Oolite Bulletins

Having taken advantage of the financial services offered by this fraternity, and being certain of a fair deal - having read their promotional material, and listened to their advertising broadcasts - imagine my surprise when, although only a month overdue, one of their holy spacecraft drew near my Falcon-S!

Of course I blew it up at once, left the galaxy, was greeted by another emissary of darkness, Q-mined it, sold my load of narcotics & firearms for a goodly sum, which I immediately spent, and to cut a long story short, when - in the fullness of time - I was obliged to EjectEscapePod, who should rescue me but The Bank Of St.Herod?

Anyone who has similarly overlooked a due payment to this mob of goons will sympathise with my depleted condition after leaving their Branch Manager's office and launching into the cold lonely vacuum of space - only it wasn't actually that lonely! Of-course, I immediately re-docked in their space-port, hoping to re-equip my ship at their very reasonable prices (clearly the hardware they sell is of a superior quality: I feel that buying eqpt. anywhere else is a false economy..and I voiced the opinion). Well, vile sinner that I am, no such respite was afforded! I got away OK ("sort of" OK) and have visited their excellent facilities 2 or 3 times since. They say that they are surprised to see me!

They decline by business, however.

Fools.

Will they persist in this offishness? Will my blowing up their gunships lower my standing further in their eyes, despite creating many profitable insurance opportunities? How long will I be unwelcome at their Temples of Mammon?

They let me in alright, but restrict my activities to the following choices:

1. Departing

Cascade missile a monastary and see what they think...

I wrote the script for black monks quite a long time ago, so its faily simply. You can recover from being a bit late. They will charge you a penalty sum on top of the capital and interest you already owe, but will permit you to redeem yourself by doing so. But the way its currently scripted, if you are really late (I think I set this as a month), then they will never let you darken their doors again and will just throw you out if you try to dock. The first time you try this they will (as you've discovered) do something nasty to you. Once they've done that, they won't bother to send further gunships after you (if you survived) but neither will they help you again. Further attempts to dock, will cause them just to throw you out. Be gone vile sinner!

This was really due to the limits in legacy scripting (the only scripting available when I wrote it). What I would have prefered to do, would have been to set a calculation up that meant you could always redeem yourself, but the amount you had to pay was calaculated depending on how late you were. It was not possible to do this in legacy with an equation, so I had to hand code it as 1 week late charge X, 2 weeks late charge Y and so on. So I had to set a cap where there was a point, where the just said. Right thats it you're bared! It would be posssible with JS to allow redemtion at any point, but that would need a rescripting.