Impossible to rescue of a pilot with heavy tractor beam ?

[lazzy]

Well, I searched for something similar, but did not find any such post.

In short, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to rescue a downed pilot using a heavy tractor beam.
He just flew by me.
Situation:
- plenty of space in the cargo hold (used a mod-ed file units.cvs, in which the starting Llama has 200,000 cubic meters of space, of wich 99% I had free)
- I had comfort passenger upgrade (not sure if it counted or not)
- the "standings" with the race/nationality of the downed pilot(s) was 0 ( with another was +25, another one -25, all failed)
( the standings changed because either me or my wingmen shot at a ship of their race/nationality )

- other factors which may have influenced the "rescue":
- I had wingmen ( from a mission in the same system - not sure how to get "rid" of them besides killing them )
- the pirates which downed (killed the ship of) the pilot where still alive (under attack of my wingmen)
- I did not use (at first) the match speed option ( HOME key), just the stop (BACKSPACE key);
- on later attempts(see below), I tried using the match speed option, but still unsuccessfully

- I later attempted using a "normal" (non-heavy) tractor beam (in case the heavy one "damaged" the pilot/pod), again unsuccessfully, both on the pilot of the above mission, and on another pilot on a mission taken after buying the "normal"tractor beam (in case visiting a station/planet/port affects the mission)

- after my wingmen took "care" of the offending vessels, tried again, still failed




Did I miss something?
I did rtfm, but no clue as what could be wrong.

I can post the save game(s), the "edited" units.cvs, as well as the stderr and the stdout files.


Computer stats (4 years old):
OS: Winblows XP sp2
CPU: AMD Barton 2500+ ( ~ 1800 MHz)
RAM: 2.5GB

Game version: Vegastrike-0.5.0







----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit 1 (2009-05-20 10:40 GMT)

Added the zipped files for:
- the units.csv

units_edited.zip

- stderr.txt

stderr.zip

- stdout.txt

stdout.zip

- serialized_xml Llama.begin.csv

Llama.begin.zip

I have later used a more "heavily" edited Llama.begin (based on the attached file), and successfully managed a rescue with a "normal" tractor beam. (Did not find yet a heavy tractor beam to try with.)
So, my assumption is that something went wrong in that game session, and may be related to my usage rather then the game.

units_heavily_edited.zip

I will try and find a heavy tractor beam and see if I can pull off a rescue.
If I succeed, I will retry using the files and save game from the session in which I could not.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit 2 (2009-05-20 10:50 GMT)

Forgot to mention:
This time ( with the heavily edited Llama), I did not have wingmen with me, nor did I kill the offending" ships ( that downed the pilot).
I just snuck in ( with cloak active) to a range of about 1000 m, after I matched the speed,
de-cloaked, tractor-ed the pilot (about 5 seconds from activating the beam), re-cloaked and left.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[loki1950]

Now lets have a look at the llama.begin file in your serialized_xml\savename folder as those are the active stats used by the engine to define your ship not the entries in units.csv i have not tried pilot rescues in a while so 'bot time i did ;)BTW welcome aboard.

Enjoy the Choice

[lazzy]

Since I was still unable to find a heavy tractor beam, I decided to load the files from the session that caused me the above problems.

I tried again ( a few times) the rescue mission, only to have the pilot come crashing into my hull and perish if I am close, or zoom by me, if I am far enough that it's trajectory does not meet it's end as paint on my armor.

The offending save game is attached below, together with the edited unit.csv (same as in the first post).

[MC707]

my best bet is that the downed pilot gets out of the tractors range in the last second. This used to happen a lot to me, so the downed pilot either flew by me or crashed and burned against my hull. Try to install an autotracker to the tractor beam and lock on the pilot. Then tractor him in.

[KillerB]

I finally had a go at piracy after upgrading to two heavy tractor beams on my Llama...one thing I noticed is that one is pretty much pissing in the wind trying to tractor loot in 'on the fly'. Unlike in Freelancer, in Vega Strike it seems to be necessary to get in quite close and match velocities; otherwise when you hit the trigger, whatever you're after just goes ripping by the other way hauling assteroid...then again it ususaly does anyhow even if you are on top of it...over a dozen tries landed me one single pallet of astral gasses, out of eight cargo pods I was after.

I accidentally snagged a free starship after robbing a ULN Dodo Freighter....one of the frieghter pilot's little friends had issues with me tractoring in his dead pal's stuff. I forgot to turn my other guns back on, and I was banging away at this fighter with just the 2 heavy tractor beams...and then he just *poof* disappeared...when I landed to sell off the loot, I noticed I had a good used 'Heatseeker' starship in my hold.

BTW is there any way to soup up the captured cargo starships? I looked and looked in both the cargo computer and the upgrades computer with no joy. On the cargo screen it says my purloined Heatseeker starship has a resale value of 10, although it was purchased for 100,000. When I launched my new wingman, and then told him to help defend me he said, "No way boss, I can't do that" even though at the time there were only 2 Aera after me...is that normal? Between the low resale value and apparent inability to do any good in a fight, my guess is that my stolen fighter is beat up too bad to be any good in a fight?

[loki1950]

my guess is that my stolen fighter is beat up too bad to be any good in a fight?

We really do need a way of doing repairs on the pets we pick up i think it should be possible as a new screen available at bases all the base interfaces are written in Python data side and not part of the engine itself as this allows the Mods to define there own behaviours.

Enjoy the Choice

[KillerB]

I tried two different ways to fix up the captured ship: first, I 'sold' it as cargo for ten credits and then 'bought' it back at the ship dealer, again for ten credits. The 'Heatseeker' was apparantly some wierd glitch...it has 0 cargo space so it can't be fixed up at all, no gun slots either. Apparently I tractored in one of my missiles and the game decided it must be a ship...odly enough it shows it takes up 1500 cargo space. Anyhow, now I had a second ship in my remuda, but no way to stick it back in my cargo hold as a cargo wingman.
The second trick I tried was to launch it and then switch commands...but the key for this '['doesn't work; I found a reference in the readme that said it would need to be modified in the .exe but no details. I tried adding it as 'alt' '[' with key binding to "SwitchCommand" but no joy.