Oolite Bulletins

Recently we were discussing the possibility of creating a new way of preventing certain death in interstellar space after a misjump: to re-create the player's wormhole, so that he can continue his journey (debate begins more or less here). Thus I have created this OXP and given the basic idea a backstory, expanding on what is already known about Thargoids and their witchspace-blocking abilitites.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the idea and discussion! The result is here to try and enjoy:

[wiki]Wormhole restoration OXP[/wiki]


Introduction

How do the Thargoids make your wormhole through witchspace collapse and spit you out in the middle of nowhere? It turns out that they have a device for that, and if you get stuck in interstellar space, you find yourself within a grid of four Thargoid Witchspace Jammers. These jammers keep you where you are, and also prevent you from escaping with another witchspace jump, even if you have the necessary fuel.

Destroy them and your original wormhole will re-open, allowing you to continue your journey to your original destination.

Overview

Usually, after a misjump you find yourself ambushed by some viciously attacking Thargoid Warships. Sometimes you even manage to fight and kill them. You're still full of excitement and adrenalin from the epic battle when you finally find out that you're dead anyway, because you don't have enough fuel left to reach any of the surrounding systems. You're doomed to die in interstellar space. This sucks.

There are already a couple of OXPs which offer you a way out of this—literally—dead end. Wormhole_restoration.oxp goes another path than those existing OXPs. Its basic premise is that after you fought off the ambush in interstellar space, your original wormhole opens again and you can continue your original journey to your original destination.

To this end the OXP introduces a visible device which is supposed to have collapsed your wormhole in the first place: the Thargoid Witchspace Jammer. There are always four of them surrounding the place where you emerged from your jump. It's a spiky device that gives off an evil glow, easily recognizable. Destroy all four of them, and your original wormhole opens again. Enter it just like you would enter another ship's wormhole, and you continue your journey to your original destination without using any more witchjump fuel.

The Thargoids place their Witchspace Jammers only at the midpoints between two systems. Therefore, if you make another misjump from that midpoint, you won't encounter another set of Witchspace Jammers. Giles only knows what it was that made your jump fail again. You may still encounter Thargoids, though, and now you're depending on your own fuel.

It is only necessary to destroy the four Witchspace Jammers, so you can try to avoid the surrounding Thargoid ships and only concentrate on the jammers. However, the warships will of course still attack you, so you will still be forced to fight them off. Your ship's computer will notify you whenever one of the Witchspace Jammers is destroyed, telling you how many are still intact. It will also detect the re-formation of your original wormhole after the last Witchspace Jammer is destroyed. All you have to do then is to locate your wormhole, return to it, and enter it. If there were other ships stuck together with you, their wormholes will re-open as well, leading to their original destinations, so in this case it may be worthwhile to examine all wormholes first. You don't want to jump in the wrong direction, do you? Don't spend too much time with a thorough examination, though. The re-opened wormholes only stay open for between one and two minutes. Therefore your maxim should be: if in doubt, just head for the closest wormhole as quickly as possible.

There is a catch, though: If you (or other ships) haven't killed all Thargoids before destroying the Witchspace Jammers, the remaining Thargoid ships may follow you or any other ship through the re-opened wormhole. Therefore your successful escape may mean death and destruction for many vessels in your destination system. You may unwillingly head the Thargoid forces to an invasion of the very system where you seek refuge from them. Therefore—if at all possible—you should make sure that no Thargoid Warships are left in interstellar space when you re-enter your wormhole.

Technical details

Wormhole_restoration.oxp contains the model of the Thargoid Witchspace Jammer. This model was recycled from Cataclysm.oxp. Four Thargoid Witchspace Jammers are spawned in a grid around the player's position whenever misjumping. These Witchspace Jammers have enough mass to prevent any witchspace jump inside their scanner range, therefore leaving is not possible, even with enough fuel. Killing them sends a message to the player's console. Killing the last one creates an invisible dummy entity that immediately attempts to jump out to the player's original destination. The attempts are repeated until one is successful. The wormhole stays open for about 90 seconds. Another dummy entity is created for each ship with a yellow blip. These jump out randomly to either the player's destination or the system he came from. Immediately after reaching the other side the dummy entity is removed.

