Oolite Bulletins

So, there you are, having just popped into a new system.
Fuel Station on your left, W-beacon close by, Con Store just within scanner range. Maybe they've got some cheap bling? Well, not much of a detour, so you pop in for a look. But first, you check what the main station will pay for that hold full of furs & liquor you've got, just in case there's a better deal out here.
Well inside, you get rid of the liquor, but hang on to the furs, because they're worth more closer to the planet. But then you notice there's a bunch of, er, migrant workers and, uh, pharmaceuticals in stock. But your hold is still half full of furs, and you can't fit everything. Where's the best profit margin? Having failed to check (and write down/remember) all the station prices, the only way to find out is to launch, check, (remember, this time!) and redock.

Now, if you only you had some sort of gizmo that would allow you to target the Con Store (or any other dockable object) and access both price lists simultaneously, say from the F8 menu...


For those miserly guys like me, flying around in an underequipped CM3 trying to maximize profit while saving up for something nice, this would be a nice time-saver.
Now before someone says "Mediocre idea! Why don't you do that yourself?", please be aware that I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag.


As an afterthought:
I have no clue where the price list is stored, but if it's a similar property as the bounty for ships, a rewrite of the Bounty Scanner could possibly (sort of) get the job done. The downside to this would of course be that you would have to switch back and forth between the view screen and the price screen while comparing. And it would really clutter up your view screen if you were ever to target a station for, ehrm, other purposes.

ah but if you're miserly, you wouldn't PAY to have a computer to do it, when you could easily write it down and use that money towards buying more goods.

It's a good idea, I'm just being silly

You could use the handy Oolite Trading Chart to write down all values.

Seriously: I wouldn't expect a price comparison to get implemented, for two reasons:

(1) The F8-screen as it is is not big enough to allow for another column of prices. (Which, I think, would be the only sensible way to make a comparison to begin with.)

(2) The idea to target a station and then call its F8-screen seems neat at first, but I would advise against it. It is never a good idea to browse F5-F8 too extensively during flight, becauses it draws your attention away from what's happening around you. A little bit like reading the stock markets in a big newspaper whilst driving a car. And while you in Oolite won't hit a tree (which is why it is strongly advised not to read a newspaper whilst driving a car, if anybody wondered), you are in constant danger of being attacked and killed, if you are not on the lookout.

Commander McLane wrote:

(2) The idea to target a station and then call its F8-screen seems neat at first, but I would advise against it. It is never a good idea to browse F5-F8 too extensively during flight, becauses it draws your attention away from what's happening around you. A little bit like reading the stock markets in a big newspaper whilst driving a car. And while you in Oolite won't hit a tree (which is why it is strongly advised not to read a newspaper whilst driving a car, if anybody wondered), you are in constant danger of being attacked and killed, if you are not on the lookout.

[OT threadjack]
Crossing a busy city street whilst reading a newspaper isn't advisable either.. as one gent discovered some years back, when I shifted down a gear and charged him with my motorcycle...

He levitated back to the footpath.. there were pages of The Age blowing everywhere..
[/OT threadjack]

www.crimsonforge.co.uk/cloister/cheatsheet.jpg

Print it out and cross fold it into the hole made by the f-keys.

Commander McLane wrote:

You could use the handy Oolite Trading Chart to write down all values.

One of the habits I've carried over from the old 8bit days is to keep a meticulous record of minimum and maximum prices for all the commodities, and the mean price and profit potential that can be derived from those. (IOW an expanded version of ClymAngus' cheatsheet.)
This gets the job done efficiently enough, without having to resort to writing down the values for every visited system.

Slightly OT: I've seen the list of average prices listed on the Trading Chart in several places. How exactly have they been calculated? They don't match what you get by (min+max)/2, and in two cases (Narcotics and Minerals) the listed average is outside the min-max range.

Commander McLane wrote:

(1) The F8-screen as it is is not big enough to allow for another column of prices.

I've got to disagree on this one. There's four columns on the screen now, and if you cram them in, you could fit four or even five more. It would be crowded, but they would fit. Furthermore, you'd have no use for the "Quantity-available-at-main-station", so that's one column less, and you could even cut the "Cargo-in-hold" if you needed the space.

Commander McLane wrote:

(2) The idea to target a station and then call its F8-screen seems neat at first, but I would advise against it. It is never a good idea to browse F5-F8 too extensively during flight, becauses it draws your attention away from what's happening around you. A little bit like reading the stock markets in a big newspaper whilst driving a car. And while you in Oolite won't hit a tree (which is why it is strongly advised not to read a newspaper whilst driving a car, if anybody wondered), you are in constant danger of being attacked and killed, if you are not on the lookout.

A valid point. But the radar display is still there at the bottom of the screen, giving you the exact same information you would have while looking at your view screen.
Working under the assumption that the prudent trader will want to compare system prices with dockable-object prices - and unless we work under this assumption, the whole discussion becomes pointless - I think checking F8 and writing down (or memorizing) prices while preparing to dock is far more of a traffic hazard than having it all available on one screen.



