Oolite Bulletins

Ever wondered who tops up the Quirium tanks at the main stations, constores etc?

How about some tanker vessels to be seen scooping Quirium from the sun and ferrying it via the witchpoint to the nav bouy?

I'm thinking they could be like the Oo-haul vessels, but real fast (plenty of fuel to throw into the injectors), but dockable (into the large fuel scoop on the nose)... should be a challenge at that sort of speed, but a handy top-up opportunity (fuel would be stupidly cheap).

A reasonable idea?
(not that I have any skill to pull it off)

Try the Woma Tanker OXP.

Ahh, missed that one.
Will investigate.
Would be nice if they blew up in a spectacular/dangerous way too!

they do.

charlie (iirc) also had plans for quirrium sky/starmines in his orbs oxp, haven't heard what happened to that pln thiough. orb had some particularly nasty bugs.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

they do.

But not as spectacular as I would have hoped.
I was thinking more in a Q-mine kinda way... with bonus fuel pods to be scooped afterwards!

In my mind, they should not need escorts, and because they have (literally) fuel to burn... they should run on the sunskimmers route, from star to WP to station, on injectors all they way, and be very fast.
(there wouldn't be an issue of escorts not keeping up... they wouldn't need 'em)

A dockable fuel scoop on the front would be a bit exciting, at those closing speeds!

Commander Mysenses wrote:

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

they do.

But not as spectacular as I would have hoped.
I was thinking more in a Q-mine kinda way... with bonus fuel pods to be scooped afterwards!

In my mind, they should not need escorts, and because they have (literally) fuel to burn... they should run on the sunskimmers route, from star to WP to station, on injectors all they way, and be very fast.
(there wouldn't be an issue of escorts not keeping up... they wouldn't need 'em)

A dockable fuel scoop on the front would be a bit exciting, at those closing speeds!

The ship will run out of fuel since i believe its hardcoded that a ship can only have 7.0 ly of fuel onboard(im pretty sure i recall something will break if you give it more). Also the Fuel injection onj/off is handeld i beleive internally by the code, so you cant flick it on or off... its flicked on once you attack it, like if it where a pirate, and it just uses up what fuel it has...

If the benefit is not injector speed, there is no need to use it logically and codewise you can just give the tanker at a speed of say the Anaconda which is 0.140 LS. Even the Anaconda with that low speed can outrun all vessels at injector speed.. so you would also not be able to give it a low enough speed where the escorts could keep up, while its normal base speed would seem logical...

Frame wrote:

The ship will run out of fuel since i believe its hardcoded that a ship can only have 7.0 ly of fuel onboard(im pretty sure i recall something will break if you give it more).

Not at all. It’s just impossible to jump further than 7 ly in one go. (Also, you can use a JavaScript timer to top up the fuel tanks continuously.) However I’m not aware of a way to force the AI to travel on afterburners.

Ahruman wrote:

(Also, you can use a JavaScript timer to top up the fuel tanks continuously.)

Somehow that sounds like cheating.

Ahruman wrote:

However I’m not aware of a way to force the AI to travel on afterburners.

One can do that by setting a speedfactor higher than 1.0. e.g.: "setSpeedFactorTo: 3.0" Just for fun I gave fuel-injectors to a woma fueltanker. Changed speedfactor to 3.0 in the state "HEAD_FOR_PLANET" and added in the update a command to add fuel.

Nice view, It fly away with injectors at high speed with purple flames. I could barely follow him. The escorts also just managed.

Well spotted. I’ve exposed the underlying desiredSpeed attribute to JS for 1.72; the equivalent to setSpeedFactorTo: 3.0 will be ship.desiredSpeed = ship.maxSpeed * 3.0.

Edit: the usefulness of this is questionable. In most behaviour states, including the ever-popular BEHAVIOUR_FLY_TO_DESTINATION, the game will change the desired speed every frame.

Ahruman wrote:

Edit: the usefulness of this is questionable. In most behaviour states, including the ever-popular BEHAVIOUR_FLY_TO_DESTINATION, the game will change the desired speed every frame.

I found it very useful when working on the Leviathan ship. That carrier has a max speed of about 300. Most launching ships had also a max speed in that area. This resulted that ships launched, than waited a brief moment to look for their target and than very often mother crashed into them. I solved that by giving them 5 seconds injectors with setSpeedFactor: >1. Crashes are now rare because they now can make a distance before they starts scanning for their target.

i was working on a tanker ages back, it was the oxp i had that bother w/, trying to get the escorts to work poperly
http://purgatori.net/tankpaint.jpg

be buggered if i know what i did w/ the OXP, i thought i'd uploaded it :-/

Just wanted to say I managed to sort out the tanker escorts problem once & for all (famous last words)! Should be uploading the new transports real soon now, so you could reuse that code for your essoo tanker. I'm assuming/hoping you've still got that oxp lurking somewhere on your hard disk...

That's really good news, escort A1's seem to have in the past been a continuing hassle for script writers.

just found *a* copy of the oxp

http://www.purgatori.net/tanker.oxp.zip

obviously a work in progress/abandoned in frustration ~ there's two tanker AI files in there. if anyone fancies a bit play, knock yourself out.
the concept behind this was the idea as to where the fuel came from that stations sold : i imagined sunskimming tankers that would be escorted by custom Asps : built w/ a mega scoop under the cab, they skimmed fuel and took it back to sell to the station. obviously being full of extremely explosive fuel, shooting one isn't a good idea....

Good news, I'm a bit bogged down with trying to figure out a couple of things with oolite's main code, but might just manage a spurt of extra brain power & apply some extra spit & polish to tanker.oxp!

Cheers,

Kaks.