvage fee - why would you trade when you can make heaps of money for just disabling a pirate and selling the hulk for salvage. It would take a LOT of trading to make the same amount of money.

Alternatively it is too easy to get new ships this way.

I think it would unbalance the game too much in favour of the player.