Killer's Mods: PF Thales/Escape Pod Fix/Tractor Turrets
Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 12:30 am
Killer's Mods
For Vega Strike 5.0
So far I don't have a true Mod, just some tweaks I've made to some of the files to make my own gameplay more intersting. If anyone would like a copy of my modified units.csv and master_parts_list.csv give me a PM and I'll zip it to ya.
Ejection Pod tweaks:
First of all I made the base price of ejection pods $760,000 instead of the original $760. I thought it was ridiculous that the price for a captured pilot, and his ejection pod, was on the order of a scrap metal price.
Next I tweaked the fuel capacity, speed governor, and acceleration figures for the escape pod. I added an even ton of mass to the thing to make up for the weight of the added fuel. Now one can play ‘hard core’ and actually escape in one’s ejection pod and return to a base, planet or passing ship, in a reasonable amount of time, to call up another of one’s fighters from one’s remuda or buy a new one, and finish that damn mission. A side benefit is that if one attempts to tractor in and capture an escape pod, if one misses then the escape pod drifts slowly away a few hundred meters away, instead of zipping away thousands of kilometers. edit: okay that was w/ a standard tractor beam. The Heavy Tractor Beam still sends 'em scooting away...just now quite as fast.
For my next hack I’m going to try to make a copy of the escape pod with ‘zero’ mass and volume, as a purchasable ‘cargo wingman’. The primary purpose for this is so that if I run out of gas on a mission (hey I love those tiny little fighters like the Robin and the Derivative, and I hate letting to in the middle of a scrap), then I can eject an escape pod and EVA to a base, and finish the mission. I hope that if the fighter I left adrift isn’t destroyed in the meanwhile I can go back an get it later….I’ll let y’all know how that works out!
Later, if I can get a geek to do it or show me how, I want to try to make it so that a damaged ship’s crew will punch out sometimes, leaving a salvageable ship adrift. Then a quick EVA over to the damaged ship, and now she’s a prize vessel. Hey, it’s a great idea, if it’ll work with this code…
Gawain Fix:
I bought a Confed fighter known as the Gawain. It looked like it would be an awesome addition to my remuda, but unfortunately it came with a size 1 reactor, and I wasn’t allowed to trade that tiny piece of crap in for something big enough to run my guns for more than a few milliseconds.
A quick copy of the Llama.begin ‘Restricted Upgrades’ data into the Gawain’s files in the Units.csv folder in Excel took care of that little headache. Now the Gawain is one of my favorites.
Player Flyable Thales:
You know it, you hate it if it’s ever blown you out of the sky on a mission, or chased you down and destroyed your cargo ship. It’s the Andolian manufactured leftover from the First Interstellar War, the Thales Corvette. Now it’s in the hands of pirates and Forsaken pilots.
If you’re like me, you’d much rather shoot someone down and loot their cargo than go back and forth and round and round trading cargo. I started out using my good ole Llama, once I discovered the advantages of phase damage and outfitted her with a set of Hesphatia cannons.
I moved up to the Pacifier, and while the cargo hold on her is half that of the Llama, the bigger guns make quicker work of those Gleaners, Oxs, and Mules. I looked and looked but I couldn’t find a bigger ship that was any good at scavenging. Oh, sure, there’s the plowshare. Lots of cargo space there, but it handles like a brick. Great for trading in if one’s reps are clean, but no good at all for us cold blooded murdering space pirates who are wanted in half the star systems in the galaxy. Likewise the Mule was a rather expensive disappointment as a scavenger. I thought the Ox might have possibilities, but there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a tractor turret.
I created a Corvette.stock by copy & pasting the Corvette_Pirates files in the Units.csv, and then creating a Corvette.stock file in the Master_Parts_List.csv. Man I love these Excel hackable programs!!! Quick & easy, just like I like my women
I learned how the damn TCNT widget works the hard way. I ran a bounty mission against some Pirates in their own Thales and when I checked my ‘Info’ stats, I learned to my horror that my kill score on Andolians and Shapers had gone from 0 and 1 respectively to 26 and 58. And now I was hated by the Confed, the LIHW, and a score of others who I had no idea didn’t like people going around mowing down Andolian and Shaper pilots who blundered too near my bloodthirsty turret gunners.
