My Fleet? Ferried? Mule not lfyable - by me anyways....

[jasonpsage]

Hi Folks.

I bought my first mule - and I can not fly it for .. mule @#$%

So... I tried to see if "my fleet" flys with me some how... no. I read in the "probably a really noobish question..." that Loki said something about a ferry cost... Now... I'm confused... here's why.

I noticed In "ship area" (docked) I can not SELL my Llama, but when I try - it makes my mule the current ship. If I try to sell my mule - its GONE and I get paid, however if I re-buy my Llame - my Lama becomes current again. In short - When I sell my Llama - Mule becomes current. When I "buy" my own Llama back - it becomes current. I have not yet noticed any sort of Ferry Deduction of my Credits.

This has turned into a lame workaround for carrying lots of cargo. Why? I can not get the darn mule to work well with Spec (I have tried dilligently)... so... this is what I do.

I "Buy My Llama" - So its current ship, I navigate as close as I can to my destination planet (or to my destination planet... if it has ship options in the menus), then I sell my llama which switchs me to Mule, then I load up the mule with cargo, then I go to a ship menu, "buy my Llama back" (again because itys easy to navigate with)... then fly where I need to sell the stuff - and do the reverse.

The bottom line is I get llama piloting with mule cargo hold - ... yes there are more steps - but I simply can't fly that mule for crap - spec or otherwise hardly at all.

anyways - this is my current fudge - but any suggestions on mule piloting or hints at better fleet management would be appreciated!

Happy VegaStrike simming - and Best Regards All.. even the rlaans

Jason P Sage

[Cockroach]

For general A to B freight hauling, get a Plowshare. 4000 hold volume will clean out all but the agriculture based worlds and you're only taking about a 50% performance hit compared to the Llama.

If you really want to use a large ship like a Mule, you need to minimize turning while in motion. Big ships don't corner on a dime like fighters, they drift on for a long time. Only throttle up your engine to get out of a planet's gravity well, then cut it to a lower speed that can be managed while a spec. It'll take a little while to get there at a slow speed, but not as long as it would take if you stayed throttled up at spec, overshot then had to double back in a ship with poor thrust...

[jasonpsage]

I am glad I saved my Game prior to trying the Mule - I knew it was rash both money wise - and probably other things.

The reason I wanted to try it was I thought that the big $$ would be in having a Big ship, and that I could work my way up to a massive ship - with turrets, and could have battles with numerous fighters, and be able to put the big ship in AI (Automatic mode) and fly one of my smaller fighters to wage my own starwars like battles.


Regardless - the game does alot and is fun. I can back off a little. I guess now I should maybe look for fun trying to (now that I have a decent bank roll) get back to Cephid and try the campaign stuff maybe.

Another reason I thought I needed big $$ is because sometimes I'll fly into a small bee nest of 3 bad guys - who knows who or what - fighters though - (small I mean) that just pound me with a few hits and I'm done. I want one of those. I like a challenge - but I end up being the escaping mouse - jamming on SPEC and time compression just to evade.

Ah well.. Life is good. I Wish had the time to join the development team.

thanx for the tips.
Jason

[targ collective]

The problem with the Mule is Delta-V, or Delta-Velocity - an unfortunate reality of spaceflight. This doesn't mean the Mule is unflyable, it just means it should be used purely for in-system interplanetary work, preferably between planets close enough to get a bead on. Say an Ocean-Ice run. Give it all the engine upgrades it can take, especially for aftward thrust - it'll help cancel out the Delta-V.

For further dictances you must get close, unSPEC and decelerate - actually push your speed into the negatives - then, when stopped, get a better bead on your target. The mule is a great big flying cargo hold, not a basecracker or an assault unit. Don't think of it as a flying weapon mount, whatever you do, as that is not what it is.