The OXP also replaces the normal thargoidAI with a slightly modified version. This new thargoidAI gives Thargoid ships a one-in-four chance to follow the player through his wormhole whenever he jumps out. This is inspired by the current pirateAI, which also introduces the chance of pirates following the player, should he jump out in the middle of a fight.

Known bugs/problems

The known bugs are fixed with Oolite 1.75.2.

Minimum Requirements

Wormhole_restoration. oxp v 1.1 requires at least Oolite 1.75.2.

Download Location

This OXP is available for download via the  Elite Wiki.


EDIT: now in v 1.1

Good Idea Commander McLane,

But I would suggest, that OXP should support a standard mechanism to be suspended for the other OXP's that may have an interstellar space mission. So please follow the discussion on that thread and please report about what you think.

Random observation department:

Since bringing bugs into system space is obviously a Bad Thing, would it make sense to have the legal status of the player/NPC affected by this? (As per usual, only if observed by the fuzz/navy, of course.)

I've no clue if it's desirable, even less scriptable. Just throwing it out there.

CheeseRedux wrote:

Since bringing bugs into system space is obviously a Bad Thing, would it make sense to have the legal status of the player/NPC affected by this?

That would certainly encourage the player to clear out the bugs first.

Very 'interesting' OXP indeed... thanks McLane, it's cool. At the first attempt, I splashed the warships, took-out three of the tube-breakers... but I lost track of the fourth during the firefight. Cue quartering the sky, trying to find it... all to no avail. I had to give up eventually, so I tried to jump out with my remaining fuel... and it worked. If I read the notes right, that shouldn't happen, but I may have got it wrong (again). At the second attempt, I lost all flight control during the firefight... everything else carried on, I was taking hits etc, but the 'stick and the keyboard flight control wouldn't work. Very strange... stuck in a horrible tumble... all I could do was let them kill me (nothing in the log, btw).

Third time around, I got it right... splashed the warships, then took-out the tube-breakers... even splashed the last one with the heavy railgun (that's a sweet weapon), and my wormhole duly re-appeared.



I really enjoyed this though... now to try and get the warships to follow me back to normal space.

Love the concept but it's slightly off-canon in that if you do misjump normally you CAN jump out again if you have fuel. i doubt that's a concern tho, when playing this new version, however one thing i'm not sure about is the wormhole life ~ we all know they collapse after a minute or so, so i can't quite understand how a device could collapse it and then have it reopened : even if the Thatgoid device doesn't collapse it as such but "freezes" it, leaving the hole in place but blocking the transportation mechanics, how does the hole stay open long enough for you to kill all the beacons and race for teh cloud?

"CheeseRedux wrote:
Since bringing bugs into system space is obviously a Bad Thing, would it make sense to have the legal status of the player/NPC affected by this?

El Viejo wrote:
That would certainly encourage the player to clear out the bugs first."
To be honest, if i'd been ambushed and swarmed by alien warships, this would be the least of my worries.

If you can't get away from the Thargoids before opening an escape tunnel (wormhole), then you're probably not doing it out of choice. That might explain the huge number of offender and fugitive ships in-universe, since the Witchspace Beacon would see them "dragging" Thargoids in with them.

El Viejo wrote:

Very 'interesting' OXP indeed... thanks McLane, it's cool. At the first attempt, I splashed the warships, took-out three of the tube-breakers... but I lost track of the fourth during the firefight. Cue quartering the sky, trying to find it... all to no avail.

I assume this will happen, depending on how far away you get from your original position during the firefight. The jammers are big enough that you can see them from quite a distance, but of course a visual scan of the whole sky is a huge task, and you may easily miss a distant object.

El Viejo wrote:

I had to give up eventually, so I tried to jump out with my remaining fuel... and it worked.

Yes. The jammers only block your jump within their scanner range. Or, to be more precise, as long as one of them is within your scanner range. So, if it isn't displayed on your scanner it doesn't affect you. This is a general feature of Oolite, I couldn't do anything about it.

Killer Wolf wrote:

Love the concept but it's slightly off-canon in that if you do misjump normally you CAN jump out again if you have fuel.