My stock Thales handled surprisingly nimbly, until one day I got the crap shot out of me and then managed to make a dead stick landing. It turns out that I had lost not only a forth of my turrets, but my huge and irreplaceable engine, and all of the ‘Shady Mechanic’ upgrades which had come as standard equipment. I put in the biggest reactor the Thales’ upgrade stats would allow, but she wouldn’t produce enough power to charge the jump drive. Worse yet, now she turned nearly as slowly as a damn Plowshare.
I wound up having to trade that one in on a new used Thales. While I was at it though, I tweaked the files so that now the Thales has enough upgrade room to install the biggest reactor and then some. The size 15 reactor is actually less than half the size at around 14,000 Megajoules of the original Thales reactor which outputs a staggering 30,000 Megajoules. I need to make about a size 20 in case I ever make the same mistake and land outa gas and shot to ribbons.
Note: when attempting to capture downed pilots or intact starfighters, you need to put the target under your nose. For some reason the Andolians installed the hard point for the tractor beam down under the belly of the Thales and towards the rear…like where the pecker would be. I figured this out the hard way. After blowing up several downed pilots and having a few fighters explode on the nose of my Scavenger, I looked at a third person view of my Thales while turning on the tractor beam. It looked like my good used Andolian Corvette was taking a blue piss.
By adding two Cargo Expansions, suddenly my Thales has 10,000 cargo instead of 5024. There seems to be some sort of bug in the program, but at least this one is actually helpful.
The best turret that I’ve found and been actually been able to install in my Thales is the Long Range PD turret. Sadly the awesome Franklin Turret won’t fit a Thales, although it does fit an Ox.
Le Condor Noir:
I’m working on building a modified version of the Thales, with some of the fuel tanks removed to make more cargo space, and to make room to install a cloaking device. The reason I’m trying to make ‘The Black Buzzard’ cloakable is not so much a ‘cheat’ as to make it at all practical. At the moment I seem to spend way too much time swatting flies and getting blown up and having to start all over again, to be able to get anywhere. I wouldn’t mind battling an occasional flight of fighters or one or two capitol ships, but I seem to draw fighters like flies to horse manure, and whole herds of Kiergaards and whatever that thing that looks like a huge carp in space is that those damn slug people the Rllan use for a capitol ship.
Hey, it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Lone wolves like ourselves don’t have the scores of Hyenas and Plowshares flying escort for us like those fat cats in the official Pirates Association. Okay, I could probably just hack my save file and make my reps neutral…but then I kinda like being a bad guy…
I’m making the cloaking device charge time quite a bit slower and the energy requirements quite a bit higher than those of the Schroedinger’s cloaking device, to make things more realistic.
Update: I’ve got the cloaking device installed and working…well sort of. It seems that cloaking a ship this size takes a ridiculous amount of energy. When I turn it on, my drive systems power level (the blue bar on my hud) starts dropping like a rock. The cloaking device goes active, as the blue bar keeps creeping down. After about 20 seconds the cloaking device kicks out and then my drive energy starts climbing again. I’ve tried tweaking the units.csc box under ‘cloaking device energy drain’ but it doesn’t seem to have any effect, even after reducing it by an order of magnitude.
The good news is that the other tweaks I made to ‘The Black Buzzard’ have worked out great (so far). By reducing the fuel load and reducing the overall mass of the ship, I’ve turned the Condor into a dynamo of a scavenger. One unfortunate side effect of my experiment is that I’ve seemed to have accidentally fixed the bug that was letting the earlier model of player flyable Thales double her cargo capacity with the addition of the first two cargo expansion improvements.
The only weapons upgrades I’ve been able to find for her so far are of course the Heavy Tractor (this is actually the first ship I’ve seen which came standard with a Tractor Beam installed), and a turret called the ‘Long Range PD Turret’, which replaces the rather ineffectual original ‘Flak Turret’. I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn’t mount any of the ‘Capitol’ turrets, or even the ‘Franklin Turret’. Why is a heavy fighter carrying a bigger turret than a Corvette can mount? I’m guessing the Franklin must be someone’s favorite pet…
At any rate, with four of the ‘Long Range PD Turrets’ installed, with their 30k range, and with the Condor’s improved handling, she’s made short work of everything she’s been thrown so far. I took her up against three of her poor half sisters, the Pirate Thales, and she danced and pranced around them as she sliced them to ribbons.
