Oolite Bulletins

Tirizaan (Proximus, G5)… TL11, rich industrial, multi-government… you would expect to find a few ships for sale here.
But no, not a single ship for sale, in three visits. What actually decides which ships (if any) are available at any one system?

Apart from things like techlevel I guess it's mainly Oolite's trusty old pseudo-random generator.

So you may try to quit and restart the game in order to actually get some different random.

I think government type must be a factor. Certainly I've rarely, if ever, seen ships for sale at an Anarchy world.

The ship market also takes a while to turn over, I think. If the psuedo-random generator rolled up a 0 for ships when you visited the system the first time, then it might take quite a lot of game-time before it rolls again.

This certainly does vary. I agree about the Anarchies...never anything for sale at them, particularly the very low-tech ones.
The High-tech worlds normally have a good selection, although recently I've noticed fewer for sale (at TL 12, 13, 14) than I'd expect. I put it down to the random nature of this aspect of the game.
None for sale is very weird though.

It was only until recently that I discovered that the ships for sale actually change at a given system. I was under the (false) impression for quite some time that they were actually static.

I like that it changes, it just makes me tear my hair out when I see the Wolf Mk II Special Edition with Naval Energy Unit no longer for sale.

I don't recall ever seeing a high tech level system with no ships for sale but it would certainly make sense to me that they would always have at least a handful. That's the beauty? of "random" though, there's always that one in a million chance.

And as we all know, you'll be hard pressed to find a safer bet than the Million to One chance...