Oolite Bulletins

There is some misunderstanding what the role "hunter" means. Several ships have as roles both "hunter and pirate". I also thought that hunters were some kind of pirates. But in fact they are law-enforcing ships. Quite the opposite of pirates.

When the system adds a hunter he searches a ship with role hunter, give it a bounty of 0 (makes it clean) and gives it a police intelligence. (route1PatrolAI). This also happens with ships from external OXP's. The problem arises when an OXP adds a hunter. It gets the role of hunter but keeps the intelligence of pirate.

Today I added such hunters as test. One of them (a ringhals) attacked me in sight of a police vessel. I had to fight back but this made me an offender in view of the police, as I was attacking a hunter and in turn I was attacked by the police.

Ahruman corrected this behavior by adding an auto_AI to the shipdata that works from version 1.69 onwards. But most of the current ship OXP haven't this incorporated yet. And as I look at some OXP ships I think they were never designed for lawenforcing-hunterAI but only for piracy.

So a plea to shipdesigners: Look at your ship roles and if necessary re-upload it with the right roles and auto_AI if not done yet.

Hmm. I thought it should be clear to all that "hunter" means a bounty-hunter. And of course those do sort of police work, yet they are no police themselves.

In Anarchies.oxp the player will, if he is a fugitive, encounter special bounty-hunters going after him. They use however a custom AI, not any of the default AIs. And they are created with a custom role, not just "hunter".

The same goes e.g. for the Black Monks.

hmm.

I always assumed 'hunter' to mean 'bounty hunter' too.

As mercenaries, these are usually seen by police as renegade vigilantes, almost worse than the pirates they help erradicate (because they get all the glory, but none of the responsibilities and paperwork).

As a concequence I imagined the hunters to simply look for ships with a bounty on them and attack (if not out-gunned), without turning police.

Having a bounty would have been natural as attacking a particulary juicy pirate in Eagis is very seductive but still an offence.

alternatively there are also pirates that attack other pirates for the bounty. no such thing a honour amongst pirates in my world.

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I'll examine my oxp's over time and replace (hunter, pirate) roles with singular instices and autoAI.

Without documentation it is impossible to know if "hunter" means a good or a bad guy. Is he hunting criminals or is he hunting traders for their loot?

When I started writing my OXP I also assumed it was a kind of pirate. When you look inside Oolites shipdata you find the Asp, Cobra's, Fer-de-Lance, Krait and Sidewinder both can have roles of pirate and hunter. This even strengthens the believe hunters are pirate-like.

Maybe it is a good thing these ships can behave both ways, so the player can not see in advance (only at their bounty) how they will behave. So giving a ship both a pirate and hunter role is not wrong by itself. It only becomes wrong when the ship has visible signs of piracy, like a death-scull on his back, or a name with pirate in it.

Although hunters and police share the same AI file, there is a little difference in behavior as some things work different if scanClass is police or not. After killing the opponent, police only saves escape pods as non police ships scoop everything they see.

Hunters are rare however. On average there is less than one flying around in any given system. So the player will hardly notice them.

Just as extra info, hunters and police have 3 ways to find their targets.

1) When a ship sends a distress message.
2) When a clean ship is hit by laser. (it need not have send the distress message.)
3) When a ship has a bounty on his head.

The first two take immediately effect. The third is has a random change build in. On every scan it looks for ships in range and a random value between 0 and 255 is subtracted from the legal status of the found ships. It then finds the highest positive number if there is one. That means that ships with a bounty greater than 255 are found on the first scan and for ships with only a bounty of 1 it will take on average 255 times before they are found. This means that when you have a bounty of just one or two legal points, you have a good change to get past these ships without being spotted. But there is always a small change you will be attacked if not totally clean.

In English a "bounty hunter" is a private individual who tracks or kills criminals for money. He may also be a criminal himself, and is basicaly an amoral individual would also kill innocents if money is to be made by doing so. Nothing personal just a matter of buisness! If GalCop will pay a bounty for hitting a criminal, a bounty hunter may decide to take the criminal out. But he might also take out a trader, if money can be made from scooping the trader's cargo!

