Oolite Bulletins

I've played oolite on and off during the last year, but mainly messing around and testing things.
Docking manually was a big problem, 80 failed attempts of my first 100 tries at lave station, UNTIL i found the milhud oxp.
Now docking (and aiming lasers in fights) has become easy.


About 3 weeks ago i started playing seriously.

I tried installing 20+ oxp's , but found that my pc can't handle that without slowing down considerably while fighting, so i'm now back to only customsounds and milhud.

I've done milk runs and am now flying an iron ass cobra on the long way around mission (close to getting competent rating).
As i can handle upto 4 opponents ok, but higher numbers often result in 'press space' i am also thinking about upgrading the cobra.

I've tried the supercobra and imperial courier, but my favorite is the tiger.

This is my plan atm :
Cobra MK III
> Cobra Courier 275 k
> Python ET Special 360k (to do some contract runs)
> Vampire 450k
> Purgatory 600k
> Tiger

Would this be a good upgrade path ?


With only those oxp's installed i wonder if the police vessels can still take on pirates.
Are there good oxps for police upgrades ?

<shameless plug>

If you want to give a career in bounty hunting a whirl, then you might want to try a Dragon on for size. A mean contender without going into Uberland.

Only 350K, flies about as fast as a Vampire, handles as tamely as a Cobra 3, packs serious teeth with a factory fitted, accurized military laser and an ordinance payload of up to 8 missiles, has a good recharge rate and can be kitted with everything except a cargo bay upgrade.

Comes standard with front military laser, fuel scoop and injectors. What a bargain!

The only con is that it's limited to 15tc cargo space, but this is a small issue if you salvage from your victims instead of trade, and toss low value salvage.

Includes an updated version of milhud and a blank texture file so you can paint your own.

</shameless plug>

Could be a viable upgrade path, but on the other hand you should consider that with every trade-in of your ship you are losing a big amount of money. Even with top maintenance the trade-in value of a ship is low, and even lower are the trade-in values of the extras you kitted it out with. It really hurts to sell a ship that has a military shield enhancement fitted!

So I would suggest to keep the path as short as possible. And as the Cobra III is a remarkably good ship I wouldn't change it at all, until you get your ship of choice, so in your case the Tiger.

I myself have happily used my Cobra III until I had enough money to afford a SuperCobra. Still later I revised my final choice and bought an Imperial Courier, which is now my third ship in a row of three. And if I hadn't decided on that too late I wouldn't have bothered to purchase a SuperCobra.

So my advice would be to max out your Cobra III and go into bounty hunting without giving up trading. Practically: I found it a very rewarding tactics to continue with the milkruns. But everytime when I have delivered my cargo I don't buy the next cargo, but launch instead and clean the corridor of any pirates. I scoop whatever I get in the process, and when my holds are full I return the station to sell it. And this time every single credit I get is pure profit. If there are still some pirates in the system I repeat the last step. Only if the system is reasonably clean I take up the cargo there is to buy and move to the next system. And there the whole thing starts again. With this kind of gameplay both your money and your reputation will mount up very fast.

Just don't forget to save each time you dock to sell your loot! And: sell all of the loot. You will need your full cargo capacity for the next milkrun. Especially: sell all the illegal goods among your loot, even if the drugs happen to have a price-tag of 1.2 Cr only. It's just bad luck. And still it's pure profit. And you don't want to become an Offender or Fugitive, which will inevitably happen if you launch again with still some pharmaceuticals, slaves or firearms in your holds.

There is one excepion to the general "sell all"-rule: gold, platinum and gemstones can stay in your ship's safe until you find a system that takes them for a good price. They don't affect your cargo capacity. Just keep in mind that on any market there never can be more than 127 units of any given commodity, so you cannot sell more than that at a time. This means that if you happen to have a nice stock of let's say 350 kilos of platinum (can happen; happens all the time to me!), you will need at least three platinum-high-price systems to sell it all. But these three sells will boost your account in a breathtaking way! Myself I start selling gold at a price of 40+, platinum at something like 77+ and gemstones at 21+.

And you should of course replenish your stock of valuables each time you see a Rock Hermit. There are some real bargains out there!

Oh, and I forgot: Do some contract runs! Forget about passenger runs, they'll never become worthwhile. But do contract runs! Chose the small ones you sometimes find, that you can do with your Cobra III. They are not as common as the big ones which need a big ship, and they don't pay off well, but they build your reputation as a contracter. And the contract market is all about reputation. If you once have got a good reputation (finishing seven contracts successfully without a single late delivery, and all that in the not-too-distant past), then you will be offered some really, really profitable contracts. And for those really profitable ones you won't need a big cargo hold anymore. I don't say more, because I don't want to spoil everything.

