Oolite Bulletins

18th July, 2014. Contractor MkII v1.5 OXZ now available via the download manager

The Mk II has a new darker and more organic 'skin', and the model has been augmented with a gun and engine nacelles. It now has only two TC cargo but adds two missile pylons, and also has a unique HUD. The ZZ1's 'twitchy' handling has been tamed, making the Contractor even more pleasurable to fly.




Original post
I am pleased to announce the release of a new OXP.
The Contractor ZZ1 is a specialist ship, normally used by Bounty Hunters and Assassins. It is very fast and well armed, and extremely rare. They can be bought, but are only available occasionally on very high Tech-level worlds (12 and above). The base cost is 1,250,000 Cr. All options are available, but the 5 Ton cargo capacity cannot be expanded.
The OXP also introduces the Contractor into the game as a NPC ship.
They will occasionally appear in-game as Bounty Hunters, and (with lots of help and advice from Thargoid) I have written a special AI for them. They will leave you alone if you're Clean, but they will attack if you are an Offender or Fugitive. These attacks will be a bit more persistent than a Pirate attack, but the Bounty Hunter will flee if you fight back hard enough...Bounty Hunters don't earn any money if they're dead! Bounty Hunter Contractors have Military Lasers, Military shields, Naval energy units, fuel injectors and ECM, so they are very tough. Unsurprisingly, they will fight back vigorously if attacked.
Rarely, you may also come across a Pirate Contractor, which will behave just like any other pirate. These may be less well equipped than a Bounty Hunter, but will certainly have Military Lasers as these are standard equipment factory fitted to all Contractors.

You can find more pictures, with full details of the ship, it's specification and history on the Wiki page , or here on my website. Both pages also include a Download link.

Oh and if you recognise the shape, its copied from a certain stolen Military ship!

cool

Nice 'steath' texture Smivs

pagroove wrote:

Nice 'steath' texture Smivs

That can easily be augmented by true stealth capabilities

It was a pleasure to be of assistance (not that you needed too much).

Thanks...Ten downloads in the first day. I hope you all enjoy it
Smivs

Hi All,
UK Eliter has alerted me to a small glitch in Contractor. There is a missing comma in the shipyard.plist, which (I think) could affect the equipment fitted/available on 'New' ships.
I don't think this will affect the frequency of appearance of the Contractor in the game, but most likely means that some or all of the equipment options may not be fitted as standard on some 'For Sale' examples.
I've been testing this OXP for some weeks and it all seems to be working OK, although the two 'New' examples I have seen for sale were both Base models, which didn't seem odd, but is probably a result of this issue.
The Contractor is deliberately very rare. For-sale examples will only be found on Tech Level 12 and above worlds, and then there's only about a 1 in 3 chance that they'll appear there. In-game, expect to come across a Bounty Hunter perhaps every 10-15 systems you visit, and remember if you're Clean he'll ignore you, so they're quite easy to overlook if there's a lot of other ships around. Only around 1 in 100 pirates will have a Contractor as well.
I have now corrected this error and uploaded v1.1 to box.net.

Nice one, to have a civilian Constrictor.

IMHO you've made the ship overpowered: 4 gun mounts and 20 TC cargo capacity in addition to "standard Constrictor features" in such a small hull feels way too much to me. Of course, this is just a personal opinion.

Anyway, I will download this ship and it will roam in my Ooniverse, maybe tamed a bit though (will still be one badass ship).

Nice design, nice background, but way way way overpowered for it's price and size.

I would personally up the price by a million credits, drop the speed by 0.1LM to 0.475LM (which is still very high) and tinker with the energy settings as well.

Sorry, I'm just not a big fan of ships with ludicrously high speeds in my Oolite. Anything about 0.4LM should be rare and ludicrously expensive in my view and the same applies for energy banks and recharge rate.

I'd certainly download this to add to my Oolite universe, but I'd certainly be tinkering with the p-list as well.

Zieman wrote:

Nice one, to have a civilian Constrictor.

IMHO you've made the ship overpowered: 4 gun mounts and 20 TC cargo capacity in addition to "standard Constrictor features" in such a small hull feels way too much to me. Of course, this is just a personal opinion.

Anyway, I will download this ship and it will roam in my Ooniverse, maybe tamed a bit though (will still be one badass ship).

Hi Zieman,
I did think long and hard about he spec. because I don't like impossible 'miracle' ships. Compromise and balance is important IMHO.
Although 'Classified', the Constrictor spec can be gleaned from the shipdata.plist, and the original does have the four gun mounts, although only the front is used.
As for the Cargo, the original has a nominal 15 Ton capacity, and I figured that as that was a prototype, useable cargo space wasn't really an issue, and the thing was likely to be full of test/telemetry equipment anyway. I thought if you dumped all the test equipment that should free-up quite a lot of space, and give the pilot some limited but useful cargo capacity.
Also the Muon Schism drive units are much smaller than the bulky Military drive fitted to the original prototype, and the top speed is lower than a Constrictor (0.575LM compared to the Constrictor's 0.6LM) as a consequence.
I hope you enjoy it!
Regards,
Smivs.