All I can say is that I would welcome and use such an addition. It would shave some RL time off my trade runs, and even reduce in-game time in those cases where you end up not docking because there's no profit to be had. I may very well be all alone in this, I don't know.

Is it worth the trouble implementing? Hard to tell, since I have no idea if this would take 20 minutes or 20 hours to do. And as they say, everything is easy for he who doesn't have to do it himself.

Just my .03Cr worth.
(Yeah, I know it's supposed to be .02, but I've got children to feed and an ailing mother to support )

CheeseRedux wrote:

Slightly OT: I've seen the list of average prices listed on the Trading Chart in several places. How exactly have they been calculated? They don't match what you get by (min+max)/2, and in two cases (Narcotics and Minerals) the listed average is outside the min-max range.

I don't know how they are calculated, but an average price is not (min+max)/2. It is SUM(prices) / COUNT(prices) where prices is a list of all prices encountered so far (for a particular item).


As for the F8 screen showing a comparison between system prices and prices available on the currently-targeted-station, I'd go along with that.

Micha wrote:

As for the F8 screen showing a comparison between system prices and prices available on the currently-targeted-station, I'd go along with that.

I'm not 100% sure - if any proper Elite / Oolite historian ( or nearest equivalent ) reads this please do clarify this for us - but there might be a non-technical problem with this concept.

I seem to remember something in the canonical backstory along the lines that solar systems are explicitely forbidden by GalCoop from broadcasting their prices, under threat of expulsion from the league...

If my half remembered backstory is confirmed, I suspect GalCoop won't be too keen on help remembering the last traded prices / trading computer usage, and it might even make anyone using them into criminals...

Micha wrote:

CheeseRedux wrote:

Slightly OT: I've seen the list of average prices listed on the Trading Chart in several places. How exactly have they been calculated? They don't match what you get by (min+max)/2, and in two cases (Narcotics and Minerals) the listed average is outside the min-max range.

I don't know how they are calculated, but an average price is not (min+max)/2. It is SUM(prices) / COUNT(prices) where prices is a list of all prices encountered so far (for a particular item).

This all depends on the distribution. If we have a normal (Gaussian) distribution of prices - or if each possible price for a given item appears the same number of times as any other possible price - the result from the arithmetic mean (average) will match (min+max)/2. (In that case, the median value will also match.)
For any other distribution this will, as you say, not be true.

Finding a useful average is a difficult process. For instance, if you're in a cluster of industrial worlds, the galactic average is a pretty useless statistic to go by, since all destinations would be likely to have prices on the same side of average.

Well, on the other side, there is always The Traders Almanach. Beware, it is a work in progress, and I'd ask you to complain about the grammar to me via PM. Whatever you find will lead to a better Almanach generator - promised!

Yours, Christian Treczoks

Kaks wrote:

I seem to remember something in the canonical backstory along the lines that solar systems are explicitely forbidden by GalCoop from broadcasting their prices, under threat of expulsion from the league...

Yes, this is correct. (Unless, of course, that we both have managed to mess up our memory in the exact same way! )

However, I cannot see how getting the price list from a Con Store (or Rock Hermit, or Monastery, or...) when you're within scanner range would violate this rule, especially since the main station prices are available systemwide.

I'm 'just' extrapolating on top of the canonical story here. If GalCoop doesn't like main stations to broadcast outside their system, for whatever protectionist reasons, they might take a dim view of other stations broadcasting their prices within the system.

It would also provide a handy explanation why trading computers are not as widespread as they otherwise 'should'.

Micha wrote:

CheeseRedux wrote:

Slightly OT: I've seen the list of average prices listed on the Trading Chart in several places. How exactly have they been calculated? They don't match what you get by (min+max)/2, and in two cases (Narcotics and Minerals) the listed average is outside the min-max range.

I don't know how they are calculated, but an average price is not (min+max)/2. It is SUM(prices) / COUNT(prices) where prices is a list of all prices encountered so far (for a particular item).

I definitely agree. I have been averaging prices in the past by calculating a mix from min/max for a rich-industrial, a min/max for a poor agricultural etc. When you add it all it might show that for some stuff the max value appears more often and other have more often an low value. For G1 I even averaged the min/max for all actual system types in that system. It came pretty close to that for a random system. So the values from the kz9999 reference sheet are pretty accurate.

Re the canonical non-advertisement of prices (beyond system space), yes, I was aware of that. But these price lists would only be broadcast within scanner range of said station, whereas the GalCop station broadcasts its price-list within the entire system.

Fair point on the extrapolation - after all, these stations are potentially taking trade (and taxes) away from the officially sanctioned GalCop stations.

Undecided.. although still leaning towards allowing the localised broadcasts.

I wouldn't mind that at all, but I reckon using one should bring a 60% chance of adding to the player's bounty... Again, just shooting the breeze, really