Hull ID: xxx
Ship Pack Name: xxx.spk
Pack Version: xxx
Pack ID: xxx
Idea : Olly Harlow/Peter Chambers
I think we all know this phenomenon? As I get older I suspect I'm part of it too!
Harmless, random, slowish and very annoying! Civilian traffic!! Clutters up "the board" and is some of it is vaguely curious.
There might be hundreds or even thousands of these guys. They pootle
about, generally solitarily, but if something interesting appears -
like a warship, they might go and have a "look see"? Maybe not.
You can destroy them easily - but high PC rating races might suffer
happiness bonuses - or perhaps it decreases the experience of the
offending ships? If you do fire at them - they all run like buggery -
the survivors anyway - bleating about "Help!! Help!! We are being
attacked by such-and-such at postion x,y!!"
Some of these guys are just truckers - they just drive between planets with Civilian space ports.
Some of them have "Mode 3 IFF" transponders so you can identify them
from a distance - some don't - so they could be an enemy warship?
---------------------------------------------
These "commuter" ships should simply be scripted with 95% damage across the
board and use basic cheap tech as standard (e.g. lowest three engine
types).Low equipment and a small hull giving v.low scan
signature.
They could be set on fixed courses by Master or perhaps
sometimes change course if Minister/Host did so.
Sort of - I imagine that they exhibit "normal" flight plan" properties,
but get "distracted by other interesting things".
Perhaps they should be
pre-programmed to fly between all Race HomeWorlds on routes that include
minor worlds in between? Commercial "local traffic" that after a few turns
makes homeworld defence much more important?
Rather boring real NPC player
item, loads of work, and no individual "impact" - a good AI or Minister would
be preferable I guess...
The effect is quite
as you describe. Many contacts that busy up the screen - so this should be
game optional in Master or by script. As/when Tim fixes the scan info code
it should work well.
<On recognition>
I was referring to the "fog of war" type stuff. Map clutter? Commercial
"traffic" could be "unknown - passive" in sensor categorisation. Foo Fighters
ought to be "unknown - threat" perhaps?
I suppose commercial traffic should really have a Mode3 IFF so when you get
closer it gives you an Interstellar Traffic Control Code. Foo fighters just
stay weird.
As part of the mix for our "commuters" and truckers they
should include all the rather omnipresent ship graphics for freighters etc
that are already in the game? This might return the Dampening Field back
into something useful (?) and mean that player freighters and such are
less vulnerable?
36x YES. Somehow we should use at least the standard common freighters and as
many of the others as we can. Especially the Q-ship alias. Best if host can
be made to select one that is returned by ship scanners. <deleted (ahem) bit>
Note that in the NG that a possible host bug is seeming to
cause different scans of a given ship to return variant results. Bug or not,
no wargame sensor should be 100% consistent.
<GREG> < xxx>
Personally, any thing whose purpose is to clutter things up in this game is
a big NO NO. Wasteful.