More a romantised idea than somthing that every really existed in Real Life. Popularised by Sergio Leone's Dollars Trillogy of Westerns in the 60s and the existance of "bounty hunters" in Elite is probabley a reference to these films IMP. Can see how the role given would be confusing if English isn't your first language!
"$200,000 is a lot of money. We're gonna have to earn it." (The Man with No Name in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!)

BTW: I playtested the 1.3 version of Assassins with Commander McLane's Anarchies OXP installed (Nice feature - you can't just get clean by escape poding and have to find a high tech Anarchy and meet up with the local hackers to get you legal status cleared). As I often had a big bounty on my head after committing mass murder to complete a hit, I got plaughed quite a bit by bounty hunters, keen to pick up that price on my head whilst sun-skimming my way to high tech Anarchies!

Don't forget the groygan Lorenzo Lamaz (?) who did a (B)series about a group of BH's, going after bail-breakers etc.

I'd give it a credability rating about equal to the A-team.
Although the A-team suposedly were mercenaries, there are more points that are equal in both series.
Both are on the run for the luw, both have a 'cool' van, both are falsely accused, both help those in need and rarely actually get paid.
(No macGuyver element in the former though)

Speaking of bounty hunters "Cowboy Bebop" comes to mind...




BTW,

Eric Walch wrote:

3) When a ship has a bounty on his head.

Wouldn't it be easier to call a biohazard-suited sanitation team instead of trying to impound a toilet for being a WMD?

LittleBear wrote:

More a romantised idea than somthing that every really existed in Real Life.

Er… it’s a real, and booming, business in the USA and other third-world wildernesses. Generally the bounties are for retrieval rather than killing, though.

True there are "bail bondsmen" in the US, but they in fact spend most of their time bailing arrested people out of Jail by putting up bail money. The idea that they spend their time hunting people down is a media myth. "Dog the Bounty Hunter" actually spends most of his time filling in forms to get drug addicts and other peeps with no money out of US prisons on bail and over 90% of people do in fact answer bail. Although the "Wanted Dead or Alive" is an idea ingraned in Westerns, the old west only lasted about 10 years and most law enforcement was done by sherifs and deputies rather than cigar smoking bounty hunters!

Most jobs are 90% paperwork, though. The idea that policemen spend most of their time policing, or that doctors spend most of their time tending the ill, is also a media myth.

Ahruman wrote:

doctors spend most of their time tending the ill, is also a media myth.

I have irrefutable evidence that in the hospital I work at, caring for the ill is one of the lowest priorities for doctors....

Captain Hesperus

Such is the way of the modern world:

[rant]
institutions paid to do a job with 'taxpayer' money MUST be seen accountable and as such the people doing the work actually end up writing stupid forms and meetings and because nothing gets done, managers are installed to manage the people doing the work (but reporting nothing done because of redtape), the problem is NEVER buraucracy, but rather a matter of getting the people doing the work actually working, so to motivate these lazy people, we have them fill in forms about their progress and their minute to minute activities. Which are tossed into the rubbish bin as the managers are off on vacation. So now there is not enough man-power to manage all the paperwork, so we hire another level of paperpushers, this requires that we either cut the salary of workers or fire some of them, We fire them as they are not working anyhow, but pushing papers around and people educated in managing red-tape are much more effective at this. This results in a total collapse of productivity and the institute is on the brink of collapse. Exactly the right time for the director to take his leave and take away 5000% of the average salary as a bonus.[/rant]

Managers are like trumbles, drastic measures (like flying into a sun) are needed to get rid of them.

Oh topic: modern-governing requires everybody to become a manager, if only managing the company of Self.

ehh.. paperwork sucks

Captain Hesperus wrote:

I have irrefutable evidence that in the hospital I work at, caring for the ill is one of the lowest priorities for doctors...

They’ve got much more important things to do, like manage those annoying and unruly nurses. ;-)

Only if they are cute.