Oolite Bulletins

tried that trick for misjumping, worked great! except i hardly got off any shots. well, that is to say my laser overheated shooting the thargoid carrier with no appreciable denting of it's armor. just started spitting out warships. so i mop up, check out the behemoth (nice ship!) and took a convenient wormhole next to a whitehole (do they always destroy you?)... only to almost run into the carrier right out of warp!

well i emptied my laser into it again, with the same results, and had to run for the station to save really fast. (out of time-wife was "indicating that it was time for me to leave... now.") so i'm hoping to stock up and run right back out and take it on before it departs. what do i need?

Four military lasers. Preferably also some hardheads.

You must have military lasers fitted front and back, alternate between them, as soon as one overheats do a 180 and use the other. You'll find that with the rear laser, the opponent is less "lively" in avoiding your laser fire. You should also have found out by now the best dogfighting speed for manouverability of your ship, it's normally about 1/3 to 1/2 on the speed gauge. Practice makes perfect, it's a technique you must master if you want to become Elite!

Go get them thargoids

Four full salvos are sufficient. (That's where the new yaw-keys come in very handy, if you happen to possess four military lasers.)

Even with four military lasers the first one won't have cooled down when you have used the fourth one. With less lasers you probably need more salvos, as the carrier's energy replenishes again while you're waiting for your laser(s) to cool enough to fire the next round.

Of course there is the "fast'n'easy" alternative: a q-bomb will get rid of the carrier and every ship that has launched. And with two carriers it's even cost-efficient.

Navy Comms Chatter picked up by an Assassin equipped with a fuel tank before jumping out:-

"Look at the size of that thing!"
"They're coming in too fast!"
"Man, its just Game Over, I mean Game Over!"
"Oh my God ..."

"If the fools want to squash the Bugs, let them. I'm not in this for principles, I expect to be well paid. Mr McJamefire engage the backup fuel supply and hit the emergency witchjump Get us out of here!"

well, i hope it's still there. and that i can manage to miss the innocents it was chasing.... ^^

Don't worry, there will be others.

Anyway, shouldn't you be with your wife now?

nijineko wrote:

(out of time-wife was "indicating that it was time for me to leave... now.")

been there and back again. ^^

i found out that you get more for the thargoid fighters if you sell them, rather than shoot them for the bounty. the bounty is 50cr, and i've gotten as much as 68cr for them selling them on low tech worlds. guess it's about how you want to spend your time. the kill count is compelling, however. ^^

Q-mine the carrier 2000cr per destruction. Destroy a few Thargoid ships and collect the robots make a profit. Sometimes you get lucky and kill two with one stone = bigger profit. Unwise to attempt mis-jumps without military shields and lazers.

nijineko wrote:

...the bounty is 50cr, and i've gotten as much as 68cr for them selling them on low tech worlds...

No, there sometimes is a bounty of 114! for them.

julyy wrote:

No, there sometimes is a bounty of 114! for them.

As well as raising your Elite Rating for almost no effort.

Captain Hesperus

just loaded that OXP, the carrier's fricking huge! i got the Behemoth OXP there too, and never had any bother w/ them getting killed - never done it personally but the Navy kick its ar$e every time. i love the insults the Thargs send
odd little civil war going on too, i was left w/ about 3 warships and was expecting to get creamed but they all started fighting each other :-/

Yes, they go after each other. That's a known AI problem of theirs, because the scanForNonThargoids method doesn't work as you would suspect.

The problem really stems from thorgorn_thread.oxp, where there are some thargoid ships that have a custom role together with or instead of 'thargoid'. These ships are found by other thargoid ships' AIs scanning for non-thargoids, because the scanForNonThargoids message finds all ships that have something else than just 'thargoid' as a role. So they are identified as non-thargoids and attacked.

On the other hand the scanForThargoids method finds only those ships that have only 'thargoid' as a role.

There are a number of methods that assume a ship can only have one role. Should probably fix that one day… oh look, it’s at the top of my to-do list, the end that never gets any lovin’. Wait, that’s the other end. Or is it both ends?