Oolite Bulletins

What if?

Then you could sneak into an asteroid field to spy on other ships and prepare a surprise attack or escape pirates. You would turn from a yellow blip on their radar ( powered) to an unpowered Craft. To return on their target list again they have to come within a certain range so they can visually id you. Would be cool if npc's could do the same thing to you. So actually it could be a poor man's stealth device. But the disadvantage could be that some engine models could take long to restart so tben you are a sitting duck. But this would give some oppertunities to build spy missions.

What do you think ?

I like the idea, although there would have to be an asteroid field to hide in. There would also need to be something else there in the field to masslock the player, otherwise chances are they'd just torus straight on through and never notice.

There's still the problem of visual identification. I usually look around at any white blip I come across to see if it's worth scooping. I'd probably spot the ships pretty quickly. Would it be possible for the pirates to launch from the asteroids? It could be an interesting technique for a big pirate ship, to draw the player inside an asteroid cloud which then becomes a surrounding mob of fighters. Even a bunch of hostile Adders or even Worms could be nasty, if there's enough of them.

And we could call them Pirate Coves...

I was thinking of having a cloud of asteroids, where each rock would spawn one fighter, all at the same time. The fighters would be camouflaged on the surface, not coming out of a base within (although in game terms they'd just be magicked into existence, maybe inside a cloud of dust and debris to provide the illusion).

I don't know if simply switching the drive off would do the trick. First, wouldn't the mere presence of quirium even in a dead drive give the ship away (although derelict ships can still have quirium on board as well)? But second, and more important, the signature of a ship is not produced by its engine, but by a transponder (which to this date can only be tinkered with by Hacker Outposts), so the state of the engine simply doesn't matter. It's also the transponder which detects whether the pilot has abandoned the ship and makes it appear as a derelict accordingly.

There's a physical difference between a white blip and a yellow one: white blips don't masslock you, but yellow ones do – so an active drive is what causes the masslock, and presumably that's what's being detected and registered on the scanner. If the ship is completely powered down, then the transponder is (presumably) dead, too – it's not putting out any information about the ship or its owner. Although this does give people a way to hide their legal status, it's not much practical use since it involves sitting dead in space until you suffocate, freeze or cook, depending on circumstances. If you want your transponder tinkered with, so it actively puts out false information, you'll still need to see a Hacker Outpost (although this may void your warranty ).

A carefully prepared ambush, though, where small singleships, their drives turned off, are buried on asteroids under a light dusting of regolith, with their pilots using self-contained life support, should be possible (i.e. capable of being explained away). How effective it might be, I don't know. I suspect it would work better as a one-off surprise at the end of a mission, maybe, than it would as a regular tactic. Apart from anything else, such an ambush, placed on the spacelanes, would keep getting tripped by NPCs and the surprise would be lost.

Disembodied wrote:

There's a physical difference between a white blip and a yellow one: white blips don't masslock you, but yellow ones do – so an active drive is what causes the masslock, and presumably that's what's being detected and registered on the scanner. If the ship is completely powered down, then the transponder is (presumably) dead, too – it's not putting out any information about the ship or its owner. Although this does give people a way to hide their legal status, it's not much practical use since it involves sitting dead in space until you suffocate, freeze or cook, depending on circumstances. If you want your transponder tinkered with, so it actively puts out false information, you'll still need to see a Hacker Outpost (although this may void your warranty ).

A carefully prepared ambush, though, where small singleships, their drives turned off, are buried on asteroids under a light dusting of regolith, with their pilots using self-contained life support, should be possible (i.e. capable of being explained away). How effective it might be, I don't know. I suspect it would work better as a one-off surprise at the end of a mission, maybe, than it would as a regular tactic. Apart from anything else, such an ambush, placed on the spacelanes, would keep getting tripped by NPCs and the surprise would be lost.

I'm pretty sure there's canon for this in TDW, where ships with main engines off tumble like asteroids, ready to ambush the unwary - if I have time I'll go look...

I recall running across something called a "treasure asteroid" once. So I got my starboard mining laser all lined up, shot it and it broke up into several very active pirate ships. LOL

But before that (if they actually were ships before the asteroid got shot), they weren't showing as ships on the scanner. The asteroid was still a white blip.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

There's a physical difference between a white blip and a yellow one: white blips don't masslock you, but yellow ones do – so an active drive is what causes the masslock, and presumably that's what's being detected and registered on the scanner. If the ship is completely powered down, then the transponder is (presumably) dead, too – it's not putting out any information about the ship or its owner. Although this does give people a way to hide their legal status, it's not much practical use since it involves sitting dead in space until you suffocate, freeze or cook, depending on circumstances. If you want your transponder tinkered with, so it actively puts out false information, you'll still need to see a Hacker Outpost (although this may void your warranty ).

A carefully prepared ambush, though, where small singleships, their drives turned off, are buried on asteroids under a light dusting of regolith, with their pilots using self-contained life support, should be possible (i.e. capable of being explained away). How effective it might be, I don't know. I suspect it would work better as a one-off surprise at the end of a mission, maybe, than it would as a regular tactic. Apart from anything else, such an ambush, placed on the spacelanes, would keep getting tripped by NPCs and the surprise would be lost.

I'm pretty sure there's canon for this in TDW, where ships with main engines off tumble like asteroids, ready to ambush the unwary - if I have time I'll go look...

I was right - Chapter Five of TDW:

Alex had been taken by surprise, not because he hadn't been paying attention, but because the attack ships had been so close to the egress point from hyperspace. With their tiny hulls between him and the glowing sun, they had not been visible for an instant, and they had been performing a 'tumbling' routine, mimicking slow-moving asteroids.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I was right - Chapter Five of TDW:

Alex had been taken by surprise, not because he hadn't been paying attention, but because the attack ships had been so close to the egress point from hyperspace. With their tiny hulls between him and the glowing sun, they had not been visible for an instant, and they had been performing a 'tumbling' routine, mimicking slow-moving asteroids.

However, the passage does not refer to the scanner, only to the ships themselves tumbling with engines off (on the scanner no tumbling is visible). So I don't think that we can draw conclusions about the colour of their scanner blip from here.

Sorry, double post.

Sorry, triple post.

Sorry, quadruple post.

I only got a bb-error screen which said something about a timed-out connection. So I went back and hit the "submit"-button again. And again. And again.

Stoopid phpBB!

Disembodied wrote:

I like the idea, although there would have to be an asteroid field to hide in. There would also need to be something else there in the field to masslock the player, otherwise chances are they'd just torus straight on through and never notice.

Something which may be of interest in this discussion is a personal patch I have for Oolite which mass-locks on mass, rather than active drives (as per the original Elite).

If there is enough interest I can clean it up and put it into trunk via a hidden switch (pending approval from the other devs, of course). That way people who want to be mass-locked rather than drive-locked can be so, and it could enable these sorts of surprise attacks.

I quite like the idea of a couple of pirate ships hidden in an asteroid field!