Oolite Bulletins

The amount of ships that have launched 4 hardheads simultaneously at me from a couple of inches away...! How about a gadget to do the same to them?
Do you think it would be useful?
Something that would fire off everything on the pylons at the selected target?
What do you think?

With the muti-target system you can lock all your missiles on the same target. Still have to hit M for each launch, but you can fire off all four as fast as you can bash the M key.

How do you do that LB?

Y on the keyboard cycles through the missiles on your pylons (but only if you have the multi-targeting system fitted). So Target the first one with T then hit Y T again relock. You can then have all 4 missiles locked on the same target, or 4 different targets. Pressing M repeatedly fires them all off. It does take time to lock each one though.

Thanks for that.
Maybe I should splash out on a multi-target?
I'm not a big user of missiles, but I'm currently getting them supplied free, so a bit of extravagance is called for...!
And I've been asked by another employer (we cats are *designed* for moonlighting!) to take out a rather hefty customer, so four simultaneous missiles in its guts will keep it occupied for a while at least.
Hardheads and standard HM3 missiles are both listed with a power of 12.5KT but some missiles only seem to take out most of a shield, whereas others ALWAYS destroy my SuperCobra (usually the HMX5s). Do the hardheads and normal ones have different power in the code? And what about the nuclear torpedos? Can they be ECMed? And how powerful and fast are they? Whilst asking a million questions, how quickly do NPCs with ECM react? Could I take out an ECM-equipped NPC if I launched close-up enough?
If so, that's a Suggestion: a delay (maybe based on whether an NPC were likely to be a good combateer or not) in their triggering of ECM. Would that be in the main program code, or in the OXP of every ship? Or impossible?
Stop... stop!!

It does seem odd that there are only two basic missiles in the Elite genre, and even then the ecm hardened missile is unique to Oolite. IIRC the Frontier games have a much larger range at varying levels of strength and pricing, but having never played them I can't be sure. One would think in the technologically advanced world of Oolite, that there would be more choice paticularly with the amount of piracy and anarchy that exists there.

But then again I can remember when the coracle was high tec

Oh yeah, the advantages of age again! (And wasn't it today that I read of another board-member playing with his grandson?)

On topic again: Isn't that exactly what e.g. Ramirez' 'Missiles and Bombs' oxp is for?

I did suggest to Giles a while back that if you have multiple missiles locked on targets, there ought to be a multi launch capability.

He came up with Shift-M as a concept, but I don't think it got implemented.

Shift-M is implemented, but only works in full-screen mode. ;-)

I can field the questions about the nuclear torpedo.

It's packing a high energy warhead capable of blowing away tough hulls like Pythons and Anacondas with a single direct hit, and that's what it's best used for. Yes, it has enough power to blow an ubership like a supercobra to hell.
It's resistant to ECM, but not invulnerable.
It's slower that either smarts or hardheads, with a very sluggish turn rate, yet it has a longer range.
Best bets are to try to shoot it down and/or outrun it if ECM fails to kill it.

There's a mention that Frontier had several types, but let's face it, that only boiled down to ECM-destroyable and not (having two ECM types upped the practical missile count to three). Generally there was only ever a point (IMO) in missiling small difficult-to-hit ships. The great big ships could more or less ignore a hit by even the most powerful missiles.

Thanks for the nuclear torpedo info Cmdr Wyvern, and for the missles/bombs, Cmdr McLane.
I didn't want to be spending my hard-earned cash (hard-earned? I've found Tescoos buying food and textiles for 100.2 a ton - don't tell anybody!) on a bunch of ordnance, only to see it ECMed out of the ether.
Down to my last 40 ships on my current contract...
*cat

*cat wrote:

(hard-earned? I've found Tescoos buying food and textiles for 100.2 a ton - don't tell anybody!)

That's not what they're supposed to do, but it's probably due to disgruntled underpaid employees.

"After all, there is a war on..."

Dr. Nil wrote:

*cat wrote:

(hard-earned? I've found Tescoos buying food and textiles for 100.2 a ton - don't tell anybody!)

That's not what they're supposed to do, but it's probably due to disgruntled underpaid employees.

More likely it's due to poor choice of values to the variables in commodities.plist .

If the author should wish to adjust that, he may kindly consult the explanations found in the thread Understanding commodities.plist.