Weirdly enough, when I load an earlier save of my commander (700 kills ago) his Eel Rapier loads fine, but the newer save displays the giant rotating question mark and says silly things like:
Saved game failed to load.
Could not find ship type "eel-alt-player" - please reinstall the appropriate OXP.
Further, last night at 10pm it worked fine, today, not so much.
Reinstalling Xships, reloading the cache don't seem to help. A quick diff(1) of the save files reveals nothing bizarre (both files have the same <string>eel-alt-player</string> line(s)).
Ah well, c'est la vie, as they say in ancient Scotland. I'll try actually removing everything oolite related outside of the AddOns dir and see if that makes any difference. Two or three more gin&tonics and I won't really care anyway. It's only a few qbombs chucked a cops.