Oolite Bulletins

Hi folks,

I've been making a living as an honest trader so far, just making a few hundred credits per run after paying for fuel and missiles etc.

I've got my eye on a new ship, but every time I check it seems to get further away! Is my ship depreciating in value as I use it?? If so, how can I earn enough to offset that depreciation? My cash balance is going up, but my total worth seems to be going down, when I look at trading in my ship. Do I just need to catch the guy on a good day, or what?

Yours confused about ship trading,

CC

You have to service the ship from time to time, or the equipment might start going bad on the most inopportune moments. And, as you'd expect, an ill-maintained ship is worth less than another that receives an occasional fresh coat of paint...

Yes, ships deprecate with use, and once the value drops "too far", which I think is 75% you should start getting offers to do a maintenance overhaul for something like 1% of the value of the ship. I am not certain about the numbers, but I think it normally costs about 2000 for me to overhaul my ship, which is well worth doing.

Of course you really want to do the overhaul immediately before making your new purchase, to maximise the trade in value of your current one.

It is also worth knowing that in some version (I think anything newer that 1.65) there is a kind of second hand tax that lowers the value of your ship by 25%. This means that it is very costly to change ship, and you should probably only do it infrequently.


There are also a number of factors that alter the purchase price of new ships, including randomness, what is fitted to the ship, and the tech level of the system you are in (lower tech levels charge more for high tech ships).

Yes, yes, get a matance overhaul and your ship value should go up a lot. I hope you get the ship of your dreams despite that dreams just test your skills... .


Don't Panic: FSOneblin

And when you overhaul your ship, pick as high-tech a world as possible to do it on. It costs the same, and you'll be sure that everything on board is serviced properly...

I'd like to see an option added to the F3 equipment purchase screen to perform a "forced" maintenance overhaul of my ship when *I* want to, not just when it is required by the game.

I remember playing Frontier where you'd jump, scoop, jump, scoop, jump just after your engine service to see how far you could get before your engine died - as it got close to the maintenance date it was worth going to the station so you could save the game because sure enough - eventually your engine would go phut and you became so much scrap metal awaiting collection...

So what we need are nano-maintenance robots - they live in your cargo hold when not used and swarm over your engine parts or ship systems when they get damaged - converting the contents of your hold into new bits for your ships (requiring you to carry a minimum of three tons of machinery and three tons of computers plus some gold in your hold/safe for ready conversion - lest you have to go mining and hope you get lucky for the stuff you need)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

So what we need are nano-maintenance robots - they live in your cargo hold when not used and swarm...

Or a tribble..er..um.. I mean a "trumble" trainer. Train your trumbles to do engine maintence! '' That would solve the 'trouble with tumbles'

tumbling trumbles? That'd play havoc with the inertial dampers...

Wrats! Another missmelled werd!

Just found that one when searching for exactly that topic

kaice wrote:

I'd like to see an option added to the F3 equipment purchase screen to perform a "forced" maintenance overhaul of my ship when *I* want to, not just when it is required by the game.

I back that request...it's HIGHLY annoying to see the ship one wants to switch to (especially if the last purchase did prove to be a bad decision) - and either having to accept another 100K loss or having to fly an annoying ship even longer - and probably the dream ship sold to someone else in the meantime....for no other reason than the impossibility to have a maintenance when I want it.

The other option would be to limit maintenance-effect when trading in a ship to the maximum cost of ship maintenance.

I really cannot understand why it is handeld as it currently is...do I miss something?

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kaice wrote:

I'd like to see an option added to the F3 equipment purchase screen to perform a "forced" maintenance overhaul of my ship when *I* want to, not just when it is required by the game.

As far as I see it there is always an opportunity to overhaul the ship. But I think it only gets offered when maintenance is below a certain level. But don't believe cmdr James with its cheap maintenance of 2000. (must be a cheap and poor repair job) Overhauling my fully equipped Boa mk2 costs me over 7000 credits every time.

Numerically, you can see your ship wear/depreciation factor in your savegame.

A new savegame starts out with as Cmdr James said, once this drops below 75 or so, you are given the option to overhaul for 1% of your ship's total value, restoring you back up to a good figure.

A manual repair function on a sliding scale of repairs (ie: 85% tradein factor means the repair costs 0.5% of total cost) would be a good idea.

Maybe someone could even write a "Ship Detailers" OXP that gives you an interior clean, coat of wax, and polished windows, raising your tradein factor to 101% or something (reduced back to 95% as soon as you hit space) for the sole purpose of making your ship all pretty before selling it?

I wish I had more time to code.

Super Jamie wrote:

I wish I had more time to code.

How difficult is it to get into the code, when being experienced with C++? My problem is, that I got all the time...but almost cannot use it useful, since my burnout in 2005. Some on-board unit project for trucks finally did wear me down after practically nothing of the working materials (hardware, tools) did work reliable...and that happened to me, where our customers often claimed, that our products are free of bugs.

Since then I've been able to get the adverse reaction to the development environment to go away, but everything I have to do, everything that's expected from me still causes immense trouble. The insurance even doesn't want to make rehab attempts, as they believe this won't be curable.

I've only been able to write code for my own game on very few days since then...however, that game is at a stage where it's well playable and all additional ideas so complex that they would take weeks...while the above idea for Oolite apparently is not that much to do....if the code and development environment are easy to get (into) and the desire to have such a modification is not only from us but everyone.

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