Oolite Bulletins

Okay, so i get this.

I find that in order to progress in game, i am going to either have to do like 1000 milk runs or take on some bounty hunting. Considering the ship i have, i take the first option.

Works well for a bit, but then one jump causes a fuel leak. Great, no fuel.

Add that that a couple of pirates, nearly kill me they do. Take out my compass but i fend them off (go military laser).
I am speeding along to the station, but a police comes onto nav, so i must cruuuuuuiiiiiiiiiii...iiiiiiiiise past. All of a sudden, he puts on his sirens and starts following me, not shooting, just sirens on and staying half a detet away! I cannot speed, or witchdrive or inject. Perfect.

So i have now been here for the last half hour rolling towards a never increasing planet.

The wiki says i shouldn't have turned down that offer to fix up my ship. Offer? WHAT OFFER I BEG OF YOU!

I've only just got the hang of things and i am being blown to bits mentally.

EDIT: It took 34 minutes, 23 seconds to go from beacon to beacon. things good now. I hate galcop.

What ship are you flying?

Milk Runs work for me, just move to an L-crate as soon as you can and the credits will come marching in. Also: Take many trade missions, they may pay next to nothing initially, but as your reputation increases the deals will get better and better, and eventually they will be much, much more profitable then that Isinor-Zaonce (or whatever)-run back and forth.

And this is especially true if you start your trade mission by selling everything at the nearest good place, and just make certain that you have the required amounts of cargo when you reach the destination, that way you can keep using your cargohold during the mission. (just make sure you paint the right names on the crates before delivering them- forgery is a skill no trader can do without )

As for bounty hunting, my favourite way is to find two planets at 1 ly or so from each other, and just keep misjumping (keep the cursor down key pressed while the countdown runs; if you did it right you will hear an ECM-sound when you jump, and next thing you know you are in deadspace surrounded by Thargoid warships and in deep delicious trouble! )

I have just today met the thargoids, and thank goodness i was making a 2 ly jump not the next 6.9!

Bounty hunting was nice, but too many cleanies. Reidquat anarchy proved to be useful in just picking off the good guys, saving their life pods and refuelling in the sun before going safely back to diso to sell the computers and what not.

I use the ship purchase section to measure my cash and it is going down quite rapidly, not because of goods. My ship (cobra mk1 with tonnes of upgrades but the last one was ages ago) has lost lots of value and has fallen now below the 100000 mark, which is how come i noticed. What the heck is going on! I will never be able to buy a new ship!

Is there any wat to get a maintenance overhaul without waiting for it to be offered

As far as I know there isn't, yet. But you can cheat a little to get the overhaul offer anyway: in your savegame (you can find it under oolite.app\oolite-saves), look for the line "ship_trade_in_factor". The value following this represents the state of repair of your ship. Lower it below 75, and you will get a maintenance offer.

Is there any advantage to having maintenence performed at a military station vs main station vs the "specialized repair and shipyard" thing I recently saw?

There is a difference concerning maintenance performance quality.

The maintenance is better if the station's tech level is higher.

The main station has the solar system's tech level.

The navy stations have tech level 14.

The SIRFYards from RS (I assume you mean them) have a tech level 3 higher than their solar system's tech level. In the RS successor (a first playable beta will be available in January or February 2009) the SIRFYards will be in deep space of tech level 12+ systems and have tech level 15.

Hope to have answered your question.

Regards & merry X-mas

L

kendrone wrote:

The wiki says i shouldn't have turned down that offer to fix up my ship. Offer? WHAT OFFER I BEG OF YOU!

I've only just got the hang of things and i am being blown to bits mentally.

EDIT: It took 34 minutes, 23 seconds to go from beacon to beacon. things good now. I hate galcop.

I guess that's exactly the trouble everyone runs into...maybe someone should write up a little bit of story about it and add it to the instructions?

Well, let's see:
- fuel leaks happen even directly after maintenance. Apparently, they are not maintenance related at all! I once had a python which had roughly about one fuel leak per hour....while some other ships I flew never had one.
- for as long as maintenance cannot be initialized by the player before the ship's price drops too much, it is an option to fly the craft without maintenance until the new craft to switch to is available and affordable...and then have the maintenance few seconds before selling the craft, this gives max credits
- the space-lane problem you describe can easily be solved: move out of the lane, especially without injector fuel it is a good idea to fly at 90 degrees from the lane, wait until you can activate torus drive (J), continue that path for about 5 seconds, then turn towards the station and select an approach from space. This way it's often only the time to wait while getting out of the lane and probably when closing in to the station for the last few km, but that is reduced by approaching from space instead of flying a straight line
- you can increase bounty-hunting, kills and have the old elite-feeling by adding "Deep Space Pirates". That OXP adds pirates off the lane. With Realistic Shipyards, the groups are sometimes as large as 30 ships for me (the OXP itself does add less than a third of that amount as maximum). One can have pretty nice fights, then...however, they usually do not have cargo. If you want cargo, go bounty hunting on pirate infested systems trading lanes...there's probably no better legal profit to be made in the game.
- Navy service can be a lot cheaper than it commonly is...I guess when you dock on one of their stations, you understand how this works, but I am not sure if you're willing to do it
- The cheapest high-tech service currently can be found with Realistic Shipyards installed by docking on a constitution class ship. Some big ships will have trouble with the bay being too small, but typically you end docked before the shields are down. It's even possible to tame fugitive constitutions by enabling the docking computer...

Ohh....and before I forget: the constitutions often launch right before the player, then they are tame, slow and close to the station. If you believe you should do, then you can sell your pylon weapons at the station and dock at the constitution for advanced, high-tech-low-price replacements...and maybe even dock back for sale at the station and then head for the constitution again...it's possible to do a few of these runs while the constitution is within the "S" area. In my eyes, it's cheating, however I tend to try out such stuff...and it works. If you've just lost a few hundred thousand credits by making the wrong ship-buying decision, it probably won't hurt to get a little bit of it back. The common profit is about 5K/missile slot, but can be much higher if the circumstances meet. You should be careful before buying some of the "interesting" tech aboard that ship, though, as it might destroy the idea of some missions to you.

Anyway, if you are in need of money, my suggestion is the boa class cruiser. A very nice ship with the perfect cargo capacity. Sometimes in battle it's difficult to get very tiny and fast moving ships in front of your lasers....but why? You're equipped with powerful shields and a perfectly built ship - just run em over! It even improves scooping up their cargo, or the minerals if you ram an asteroid (danger, too fast and you're dead!). With a BCC you can make 60-100K per hour! Furthermore, if you care about shooting down pirates, you have enough cargo hold free in order to scoop all that stuff up while you are on a trading run!

If you want a fighter craft with little cargo space and don't care about the balance of the game, I suggest the Merlin from it's OXP or Realistic Shipyards. I think it's a beauty...but I sold mine because it's so small (about the size of a cargo canister), that most enemies won't hit you anymore. That practically made the game too easy for me...I guess even the super cobra is more difficult to fly than the merlin...

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