Oolite Bulletins

Other day I found an offender flying in formation with a clean python. All the other escorts were clean. Just the one offender. I attacked the offender (thinking it was stalking the python) and ended up a fugitive!? I have since found this again. One offender flying escort on a clean cargo ship. I stalked the offender but never did fire on it. It did seem to be flying escort.

If it's an offender, seems like I ought to be able to collect the bounty. But if it's flying escort I can't??

I've seen the occasional offender flying escort missions too, or even hanging around in the station aegis, and I've often shot them on reflex -- usually collecting a tiny little bounty, presumably for an overdue library book or something. Either that or it was some poor guy working off his offences and running under my guns just days away from clearing his record. Sad, really...

Although this sometimes results in me getting attacked by the escorted ship and/or his escort pals, I've never suffered any legal penalty for it. I usually just hightail away in slight embarrasment.

Mind you, could this possibly be evidence of a minor bug -- the wrong sort of ship being called up as an escort?

Dou you happen to know which ship it was? My guess is that it has a non-zero bounty set in shipdata.plist.

Disembodied wrote:

Mind you, could this possibly be evidence of a minor bug -- the wrong sort of ship being called up as an escort?

I believe that both offenders were Aphids.

In my experience they're almost always Kraits or Mambas, but occasionally Sidewinders too. Often just escorting something like a Boa or an Anaconda, or (perhaps) waiting to form up on one, or docking in behind one, when in the aegis.

The Aphid does indeed have a bounty set, which would cause this. The standard Sidewinder and Krait do not. Possibly the game should reset bounties to zero for ships spawned as escorts for zero-bounty motherships?

I have five ship oxps (not counting behemoth):

Ship oxp Bounty
aphidv2 100
Herald 0
longshot 100
RoC 200
tiger 74

It seems like most of them have a bounty.

Fugitive(!) Tigers as escorts are a very common view as well. Usually I see them launching from the station together with a large trader.

The cops go after them, and so do I. The thrill is that you have to kill them before they vanish in their mother's wormhole, so it's an exercise in acting fast in a limited amount of time. (You could of course follow them through the wormhole and kill them on the other side, but then they're only worth half the bounty! )

Same happens with Sabres.

Commander McLane wrote:

Fugitive(!) Tigers as escorts are a very common view as well. Usually I see them launching from the station together with a large trader.

I can't imagine a clean trader taking on a fugitive as an escort. You would get escorts to stop trouble. A fugitive escort will only attract trouble. Besides the pirates you would then have the police vipers after you as well as bounty hunters.

What next? A fugitive trader hiring clean escorts?

Madness!

It's refreshing to see a thread about roles & snafus that doesn't mention Leastradae! (Oops. Sorry, couldn't resist! )

Well in fairness to Lestrade he isn't the only author to make this mistake! The inbuild ships that appear as escorts don't have a bounty set. This is so that the game gives them automaticly an approprate legal status (the inherit the motherships legal status), but if you set an escorts record in shipdata then it over-rides this.

Ahruman wrote:

The Aphid does indeed have a bounty set, which would cause this. The standard Sidewinder and Krait do not. Possibly the game should reset bounties to zero for ships spawned as escorts for zero-bounty motherships?

I think this would be the easiest solution to correct wrong ship definitions. The current state is that an escort gets at least the starting bounty from shipdata.plist, even when attached to an clean mother.

So if I set the bounty to zero in the shipdata oxps what would I mess up otherwise? I ask
because I see the ships have other roles besides escort. Perhaps some of the other roles
require a bounty?

Try removing the bounty entry alltogether instead of setting it to zero. If I am not mistaken, Oolite will assign a bounty automatically when it spawns a ship with the role 'pirate'.

And remember to press Shift when restarting the game after you are done editing the shipdata.

I once sped into an almighty fight right next to a station orbiting a high tech-level planet. In the heat of battle the Hoopy Casino had managed to earn itself the status of 'Offender'.

I didn't attack, but wondered what kind of bounty I would have earned....