Oolite Bulletins

Since the appearance of 1.74 I have had to do without Realistic_shipyards v3.02b.oxp, which is not a problem as most of the ships contained in it are available separately. However I miss the S.I.R.F. repair facility found near many planets. Is anyone else as bereft as me? Is anyone playing with their independant return? Surely I am not alone in this!

Ffoeg

Thats odd im running 174 and the latest shipyars perfectly well.

You could try to just install SIRFYard.oxp from the defunct-but-still-working-in-however-limited-way Oosat 2.

By the way: you can easily see from the description milinks put up on Oosat that it was never meant to appear close to the planet (probably only in interstellar space—the clue seems to be in its name). Placing it close to the main station is purely a debugging feature. I guess just another of the things RS didn't get quite right.

You're right, I'm a dodo. I remember I took it out to avoid clashes with the updated versions of any oxps contained in it. I have replaced it at the front of the list so newer oxps would overwrite any in RS, and it seems to work fine. Awards to you, and away with me.

Ffoeg

My thanks to Commander McLane. I hadn't realised there was a separate sirfyard.oxp. I've never explored Oosat2 as the wiki seemed all knowing. It will be interesting to find out how sirfyard should work after all this time. Yer lives and learns, if yer lucky!

Ffoeg

What is this OXP?

Don't worry, looked it up on Oosat 2. Its the System Independant Repair Facility OXP. Looks quite nice, but it was not on the Wiki, so have added it here.

Added this OXP today. Looks quite nice but it slows my pc down too much so I'm going to remove it again. Very nice interior on docking, with a couple of rooms. Much nicer than a boring docking port on most stations.

I think the version you have linked to is quite an old one, I cannot check as I cannot get the d/l link to work.

I use the RS version and even with RS and 50+ other oxps there is not much slowdown. I checked today and it is quite easy to extract the RS version out of RS, which works for me on 1.74. You need to cut and paste all the SIRF stations from shipdata.plist and the same with the config/script then the models and textures.

I tried extracting it from the OSE version as a test, this seems a much tighter oxp but has a couple of files extra, like commodities.plist.

I also think it is now called Special Interstellar Repair Facility.

tinker wrote:

I think the version you have linked to is quite an old one, I cannot check as I cannot get the d/l link to work.

Have fixed the link on the wiki. It's the same link as on Cmdr McLane's post on this thread earlier.

I have created a new version of SIRF for my own use as milinks who created the original SIRF seems to have gone. I am not sure if it is OK for me to release this to all users though it does seem to be an abandoned oxp.

If users agree that is Ok for me to do this then there will be an opportunity to add this to their game with added commodity tweaks and placing it where I think milinks originally planned it to go. I am working on adding a mission to it as well. The scripting has been greatly simplified, 2 world scripts instead of 15 and a beacon to help find it, as it is nowhere near the main station now.

Well, I've had a similar problem with Orbits. Personally I went with the 'publish & be damned' theory, after waiting to see if Ebi would reply to my messages.

As long as you respect the wishes of the original oxp maker, there shouldn't be any objections.

I hope I've done just that with Orbits myself. In any case, the second Ebi shows up again, I'm going to hand over the modified version to him lock, stock and barrel, for him to deal with as he pleases!

OK SIRF update is now available.

Background.

As is the way with entrepreneurs a few people saw an opportunity to make money.

Each systems main station had the monopoly on ship sales and upgrades and they had very little interest in repairing old crates. "Much better to buy this shiny new ship Commander."

They formed a company SIRFCorp to build System Independent Repair Facilities in most systems, where they would offer an alternative to the main stations.

The project had a few technical and political problems. Repairing blast damaged ships was dangerous work and highly skilled and trained engineers were in short supply, staff losses were quite high to begin with. A decision was made to use untrained slave labour for initial work on making wrecks safe leaving the engineers to to do the more technical and safer work.

The use of slave labour became an increasing problem in some systems and the drop in sales of new ships and equipment from main stations was another problem.

Galcop was quite happy with the SIRF system as they reduced their repair bills by about 30% as well as providing a way to get rid of slave surplices, they could tolerate SIRF more than Free Trade Zones.

SIRFCorp made a decision to move their facilities away from the main stations, to places far beyond witchspace beacons, they renamed the facilities Special Interstellar Repair Facilities and reduced their plans of having a yard in every system.

SIRF's are only to be found in higher Tech level systems and only then if the government is reasonably safe, they do provide some alternative trading strategies as they need to import everything, though certain items are restricted for safety reasons.


Download from Box.net

What about the mission OXP mentioned on this OXP's Wiki page?