Oolite Bulletins

Just docked at Salvage gang asteroid

One of the items for sale is "Military Shield Enhancement (salvaged)" which is going for 32250.0 - normal price is around 47k.

Worth the deal? Or will it not work correctly?

I see other 'standard' items for sale are much pricer than normal - i.e. Escape Pod for 1500.0 and not 1000.0 etc!

I think you pays your money and takes your chance if you deal with unauthorized dealers!

Yup - I was tempted with that price for Military Shields, but declined. On the whole the 'salvage gang' asteroid doesn't really offer much - worth it if you need fuel, but other equipment is too expensive or too dodgy to use. Market prices are not good either.

Unless you're desperate, not worth docking IMO. Go for the hermit asteroid instead - at least you get cheap gold,plat,gems,minerals

The only thing still left to do before I can release Anarchies 1.1 is re-working the commodity prices for Salvage Gangs and Hacker Outposts. Somehow they are not as I intended and expected them to be.

As for the equipment: Like in Rock Hermits, equipment prices in both Salvage Gangs and Hacker Outposts are higher than on main stations. Makes sense, doesn't it? All asteroid-based operations cannot compare with the official GalCop stations, as far as equipment supplies are concerned. So prices can be expected to be higher. (And by the way, they are way higher on a Rock Hermit, than on a Salvage Gang!)

But the Salvage Gangs do offer bargains. Their job is to salvage items from the space lines. And of course they can offer these items much cheaper than original ones. These items are marked as 'Item XY (salvaged)', and in their short description you certainly have read that you may expect it to have at least some scratches (all of these stem from ships that have been shot at!).

However, the Salvagers guarantee full functionality. In flight, there is no difference between a brand-new and a salvaged Military Shield Enhancement. The only risk you are taking is that the salvaged equipment has some internal damage which went undetected, and therefore may break unexpectedly. In which case you can have it repaired at any station with a suitable techlevel. After being fixed, it won't break again.

And this is all explained at length in the manual (read: readMe of Anarchies.oxp).

And the real reason for docking with a Salvage Gang is a different one altogether. It has to do with a very special piece of equipment, which may help you a lot if you want to get rid of that nasty 'Fugitive' behind your legal status. Said piece of equipment, however, is only available in Slavage Gangs located in Anarchy systems.

Thanks for taking time for a (good) explanation Commander!

After a detailed read of your README.rtf it makes more sense to me, esp. regarding 'offender','fugitive' statuses.

Maybe those Military Shield at 32k were worth a punt after all

But I still think market prices (goods) at better at the Hermit Asteroid than the Salvage one. On Hermit I tend to buy all of the gold,platinum and gems. Minerals are cheap too, but I generally don't bother as (1) I've got port/starbyd mining lasers and (2) they generally don't make as much profit as other items such as furs,computers etc.

Will definitely stop-by now if I get that Fugitive status - than ain't nice; especially in 'stable' systems with lots of cops around
(I'll be heading to Anarchy systems!)

Digging into the code I discovered you are completely correct. There is a bug, and therefore neither Salvage Gangs nor Hacker Outposts had the market prices I intended for them.

The good news is that it was relatively easy to fix.

The better news therefore is that Anarchies 1.1 is now only one upload away from release (let's see how good my connection to box.net is; usually it's terrible in the early afternoon, so probably you'll have to wait until tomorrow).

I bought the Mil shield at the first oppotunity, tonight after i finally found my first Salvage gang asteroid.
Result- it failed after my first launch & a jumpdrive to the Seedy Space Bar for a mission, not even ONE combat.
Nanobot repair crew failed to repair...Twice...
Hopefully it won't be too much to repair once I get to a higher tech system...

Edited to add, now repaired third time lucky by the repair bots

So did it work out cheaper (basic cost + fixes) than buying it from 'normal' stations at 47k ???

The one I saw was on sale for 32k, and I didn't buy it.

beeze wrote:

So did it work out cheaper (basic cost + fixes) than buying it from 'normal' stations at 47k ???

The one I saw was on sale for 32k, and I didn't buy it.

Bought for 32K + 3x 3K for the bots, so 41K all in...

Still cheaper than the std 47K to buy, if you can find one for sale.

What shall I say? S**t happens! And it's completely up to you whether you want to trust the dubious guarantees of some shady salvager characters.

But in this case you had a little bad luck. Usually it doesn't need to break so quickly. (Probably the breaking probability could be tuned down a little more in upcoming releases. Let's see what other people have to report.)

Latest Salvage gang mega deal- navy energy Unit 37.5K, ok so it failed after the first hyperspace jump, but the repair bots fixed it first time. YAY...
Bargain at 40.5K, last time I had one it cost me 158K from those robbing Black Monks...