Actually in 1.65 the trade-in value isn't so bad.

A fully equipped Cobra (4 hardhead missiles, 1 military laser, every possible upgrade except galactic hyperdrive and naval energy unit ) costs 230 k and has max trade-in value of 228230 .

Note : This assumes the trade-in factor is maximum (100) , like just after maintenance. I could be wrong if maintenance doesn't set the trade-in factor back to 100 but to a lower value.
I'll compare save-files on my next maintenance.

ADDED
I just had a maintenance overhaul and trade-in value was raised from 84 to 100.
My cobra is now worth 228230 again.
end of addition

I use the milkrun/bounty hunting combo like you described and it works indeed good.

Thanks for the tip about precious metals, and i'll check for small contracts often.

As i now have 30k cash and need 125k+ before i can switch to a iron ass cobra courier, i have time to think things over.

@Cmdr Wyvern :
The dragon is not listed in the wiki, but i've downloaded it and will check it out once i have enough cash.

Sidenote :
As oolite chooses the ships available for purchase from the shipyard.plist in the install dir and then adds the ships from all oxp's there is a way to get a specific oxp ship easy.

1. make sure you have enough cash
2. dock at a high TL station that has ships for sale.
3. SAVE and quit oolite, copy the savefile somewhere.
3. copy shipyard.plist in the oolite install directory to some other place.
4. remove all oxps except the one that has the ship you're interested in.
5. copy the oxp shipyard.plist to the oolite install dir.
6. start oolite and buy the ship.
7. save and quit
8. put the original shipyard.plist back

After you have tested enough, goback to your original savefile.

Using this for anything except testing is cheating

Commander McLane wrote:

Could be a viable upgrade path, but on the other hand you should consider that with every trade-in of your ship you are losing a big amount of money.

Not every trade-in. It’s actually possibly to earn money by making trade-ins. (No, I’m not going to specify how.) I believe this is an effect of having two completely different (and complicated) bits of code to calculate ship values based on differently-formatted data. :-/

Commander McLane wrote:

So my advice would be to max out your Cobra III and go into bounty hunting without giving up trading. Practically: I found it a very rewarding tactics to continue with the milkruns. But everytime when I have delivered my cargo I don't buy the next cargo, but launch instead and clean the corridor of any pirates. I scoop whatever I get in the process, and when my holds are full I return the station to sell it. And this time every single credit I get is pure profit. If there are still some pirates in the system I repeat the last step. Only if the system is reasonably clean I take up the cargo there is to buy and move to the next system. And there the whole thing starts again. With this kind of gameplay both your money and your reputation will mount up very fast.

very useful post for a beginner like me. But I have one question regarding the corridor you mentioned. How do you find your way back to the witchspace buoy ?

I haven't installed the OXP's you have.

I started with a Cobra MkIII and eventually equipped it with everything except the Naval Energy Unit and the Cloaking Device.

I wanted more cargo space, so I purchased a Python. I used it to earn more money per cargo run, Galactic Hyperspace the 8 Galaxies twice over just for fun and complete the Constrictor mission.

After a while, the slow speed of the Python became annoying and I set my sights on purchasing the Boa Class Cruiser I currently fly.

I currently have 271,262.5 credits and a Dangerous rating for 966 combat kills.

I like the Boa Class Cruisers' combination of cargo capacity, energy capacity, speed and manuverability. There are plenty of ships that exceed the BoaCC's specification in one or two categories, but none match it in all categories.

I intend to continue trading and defeating pirates or thargoids while preparing for the Naval Energy Unit mission in Galaxy 3.

Energy bombs are useful when faced with multiple opponents.

Good luck, Lone_Wolf

bdug wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

So my advice would be to max out your Cobra III and go into bounty hunting without giving up trading. Practically: I found it a very rewarding tactics to continue with the milkruns. But everytime when I have delivered my cargo I don't buy the next cargo, but launch instead and clean the corridor of any pirates. I scoop whatever I get in the process, and when my holds are full I return the station to sell it. And this time every single credit I get is pure profit. If there are still some pirates in the system I repeat the last step. Only if the system is reasonably clean I take up the cargo there is to buy and move to the next system. And there the whole thing starts again. With this kind of gameplay both your money and your reputation will mount up very fast.

very useful post for a beginner like me. But I have one question regarding the corridor you mentioned. How do you find your way back to the witchspace buoy ?

You need to buy the Advanced Space Compass first. This is an upgrade for your ship's navigation system, and available at every station with a techlevel of at least 7 for a mere 650 credits. It allows you to target all the system's main features (including the witchpoint beacon) on your astrogation console.

A must-have for every commander.

ok I did have it in fact but I did not know that you could switch from one objective to another. Thx