EDIT:- I've just read Sendraks comment as well. I'm open about the price, and did think of making it higher, because yes it does represent very good value at the moment. All I will say is that a base model with all the options will cost up to 900,000 Cr in total, which is way out of reach of most people anyway.
Also consider cost/benefit analysis. A Bounty Hunter or Assassin is going to have to be pretty good to raise that sort of money in the first place, and then there is servicing and repair bills (an overhaul costs around 8,000 Cr if I remember correctly), and a damaged Military Shield Enhancement costs more than some ships to repair. You won't make any money trading in a small ship like this, so it's all got to be funded from your 'Professional' income.
Put simply, if it's too expensive, no one will buy one.

Smivs wrote:

Although 'Classified', the Constrictor spec can be gleaned from the shipdata.plist, and the original does have the four gun mounts, although only the front is used.

Well, it has 4 weapon_positions defined in the shipdata.plist, but so does Adder...
And a player Adder definitely has just one gun mount.

Smivs wrote:

As for the Cargo, the original has a nominal 15 Ton capacity, and I figured that as that was a prototype, useable cargo space wasn't really an issue, and the thing was likely to be full of test/telemetry equipment anyway. I thought if you dumped all the test equipment that should free-up quite a lot of space, and give the pilot some limited but useful cargo capacity.

I don't know why there's 15 TC cargo capacity for Constrictor in Oolite core shipdata.plist - IMHO 5 TC would suffice, and the civilian (even if pirate-reverse-engineered) should be statswise seriously nerfed if it has bigger cargo space.

Hope you don't take these comments as attacks against your work, they're meant to be constructive and observative.

The ship looks good, and as stated before, it will roam in my Ooniverse (maybe in less über form though).

Z

Zieman wrote:

Smivs wrote:

Although 'Classified', the Constrictor spec can be gleaned from the shipdata.plist, and the original does have the four gun mounts, although only the front is used.

Well, it has 4 weapon_positions defined in the shipdata.plist, but so does Adder...
And a player Adder definitely has just one gun mount.

Smivs wrote:

As for the Cargo, the original has a nominal 15 Ton capacity, and I figured that as that was a prototype, useable cargo space wasn't really an issue, and the thing was likely to be full of test/telemetry equipment anyway. I thought if you dumped all the test equipment that should free-up quite a lot of space, and give the pilot some limited but useful cargo capacity.

I don't know why there's 15 TC cargo capacity for Constrictor in Oolite core shipdata.plist - IMHO 5 TC would suffice, and the civilian (even if pirate-reverse-engineered) should be statswise seriously nerfed if it has bigger cargo space.

Hope you don't take these comments as attacks against your work, they're meant to be constructive and observative.

The ship looks good, and as stated before, it will roam in my Ooniverse (maybe in less über form though).

Z

Certainly no offence taken.
You are actually expressing thoughts (concerns?) I had when making this. At the end of the day I had to make decisions and I went for the options that I felt made the ship realistic both in terms of how something like the Constrictor could be reverse engineered for use by Hit-Men, and also how practical it is to own and operate.
I haven't (yet) installed Assassins or Random Hits OXPs, so don't actually know what sort of money these Hits might pay, but in the normal game, a good run might net around 200 Cr in bounties (say eight pirates paying a bounty of 25 Cr each) and maybe up to 750 Cr in bounties and Insurance payouts if you capture/rescue several escape capsules. Let's say around 1,000 Cr on a good day. Perhaps as little as 50 Cr on a not-good day. And of course on a not-good day your expenses could be very high indeed! What's the repair cost of a Military Shield Enhancement, say? About 20,000 Cr if memory serves.
Ok this is all speculative, but does suggest that, relying on bounties etc alone for your income, you'd be lucky to break even at best over time.
I am listening, and if the general view is that this OXP is un-balanced I would consider making some changes, although right now I still think the balance is about right. You can always tweak your version if you want to, and that's fine by me.

Smivs wrote:

You won't make any money trading in a small ship like this, so it's all got to be funded from your 'Professional' income.

With lucrative courier runs that don't take up any space at all, it's possible to keep making very good money even with a very small cargo hold. It all goes in the safe in the cockpit!

Balancing ships is a very tricky business, of course, and one person's honest-reward-for-hard-labour-ship is often another person's OTT-übership ... perhaps the best rule of thumb is to compare everything to a Cobra III. Personally speaking, I think at 0.575 the top speed is way too high: it's a huge increase over all the original ships (with the exception of the Constrictor itself, which is supposed to be an experimental model). If the ship is going to have any usable cargo space at all I think the speed has got to be significantly lower. Personally speaking I'd top it out at 0.4 or (at a massive stretch) 0.425. That makes it more than 14% (or, at 0.425, more than 20%) faster than a Cobra III (0.575 is 64% faster).