More Lootable Contraband:
I’m trying to get the Luddites to start dropping Luddite Religious Tracts (I’ll have to either tweak the price or make them drop thousands of them at a time). So far I’ve got ‘em dropping the same loot as a Thales does, booze, cotton and oil. By the way, that is a really weak reward for blowing up the baddest mission target in the game! Hyenas drop more expensive loot!
The holdup is that the .csv file for ‘Import Cargo’ is in some dialect of Geek that I can’t make heads nor tails of. If I can figure out how those damn semicolons and numbers translate into real (well VR) stuff I can probably also build a tractor turret. The language for the weapons loadout is in the same dialect of Geek.
Once I get the Luddites dropping religious tracts, I’m going to try getting other factions to drop stuff like illegal weapons, overeager immigrants, and zhollus.
Scavenger Turrets:
With a turret mounting a Jackhammer on one side and a Heavy Tractor on the other side, the big klutzes like the Ox would make real scavenger monsters. What??? Am I the only nut who wants to be able to loot whole convoys at a time? Now if I can just figure out what those semicolons and numbers in the ‘Subunits’ box translate into! Anybody got a Redneck-Geek dictionary handy?
Update: if someone decides to take on this project, I think a better choice for the gun side of the Scavenger Turret might be either the FS MWR Laser (Cap ship Light) or whatever is installed in the Franklin Turret.
It may be that we can only mount one type of weapon in a turret. Only hacking and test flying will tell.
Coyote Ugly:
I'm working on making a customized and renamed Hyena to stick in the cargo hold of the Llama.start, pre-equipped with weapons/shield/ecm/scanner, so new players can get right into doing missions if they wish instead of hauling booze, cyberhos & space porn to lonely miners for a few hours. Back and forth, back and forth...not my idea of a good time
Making the Coyote Ugly was the easy part, and it was the inspiration for me to build a revamped and renamed Thales, Le Condor Noir.
The hard part is getting the thing into the cargo hold of the Llama.begin. My experiment with the Luddite loot drop has only been partially succesful in that I can make them drop something, just not the thing I want them to drop.
I don't know why the 'Import Cargo' box had to be written with all those commas and meaningless numbers instead of just saying for example Commmodidy/Food/Liquor/Space Grog
Can someone help me out with some pointers on how to translate this gibberish and make it my virtual bitch?
For Vega Strike 5.0
So far I don't have a true Mod, just some tweaks I've made to some of the files to make my own gameplay more intersting. If anyone would like a copy of my modified units.csv and master_parts_list.csv give me a PM and I'll zip it to ya.
Ejection Pod tweaks:
First of all I made the base price of ejection pods $760,000 instead of the original $760. I thought it was ridiculous that the price for a captured pilot, and his ejection pod, was on the order of a scrap metal price.
Next I tweaked the fuel capacity, speed governor, and acceleration figures for the escape pod. I added an even ton of mass to the thing to make up for the weight of the added fuel. Now one can play ‘hard core’ and actually escape in one’s ejection pod and return to a base, planet or passing ship, in a reasonable amount of time, to call up another of one’s fighters from one’s remuda or buy a new one, and finish that damn mission. A side benefit is that if one attempts to tractor in and capture an escape pod, if one misses then the escape pod drifts slowly away a few hundred meters away, instead of zipping away thousands of kilometers. edit: okay that was w/ a standard tractor beam. The Heavy Tractor Beam still sends 'em scooting away...just now quite as fast.
For my next hack I’m going to try to make a copy of the escape pod with ‘zero’ mass and volume, as a purchasable ‘cargo wingman’. The primary purpose for this is so that if I run out of gas on a mission (hey I love those tiny little fighters like the Robin and the Derivative, and I hate letting to in the middle of a scrap), then I can eject an escape pod and EVA to a base, and finish the mission. I hope that if the fighter I left adrift isn’t destroyed in the meanwhile I can go back an get it later….I’ll let y’all know how that works out!
Later, if I can get a geek to do it or show me how, I want to try to make it so that a damaged ship’s crew will punch out sometimes, leaving a salvageable ship adrift. Then a quick EVA over to the damaged ship, and now she’s a prize vessel. Hey, it’s a great idea, if it’ll work with this code…
Gawain Fix:
I bought a Confed fighter known as the Gawain. It looked like it would be an awesome addition to my remuda, but unfortunately it came with a size 1 reactor, and I wasn’t allowed to trade that tiny piece of crap in for something big enough to run my guns for more than a few milliseconds.