Yeah. I bent the canon here as an incentive to go the way of killing the jammers. If you only needed to press 'H' you probably wouldn't go through the hassle of killing four objects. BTW, for real (= accidental) misjumps you probably won't notice, because they temporarily damage your witchdrive anyway. It takes some time before you can press 'H' again.

On the other hand it's not absolutely impossible to jump out on your own. You only have to leave the immediate vicinity. As soon as no jammer is on your scanner, you can jump out at once.

Killer Wolf wrote:

i doubt that's a concern tho, when playing this new version, however one thing i'm not sure about is the wormhole life ~ we all know they collapse after a minute or so, so i can't quite understand how a device could collapse it and then have it reopened : even if the Thatgoid device doesn't collapse it as such but "freezes" it, leaving the hole in place but blocking the transportation mechanics, how does the hole stay open long enough for you to kill all the beacons and race for teh cloud?

The idea of re-opening the wormhole came from Disembodied. Perhaps he has some handwavium ready in order to explain the technical details?

Switeck wrote:

If you can't get away from the Thargoids before opening an escape tunnel (wormhole), then you're probably not doing it out of choice.

That's what I think as well. A pilot's first priority will likely be to get the hell out of there, and he's not going to worry about side-effects.

Attaching a bounty to a refugee whose only fault it is that he wants to save his life and cargo doesn't seem fair to me. I don't think that GalCop would do that, after all they're all about encouraging trade, not discouraging it.

Killer Wolf wrote:

i doubt that's a concern tho, when playing this new version, however one thing i'm not sure about is the wormhole life ~ we all know they collapse after a minute or so, so i can't quite understand how a device could collapse it and then have it reopened : even if the Thatgoid device doesn't collapse it as such but "freezes" it, leaving the hole in place but blocking the transportation mechanics, how does the hole stay open long enough for you to kill all the beacons and race for teh cloud?

Um ... conservation of n-angular momentum. Yes. GalCop doesn't fully understand all the details, and a full explanation would require a lot of hyperdimensional maths ... I don't think this keyboard has all the necessary symbols, but I'll try to get the idea across in layman's terms.

Although the exact mechanics of the Thargoid jamming device is unknown, it must take a vast amount of negative energy to break open a wormhole. The jamming devices probably pump this negative energy out into the surrounding spacetime. If we were able to get out there with something like a 50-km gravity wave detector we'd see a local contraction: spacetime in the local vicinity of the jammers would be moving closer together. There are conflicting theories as to how far this effect spreads or how long it lasts for. There are even conflicting theories as to whether this contraction is a side-effect of Thargoid attempts to break wormholes, or whether the broken wormholes are a side-effect of Thargoid attempts to reverse the expansion of spacetime. Are they setting traps for us, or are we falling into holes they've dug for some other purpose?

Anyhoo, when the jammers are destroyed, spacetime rebounds. Any previous wormholes will have left a residual fault-line: the rapid re-expansion of spacetime will cause these to tear open, allowing stranded pilots the chance to duck out before the wormholes "heal over".

Impressive stuff! However, the canon breakage is a possible worry.

What if the OXP checked if you have sufficient fuel for the nearest system (plus 1 ly for in-fight injecting, maybe)?
In that case you could drastically reduce the chance of any witchspace jammer from actually appearing...

Commander McLane wrote:

Attaching a bounty to a refugee whose only fault it is that he wants to save his life and cargo doesn't seem fair to me. I don't think that GalCop would do that, after all they're all about encouraging trade, not discouraging it.

Who said anything about fair? GalCop is a big, uncaring bureaucracy (or, as I like to call them, bureaucrazy). If you bring Thargoids into system space, you're endangering innocent traders. No choice, you say? Rubbish, you could have stayed in WS and killed them there. Too many, you say? Only way out? Well, you should have though about that before you started jumping between planets.

While the pilot may not be looking at the bigger picture in the midst of half a dozen angry bugs, that has never, in all of history, stopped the authorities from levying any fines or taxes they though they could get away with.

Anyway, just throwing it out there for your consideration. Your OXP, your rules.

Kaks wrote:

Impressive stuff! However, the canon breakage is a possible worry.

What if the OXP checked if you have sufficient fuel for the nearest system (plus 1 ly for in-fight injecting, maybe)?
In that case you could drastically reduce the chance of any witchspace jammer from actually appearing...