Looking at real-world vehicles, it's easy to make big increases in things like cargo space (primarily by making the vehicles physically bigger – e.g. a car, a van and a lorry), whereas it's relatively difficult to make similarly big increases in things like speed – you tend to get diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, squeezing out that extra 5 m.p.h. becomes enormously difficult: you have to start doing things like building the vehicle out of entirely new materials and using specialist fuels (and by this point the costs are rising astronomically).

But it's your ship! And anyway, the beauty of the OXP system is that nobody is forced to install something they disagree with – and everything is easily editable anyway.

Smivs wrote:

EDIT:- I've just read Sendraks comment as well. I'm open about the price, and did think of making it higher, because yes it does represent very good value at the moment. All I will say is that a base model with all the options will cost up to 900,000 Cr in total, which is way out of reach of most people anyway.

As I said in the other thread, price is a poor justification for uber stats and the stats for this ship are very uber. Silly uber. The ship is comparable in every way to the Caddy, except that the Contractor is much faster, smaller and lacks the Caddy's DNC and turrets.

The base Caduceus costs around 1.2million credits. I would consider pitching this vessel around that price mark.

Also consider cost/benefit analysis. A Bounty Hunter or Assassin is going to have to be pretty good to raise that sort of money in the first place, and then there is servicing and repair bills (an overhaul costs around 8,000 Cr if I remember correctly), and a damaged Military Shield Enhancement costs more than some ships to repair. You won't make any money trading in a small ship like this, so it's all got to be funded from your 'Professional' income.
Put simply, if it's too expensive, no one will buy one.

Actually anyone with a good reputation for shifting cargo can make plenty of cash in this vessel doing the contracts that only do gold, plat and gems. 20tonnes of space is more than enough for that and you're looking at making tens of thousands of credits per job. In a ship as formiddable as this, it is practically a no-risk venture.

As for the expense, it isn't hard to make money in oolite if you go down the route of contracts. From a pure pirate/bounty hunter route, yes amassing this kind of cash is hard and if you want to solely play that way, then I would concur stupidly expensive ships are a lifetimes work to amass the cash for.

I strongly concur with Disembodied comments on the speed of this vessel. It is silly fast.

For it's size, shield power and speed, I'd do away with it's cargo hold almost entirely. Perhaps leaving only one or two tonnes space and even then, I'd drop the speed down to something close to what Disembodied suggests. I'd also nerf either the energy banks or the recharge, probably the former, as it makes more sense for a small combat vessel not to have reams of energy banks. Combat vessels with high energy recharge and lots of energy banks are just broken, no argument. Killer Wolf knows this from the original dominatrix release, where the energy recharge + number of banks made the vessels almost impossible to kill.

If the speed was 0.45lm, with 3 energy banks, a recharge of 5 and 4 tonnes cargo space, it would still be a monster bounty hunting vessel.

I really don't want to detract from what you've achieved here, which is a great looking ship and a really nice background, but the stats are so far out of whack with other player ships, it spoils it for me slightly.

Disembodied wrote:

Smivs wrote:

You won't make any money trading in a small ship like this, so it's all got to be funded from your 'Professional' income.

With lucrative courier runs that don't take up any space at all, it's possible to keep making very good money even with a very small cargo hold. It all goes in the safe in the cockpit!

Good point...I hadn't considered that, or passenger transport come to that. Hum!

Disembodied wrote:

Balancing ships is a very tricky business, of course, and one person's honest-reward-for-hard-labour-ship is often another person's OTT-übership ... perhaps the best rule of thumb is to compare everything to a Cobra III. Personally speaking, I think at 0.575 the top speed is way too high: it's a huge increase over all the original ships (with the exception of the Constrictor itself, which is supposed to be an experimental model). If the ship is going to have any usable cargo space at all I think the speed has got to be significantly lower. Personally speaking I'd top it out at 0.4 or (at a massive stretch) 0.425. That makes it more than 14% (or, at 0.425, more than 20%) faster than a Cobra III (0.575 is 64% faster).

Looking at real-world vehicles, it's easy to make big increases in things like cargo space (primarily by making the vehicles physically bigger – e.g. a car, a van and a lorry), whereas it's relatively difficult to make similarly big increases in things like speed – you tend to get diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, squeezing out that extra 5 m.p.h. becomes enormously difficult: you have to start doing things like building the vehicle out of entirely new materials and using specialist fuels (and by this point the costs are rising astronomically).

I'm not trying to justify anything here, but having test-driven this thing a lot lately, the speed is really only a minor point. The bottom line is it's not much help in combat (targeting another ship at such high speed is all but impossible), and it really only becomes useful if you need to run away!

Disembodied wrote:

But it's your ship! And anyway, the beauty of the OXP system is that nobody is forced to install something they disagree with – and everything is easily editable anyway.

True, but I'd like it to be accepted. Keep the comments coming please, they are all being taken on board.