Finally you should be aware that it is very difficult to fill that cargo hold. The only way around this is to tweak the amount of goods planets sell - check out the HowTos on info for this. It will unbalance the game to be able to make so much money so quickly - you'll be able to make tens, eventually hundreds of millions a trip if you can fill your Mule's cargo hold - but this problem is due to the game designers not taking into account the possibility of heavy trading between planets in game; their economic model is flawed with no capship flying bounty missions and overly cheap medium and high level reactors, weapons, shields and ships. With the extended trading model (say 20, 60 times the goods produced by planets) the Clydsedale, for example, should be at least 800,000,000 credits.

That's all by the by. On my system, which I've tweaked a little so planets are more... planetary... in their production, I wouldn't be without my Mule and the Oceanic-Ice planets some 6000km distant from each other.

Just don't treat it like a fighter.

[Octavius8]

Technically if you pilot anything with a moderate to ridiculous(note:capships) discrepancy between 'fore and aft acceleration' and 'orthogonal(lateral and vertical if it's different) acceleration' (the quotes are to differentiate due to too many 'ands'), it's a good idea to kill your thrusters before attempting to turn. if you want to do it faster, kill your thrusters first, turn around 180 degrees, and proceed to fire afterburners (and set max speed, it might help) to decrease your velocity rapidly (I think this is what Targ means by negative velocity). Once your velocity is zero, turn and accelerate toward where you want to go. Switch on spec, switch to flight mode to achieve a moderate speed increase over your normal combat speed. (I recommend 200-500) and switch back to combat mode when the spec multiplier starts climbing up

Prime example: the mule itself 'fore and aft':1.00 gravity(approx 25.28 km/hour/second (the speed number increases by 25 per second when you are accelerating, you are using 0.4.3 right?) and 'orthogonal' a mere 0.01 gravities.

Vector addition is a big headache when piloting these types of ships at high speeds. (It's even a good idea to cut down the speed of the llama to <1000 before attempting a major course correction with spec on)

You can use time compression if you are tired of waiting. It seriously messes up the game engine though.

[jasonpsage]

I appreciate your response. Concering the Time compression messing up the game - "Here Here" but I wish that was fixed - and if Super Time compression is the actual problem - perhaps a maximum time compression ... like 10 times or something would help. Who knows.

Thanx Again
Jason

[Shissui]

Concering the Time compression messing up the game - "Here Here" but I wish that was fixed - and if Super Time compression is the actual problem - perhaps a maximum time compression ... like 10 times or something would help. Who knows.

Since each compression multiplies against the previous, I do not recommend more than 3x compression. Personally, I do not use it at all.

It will not be fixed. The problems that result from time compression occur because of the cumulative rounding errors that result from skipping all of the intermediate time steps. Time compression is principally a debugging tool & is not really intended for general use. Rather, it seems a serious waste to disable it.

[Octavius8]

Time compression seems to work by skipping frames ala 'fast-forwarding'.
As a result, internal game calculations have to be skipped or truancated in order to match up with the frames. Which could result in a lot of rounding-up errors as mentioned by Shissui, theorically wrecking havoc with shield and reactor regeneration, weapon firing, velocity, docking, collision checks, and basically anything involving caluclations(and hence everything). I've never witnessed any of these above problems, but there are a lot of posts confirming most of them in the forums.

It should be possible to use time compression without problems if you don't amp it up too much, and minimise the amount of calculations done. Example:No weapon firing, missle lock-on,constant (or even better zero) acceleration, and not a lot of in-system ships(peaceful systems) Remember to turn it off when docking.

I can't see any workaround to 'fix' time compression except a revamp of the game engine. It's a developer tool (debugging at normal game speed would frustrate a lot of people) and IMHO should not be used by players unless you want to risk wierd game-stopping problems popping up all over the place.

Personally I only use time compression to view the orbiting of planets and stations. Watching planets spin is also quite fun, especially when done in Sol system. To be safe, I restart my game afterwards before playing.

[targ collective]

I'm pretty sure all the rounding errors are with variables which the game clears each load, and does not save. So in theory, there's no real risk until the game grinds to a complete halt.

Shissui's right, though - everything does indeed work in theory. (That's got to be one of the most quotable sigs I've ever seen - wish I'd though of it...)

[Octavius8]

Agreed. Reloading will solve most anomalies that happen in-game.