Oolite Bulletins

I arrived at the scene of a battle with lots of derelicts around. I decided to try salvaging one of them.

The bulk hauler the autopilot headed towards was near the sun. I flew towards it and noticed these explosions in the distance. It seemed that there were some pirates and traders flying too close to the sun. Then, to my surprise, the bulk hauler exploded and at some point my salvaged ship too. I shot a few pirates, but more flew into the sun.

Did they all get sun stroke?

You've seen "Sunshine", right?

You may have watched an instant of "sunskimming gone horribly wrong". Or of something else gone horribly wrong, for that matter.

Ships heat up when they are close to the sun. You may even see their hull get redder and redder from the overheating. At a certain point they can't take the heat anymore, so to speak, and are destroyed. Problem is: you have to get out quite early. When the alarm rings (for the player ship, but also for NPCs), it is usally too late already. Even when using injectors you cannot retreat to a safe distance anymore before you're shields and energy are gone (and boy, are they going quickly; eight energy banks in the blink of an eye).

The only thing that can slow down the heating-up process enough to allow anybody to fly close to the sun for more than a few seconds is heat shields. And here lies the problem, because many NPCs don't have them.

Oolite always sported sunskimming NPCs, but, as a matter of fact, until a quite recent version (1.73-ish, I think), when Eric auto-raised their heat shielding, that never actually worked. If you would follow a sunskimming trader from wither witchpoint or station in Oolite 1.65, you would see it blow up long before it even reaches the sunskimming-starting-point. Another 1.65-bug which recently was fixed. However, if some pirates and their victims would get too close to the sun in the heat of a battle, they still don't stand the heat, because they were not originally intending to sunskim, so they don't have enough heat shields.

That explains it then; the traders, pirates and bulk hauler distracted by battle failed to notice their proximity to the Sun. Brings a whole new meaning to the "heat of battle".