A quick copy of the Llama.begin ‘Restricted Upgrades’ data into the Gawain’s files in the Units.csv folder in Excel took care of that little headache. Now the Gawain is one of my favorites.
Player Flyable Thales:
You know it, you hate it if it’s ever blown you out of the sky on a mission, or chased you down and destroyed your cargo ship. It’s the Andolian manufactured leftover from the First Interstellar War, the Thales Corvette. Now it’s in the hands of pirates and Forsaken pilots.
If you’re like me, you’d much rather shoot someone down and loot their cargo than go back and forth and round and round trading cargo. I started out using my good ole Llama, once I discovered the advantages of phase damage and outfitted her with a set of Hesphatia cannons.
I moved up to the Pacifier, and while the cargo hold on her is half that of the Llama, the bigger guns make quicker work of those Gleaners, Oxs, and Mules. I looked and looked but I couldn’t find a bigger ship that was any good at scavenging. Oh, sure, there’s the plowshare. Lots of cargo space there, but it handles like a brick. Great for trading in if one’s reps are clean, but no good at all for us cold blooded murdering space pirates who are wanted in half the star systems in the galaxy. Likewise the Mule was a rather expensive disappointment as a scavenger. I thought the Ox might have possibilities, but there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a tractor turret.
I created a Corvette.stock by copy & pasting the Corvette_Pirates files in the Units.csv, and then creating a Corvette.stock file in the Master_Parts_List.csv. Man I love these Excel hackable programs!!! Quick & easy, just like I like my women
I learned how the damn TCNT widget works the hard way. I ran a bounty mission against some Pirates in their own Thales and when I checked my ‘Info’ stats, I learned to my horror that my kill score on Andolians and Shapers had gone from 0 and 1 respectively to 26 and 58. And now I was hated by the Confed, the LIHW, and a score of others who I had no idea didn’t like people going around mowing down Andolian and Shaper pilots who blundered too near my bloodthirsty turret gunners.
My stock Thales handled surprisingly nimbly, until one day I got the crap shot out of me and then managed to make a dead stick landing. It turns out that I had lost not only a forth of my turrets, but my huge and irreplaceable engine, and all of the ‘Shady Mechanic’ upgrades which had come as standard equipment. I put in the biggest reactor the Thales’ upgrade stats would allow, but she wouldn’t produce enough power to charge the jump drive. Worse yet, now she turned nearly as slowly as a damn Plowshare.
I wound up having to trade that one in on a new used Thales. While I was at it though, I tweaked the files so that now the Thales has enough upgrade room to install the biggest reactor and then some. The size 15 reactor is actually less than half the size at around 14,000 Megajoules of the original Thales reactor which outputs a staggering 30,000 Megajoules. I need to make about a size 20 in case I ever make the same mistake and land outa gas and shot to ribbons.
Note: when attempting to capture downed pilots or intact starfighters, you need to put the target under your nose. For some reason the Andolians installed the hard point for the tractor beam down under the belly of the Thales and towards the rear…like where the pecker would be. I figured this out the hard way. After blowing up several downed pilots and having a few fighters explode on the nose of my Scavenger, I looked at a third person view of my Thales while turning on the tractor beam. It looked like my good used Andolian Corvette was taking a blue piss.
By adding two Cargo Expansions, suddenly my Thales has 10,000 cargo instead of 5024. There seems to be some sort of bug in the program, but at least this one is actually helpful.
The best turret that I’ve found and been actually been able to install in my Thales is the Long Range PD turret. Sadly the awesome Franklin Turret won’t fit a Thales, although it does fit an Ox.
Le Condor Noir:
I’m working on building a modified version of the Thales, with some of the fuel tanks removed to make more cargo space, and to make room to install a cloaking device. The reason I’m trying to make ‘The Black Buzzard’ cloakable is not so much a ‘cheat’ as to make it at all practical. At the moment I seem to spend way too much time swatting flies and getting blown up and having to start all over again, to be able to get anywhere. I wouldn’t mind battling an occasional flight of fighters or one or two capitol ships, but I seem to draw fighters like flies to horse manure, and whole herds of Kiergaards and whatever that thing that looks like a huge carp in space is that those damn slug people the Rllan use for a capitol ship.
