Oolite Bulletins

I just made a passenger contract to Ascension, thinking that the TL of 16 would mean a wonderful selection of ships to ogle. I arrived there, only to find that it only had some Pythons and some Wolf Mk. IIs. I am severely ticked off by this, and would much appreciate if someone would tell me what the algorithm for which ships turn up is.

Well, on a whim, I poked into Latest.log, and I noticed that Famous Planets (which is what turns Sori, a TL 9 backwater with Ascension) is listed after most other OXPs in the list. Could this be related?

The reason for this is that the TL16 system in Ascension is just a teaser for something that was planned to have been in a bigger oxp project.

That bigger oxp project has become something that might one day become a sister game to Oolite and has branched off a bit. Oolite Extended.

In that one, you have your special ships there indeed. But don't get your hopes up too soon: I am still working on it, but after a development time of three years and possibly still two years of dev ahead plus some potentially thorny licensing issues to be resolved this is science fiction and perhaps even vapor-stuff.

We'll see, and sorry you got your hopes up too early.

Well, yes, I understand that, but having a TL of 16 alone should guarantee a better haul of ships than Pythons and Wolves. Or am I missing something?

The ship selection in a shipyard is just a little more complicated, I'm afraid. For instance, shipyards tend to have ships which require a techlevel close to the station's techlevel. So, in a TL 15-station you would mainly expect to find ships in the range of TL 10-15, rather than ships with TL 1 or 2.

Which means that if you have a station with a techlevel beyond the default range (which is 1-15), ships will get increasingly rare, because all Oolite ships are of course within the range.

Dammit! Well, time to ply my way to a less high-tech system which doesn't turn its nose up at all of the ships...