Oolite Bulletins

Found an abadoned Boa in space, it's just floating there. Is there any way that I can get this ship?

Yes and no ... well, for this particular ship, the answer is "no". However various OXP wizards (especially Eric) have been working on developing a system that allows players to use a special salvage drone (fired like a missile) which will reactivate abandoned ships and summon up a Deep Space Dredger to come and collect them – awarding the player a salvage fee on the ship and its cargo. It's still in development, but if you are running Oolite 1.72+ you can check out the Deep Space Dredger OXP version 2.2.

Disembodied wrote:

Yes and no ... well, for this particular ship, the answer is "no". However various OXP wizards (especially Eric) have been working on developing a system that allows players to use a special salvage drone (fired like a missile) which will reactivate abandoned ships and summon up a Deep Space Dredger to come and collect them – awarding the player a salvage fee on the ship and its cargo. It's still in development, but if you are running Oolite 1.72+ you can check out the Deep Space Dredger OXP version 2.2.

Is that compatable with "coaxing" a pilot out of his ship throught the medium of laser fire?

ClymAngus wrote:

Is that compatable with "coaxing" a pilot out of his ship throught the medium of laser fire?

No, what is a pity. When a pilot ejects, the ships maximum speed is set to 0 m/s. by the core game. And because maxSpeed is read only I can't let those ships fly anymore. My oxp selects random traders from the installed ones, changes them to derelicts and add the word "derelict" to its name for better differentiating. Those derelicts can be salvaged.

Hmm, forgive me for asking a dumb question (you've probably thought of this already) but how about the dredger turning up and scooping them? They wouldn't have to move then.

quote="ClymAngus"]Hmm, forgive me for asking a dumb question but how about the dredger turning up and scooping them? [/quote]

Giles already found a solution for that: Ships have cargo_type: CARGO_NOT_CARGO. This makes them explicit unscoopable. This of cause is a solution the other way round: prevent that the player accidentally scoops up a ship.

In the oxp I added a few like ships I can change at will. But than I miss the variation of the ships the player has added. Therefor I also change a few traders to cargo with the same command that transforms the robot fighters to cargo. (There is no command to explicit change scan class)

Problem is the system created derelicts. Giles had also plans to re-add a pilot to them. There is even code present for this and a few undocumented functions to do it. But even those functions don't reset the maxSpeed or scanclass and are useless in their current state.

Thargoid wrote:

Or perhaps on system entry check for traders, and for examples of ships that have the role but no script, assign it one and make some use of the shipLaunchedEscapePod event to do some selective ship-swapping or something?

This is already sort of what I'm doing. oxp created derelicts is not the problem. Although it needed some extra tricks to deal with the also added escorts for some traders!
btw.: shipLaunchedEscapePod will trigger for npc ships but swapping itself will not be possible: This are ships from other, unknown oxps. I have no way to replace it with a guaranteed identical copy of this ship. There could be more ships with this role or role-set. If I could generate an identical ship, swapping at the moment of salvage missile impact would be soon enough.

OK one other dumb question how come when I salvage a ship and have to fight the obligatory lobotomized salvage ship hating pilots, they never declare themselves hostile to me, only the ship I'm salvaging?

If there are any police around which there usually are, as soon as I take a swipe I'm a fugitive. So I assume that only pirate players salvage successfully?

Wish I'd known that before I'd bought the missile.

In the end I just had to nuke the lot of them, the three attacking ships, the police who weren't lifting a finger to stop them, the dredger not being closer. AS A MEGALOMANIAC I CANNOT ABIDE FAILURE IN MY SUBORDINATES!!! And I have to say I felt a lot better about myself afterwards. Could the autopilots ai be tweaked so any attack on a towed ship registers as an attack on the players ship?

Or am I really just going to have to be a little more Buddhist about the whole experience?

I wrote a bit of "deep thought" Just in case that is the case;
"salvaged ship blow apart as law enforcement stands by dunking donuts;
This bounty was never yours player-san,
it graced your life with hope for but a short moment.
You do not morn the falling leaves of autumn.
Then why morn this?"

Nope sorry, I don't look good in saffron. I still got more of a kick killing every last one of them. Yeah, laughing is a bit tricky in a vacuum isn't it mate? Especially after I crack open your escape pod on the hood of my python. I knew those spacescreen wipers would come in handy one day.