Hey, it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Lone wolves like ourselves don’t have the scores of Hyenas and Plowshares flying escort for us like those fat cats in the official Pirates Association. Okay, I could probably just hack my save file and make my reps neutral…but then I kinda like being a bad guy…
I’m making the cloaking device charge time quite a bit slower and the energy requirements quite a bit higher than those of the Schroedinger’s cloaking device, to make things more realistic.
Update: I’ve got the cloaking device installed and working…well sort of. It seems that cloaking a ship this size takes a ridiculous amount of energy. When I turn it on, my drive systems power level (the blue bar on my hud) starts dropping like a rock. The cloaking device goes active, as the blue bar keeps creeping down. After about 20 seconds the cloaking device kicks out and then my drive energy starts climbing again. I’ve tried tweaking the units.csc box under ‘cloaking device energy drain’ but it doesn’t seem to have any effect, even after reducing it by an order of magnitude.
The good news is that the other tweaks I made to ‘The Black Buzzard’ have worked out great (so far). By reducing the fuel load and reducing the overall mass of the ship, I’ve turned the Condor into a dynamo of a scavenger. One unfortunate side effect of my experiment is that I’ve seemed to have accidentally fixed the bug that was letting the earlier model of player flyable Thales double her cargo capacity with the addition of the first two cargo expansion improvements.
The only weapons upgrades I’ve been able to find for her so far are of course the Heavy Tractor (this is actually the first ship I’ve seen which came standard with a Tractor Beam installed), and a turret called the ‘Long Range PD Turret’, which replaces the rather ineffectual original ‘Flak Turret’. I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn’t mount any of the ‘Capitol’ turrets, or even the ‘Franklin Turret’. Why is a heavy fighter carrying a bigger turret than a Corvette can mount? I’m guessing the Franklin must be someone’s favorite pet…
At any rate, with four of the ‘Long Range PD Turrets’ installed, with their 30k range, and with the Condor’s improved handling, she’s made short work of everything she’s been thrown so far. I took her up against three of her poor half sisters, the Pirate Thales, and she danced and pranced around them as she sliced them to ribbons.
More Lootable Contraband:
I’m trying to get the Luddites to start dropping Luddite Religious Tracts (I’ll have to either tweak the price or make them drop thousands of them at a time). So far I’ve got ‘em dropping the same loot as a Thales does, booze, cotton and oil. By the way, that is a really weak reward for blowing up the baddest mission target in the game! Hyenas drop more expensive loot!
The holdup is that the .csv file for ‘Import Cargo’ is in some dialect of Geek that I can’t make heads nor tails of. If I can figure out how those damn semicolons and numbers translate into real (well VR) stuff I can probably also build a tractor turret. The language for the weapons loadout is in the same dialect of Geek.
Once I get the Luddites dropping religious tracts, I’m going to try getting other factions to drop stuff like illegal weapons, overeager immigrants, and zhollus.
Scavenger Turrets:
With a turret mounting a Jackhammer on one side and a Heavy Tractor on the other side, the big klutzes like the Ox would make real scavenger monsters. What??? Am I the only nut who wants to be able to loot whole convoys at a time? Now if I can just figure out what those semicolons and numbers in the ‘Subunits’ box translate into! Anybody got a Redneck-Geek dictionary handy?
Update: if someone decides to take on this project, I think a better choice for the gun side of the Scavenger Turret might be either the FS MWR Laser (Cap ship Light) or whatever is installed in the Franklin Turret.
It may be that we can only mount one type of weapon in a turret. Only hacking and test flying will tell.
Coyote Ugly:
I'm working on making a customized and renamed Hyena to stick in the cargo hold of the Llama.start, pre-equipped with weapons/shield/ecm/scanner, so new players can get right into doing missions if they wish instead of hauling booze, cyberhos & space porn to lonely miners for a few hours. Back and forth, back and forth...not my idea of a good time
Making the Coyote Ugly was the easy part, and it was the inspiration for me to build a revamped and renamed Thales, Le Condor Noir.
The hard part is getting the thing into the cargo hold of the Llama.begin. My experiment with the Luddite loot drop has only been partially succesful in that I can make them drop something, just not the thing I want them to drop.
I don't know why the 'Import Cargo' box had to be written with all those commas and meaningless numbers instead of just saying for example Commmodidy/Food/Liquor/Space Grog
Can someone help me out with some pointers on how to translate this gibberish and make it my virtual bitch?