Oolite Bulletins

I was thinking that some suns could produce solar storms on occasion, knocking out the scanner, screwing up missile tracking, affecting docking computers, diminishing shields and if possible adding some kind of visual affect to the view out of the window just so knew that something was going on...

Just a thought - no idea if it could be implemented or indeed if anybody thinks its a good idea!

Would be good. To begin with script these solar storms if a system description is like: 'cursed by dreadfull solar activity' . Could also intorduce some more equipment like anti radiation protection against it.

sry to tell you this but

Scanner cant be knocked out

But I think standard missiles would rather explode if they where suddenly bombarded with high particle energy.

Regarding tracking/docking computer Would be easy enough, to set a status of Equipment to be damaged for the time being, until the storm is over... actually it would have to be completely removed, so that Thargoids repair Equipment dont fix it...

and upon end of storm, the player gets it back...

you can fiddle with the players target... too, making it flicker between all ships in the area...

If the scanner can't be knocked out - could it be filled with a large number of spurious contacts that effectively make it near useless? (perhaps spawning a number of "tiny" targets that move away from the sun creating false targets as they go?)

That sounds like a clever workaround, maybe you could create a tiny speck of a 'ship' as a model.dat and spawn copies of it randomly around the player current location whilst the sunstorm is in progress - perhaps remove the spawned ships random times too so as not to overload the game?

The Solar storms should be as dangerous as Q bombs

if a ship can get close enough to a sun to scoop fuel, why would a solar storm affect it?

Killer Wolf wrote:

if a ship can get close enough to a sun to scoop fuel, why would a solar storm affect it?

because present day probes, it seems can allready do the trick, what would not be possible in the Oolite timeline

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology ... probe.html

And because solar storms are violent events that are spawned by these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare

and the most important one...

more eye candy = more fun

Nice idea. Alternatively to flooding the system with small objects, could the scanner-knock-out be achieved by temporarily placing an image in front of it? Like a large, non-moving trumble? Of course its exact size and location would depend on the installed HUD, which in itself would be tricky to achieve...

Commander McLane wrote:

Alternatively to flooding the system with small objects, could the scanner-knock-out be achieved by temporarily placing an image in front of it?

No.

how about changing all the scanner "stalks" to black?