Oolite Bulletins

What if you could drop a bomb or fire a missile that unleashes a fast sphere like the Q-bomb. Every one hit by the expanding sphere is the instantly dropped into witch space. Or you could have a variant that freezes the ships like glue.

Second idea is to have a weapon that you could 'draw' a deadly energy barrier around your enemy like in the classic BBC-game frenzy. but in 3d

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_eJ3gJhvEw

Just had to launch these ideas. Otherwise they would be gone

pagroove wrote:

What if you could drop a bomb or fire a missile that unleashes a fast sphere like the Q-bomb. Every one hit by the expanding sphere is the instantly dropped into witch space.

Or a missile that opens a witchspace tunnel upon contact with an enemy to get rid of it.

maik wrote:

pagroove wrote:

What if you could drop a bomb or fire a missile that unleashes a fast sphere like the Q-bomb. Every one hit by the expanding sphere is the instantly dropped into witch space.

Or a missile that opens a witchspace tunnel upon contact with an enemy to get rid of it.

Like this little proof-of-concept OXP?

However, I am not entirely sure how useful a weapon it would be. And I am especially not sure whether I wanted it to be used against the player. Could be extremely annoying for gameplay.

Comments welcome.

picked it up. Now searching for a station where I can buy it and then test it.

Tested it and worked like a dream Cmdr Mc Lane. Shot it at a Cobbie and then followed it through the wormhole. The ship was in another system.

Maybe this missile could be used to lure escorts away from its mother?
So that if you have to attack the main ship you could use this one. But it works and its kind of funny to see the ship sucked in by its own witch space.

Now the missile is I think a little too expensive for what it does. I think.

Other uses are to beam out an asteroid before it hits something?

What about the energy wall? is such thing doable? Something like the energy web in Star Trek?

Thargoid wrote:

The latter's a little like the displacer missile in Armoury. That just short-hop relocates the target in the same system rather than forcing a witchspace jump, but it's the same principle.

I've been hit a couple of times with that thing.

It moves you somewhere else in the system. That's both a good thing and a bad thing: When I find my prey again, it's with recharged shields, cold lasers, and just a bit annoyed that they had the stones to shoot something like that at me. It just takes them a little longer to suck vacuum, is all.

In that way, it's actually a tactical advantage weapon - for you.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

I've been hit a couple of times with that thing.

It moves you somewhere else in the system. That's both a good thing and a bad thing: When I find my prey again, it's with recharged shields, cold lasers, and just a bit annoyed that they had the stones to shoot something like that at me. It just takes them a little longer to suck vacuum, is all.

In that way, it's actually a tactical advantage weapon - for you.

It (deliberately) doesn't move you very far, only a couple of scanner width max iirc.

And yes your lasers are cold and your shields and energy is back, but then so are those of your prey. Plus they may have had time to do any number of things - order drinks, witchspace out, dock, paint their ship pink...

Incidentally, I did a witchdrive disruptor missile as special equipment for the Trident Down mission. I stumbled across the performHyperpaceExit command and created a whole bit of plot to make use of it.

However, making the target then appear in witchspace, rather than showing up safely on the other side of the tunnel, involved a whole load of hard coding. I know that with javascript you can now use the existSystem method and you can also specify the destination system, however it doesn't seem to like a system ID of -1.

However it is a fun weapon. More like a tactical displacer.
But it should be about 400 credits instead of 1350. I think.

As I said, it's just a proof of concept, and I did it in less than five minutes. I just took the ECM hardened missile and made the necessary AI changes. I didn't even bother to change the model or the stats, except for the price.

And as it turns out that similar weapons already exist, I don't think that I will follow it any further.

If you want to make something with it, be my guest. If you ever release it as a real OXP, you could mention my name in the readme.

Other idea:

Missile that creates a copy of the targeted ship. The copy then starts fighting against the ship is was copied from. Missile consists of duplication Nanobots that disappear after a while.

I forgot to mention a flaw in my small proof-of-concept OXP. The target is transferred to the next system, but remains in its current AI state. This may cause it to hang in its destination system, being stuck in an AI which makes no sense in its new situation (for instance it could still search for the next fuel station, even if there is no fuel station in the new system).

Ramirez wrote:

however it doesn't seem to like a system ID of -1.

No, however, you can force a player's ship to misjump via js.

The NPC situation is indeed 'a bit' complicated: the Ooniverse's physics so far dictate that any jump creates a full wormhole, and that a misjump causes the affected ship to kind of hit the wormhole 'wall' and just tumble outside, somewhere in between systems... In other words, we'll never have a wormhole ending in interstellar space, ever, even if the jumping ship has actually misjumped. It's also consistent with the way witchpoints work.

I'll see if I can find an easy-ish way to script NPC misjumps. Thing is, it will be almost impossible to catch up with a misjumped NPC, what with going all the way to the destination system, then doubling back to the misjump position. By the time you get to the right place, you're probably too late...

maik wrote:

pagroove wrote:

What if you could drop a bomb or fire a missile that unleashes a fast sphere like the Q-bomb. Every one hit by the expanding sphere is the instantly dropped into witch space.

Or a missile that opens a witchspace tunnel upon contact with an enemy to get rid of it.

I bags-eyed that one in "Snake Charming" in the Fiction section...