That would introduce a worry about consistency. If a player decides that in their Ooniverse the Thargoids have a visible device for inducing misjumps, then it should be there for every misjump. I would like to be able to make a distinction between accidental and self-induced misjumps, but that's unfortunately impossible on the scripting-end.

However, as the break from canon is mainly about blocking self-powered jumps, I could easily take this feature out again. It was sort of an afterthought, anyway, thinking that if the Thargoids have a device that makes wormholes collapse, it would probably also prevent them from being formed in the first place, or would make freshly formed wormholes collapse immediately, with the same result.

This OXP could form the basis for quite an Epic mission.

The player jumps with Navy fleet specifically tasked with the recovery of one of these Jamming devices.

The Navy task force consists of Capital Ships, plus fighters and several Engineering/Marine vessels plus some specially modified Tugs for just such a mission.

Standard mis-jump Thargoid fire fight starts which hopefully quickly overwhelms the Thargoids, But...

Once it becomes obvious that the target is the jammers themselves additional Thargoids jump in, wave after wave of them, the task for the player is to initially protect the Engineering boarding craft who will enter and disable at least one Jammer and then to protect the specially modified tugs as they attach themselves to the jammer and initiate a jump back to normal space, big enough to pull the jammer through.

The less boarding craft survive, the longer the initial boarding and jammer shutdown takes and the less tugs that survive the longer the wormhole takes to form, all the time more and more Thargoids are pouring in, trying to attrit the Navy forces before their jammer can be stolen...

Kaks wrote:

What if the OXP checked if you have sufficient fuel for the nearest system (plus 1 ly for in-fight injecting, maybe)?
In that case you could drastically reduce the chance of any witchspace jammer from actually appearing...

Misjump Analyser OXP does just that -- it won't cause a misjump if you don't have enough fuel to hyperspace the rest of the way. Regular misjumps (which are much more rare) could still happen though.

CheeseRedux wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Attaching a bounty to a refugee whose only fault it is that he wants to save his life and cargo doesn't seem fair to me. I don't think that GalCop would do that, after all they're all about encouraging trade, not discouraging it.

Who said anything about fair? GalCop is a big, uncaring bureaucracy (or, as I like to call them, bureaucrazy). If you bring Thargoids into system space, you're endangering innocent traders. No choice, you say? Rubbish, you could have stayed in WS and killed them there. Too many, you say? Only way out? Well, you should have though about that before you started jumping between planets.

My take on yet another way to handle getting stuck in interstellar space AND partially explain/justify the fines for bringing Thargoids to system space:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f= ... 00#p137700

In short: If you're having to fight a bunch of Thargoids all by yourself...and fleeing as a result, you're "doing it wrong"(tm).

After giving it some more thought I am not going to attach a bounty to Thargoids-following-through-your-wormhole. I simply can't reconcile this with how I view GalCop. That doesn't prevent anybody from creating a small OXP which—in conjunction with this OXP—would do it. An expansion of the expansion, if you want. This way each player can decide whether it fits into their Ooniverse or not.

Please note that Thargoids following the player is a completely new feature in the tweaked thargoidAI that comes with this OXP. Therefore it cannot happen at all without this OXP.

For me it's a logical expansion of the same (new) feature in pirateAI. Pirates can and will follow through your wormhole only since Oolite 1.75. I suggest the same feature for Thargoids as well, but we're in a feature freeze, therefore it has very small (read: no) chances to become a feature in 1.76. Thus the thargoidAI in this OXP is sort of a proof-of-concept for a suggestion that I'd like to make for post-MNSR.

The tweaked Thargoid AI is a distinct second feature of the OXP. It isn't in any way technically related to the main feature (witchspace jammers). Therefore the two can be used independent of each other, and also one without the other.

For instance, if anybody doesn't like Thargoids to follow him, they can simply remove the file thargoidAI.plist from the OXP's AIs-folder (or delete the AIs-folder altogether, as it doesn't contain anything else).

On the other hand, if anybody would like to try the tweaked thargoidAI but not the other features of this OXP, they can simply take the file thargoidAI.plist from the OXP's AI-folder, drop it in their AddOns-folder, and throw the rest of the OXP away. It's all possible.