instead of escape pods

It seems silly in EV Nova that when you have hundreds of millions of dollars and lose a ship, the escape pod message says something about scraping together enough money to be a shuttle, and it also seems silly that certain missions are auto-failed and your legal status is reset. So I was thinking that maybe you could make an escape ship type 'escape pod' that you actually fly away in. It would probably have a fair bit of speed, poor maneuverability/accel, no upgrade space, and a jump or two. Well if the escape pod is launched at the speed in the weapon speed field of the bay, then it wouldn't even need much speed to fling it free of the fighting. It would have to come with an auto eject though.

The only problem I could see is that you could launch it as a fighter. Is there any way to make the weapon unuseable, yet still have the escape ship work?

I'm not certain if making a weapon that is a fighter bay (using a ship with "escape ship" flagged), then only making the ammo for the bay available will work. I don't know if Nova lets you buy ammo for a weapon that you don't have (I think it does, but it may have special restrictions on bays).

But if it is possible, then there you go, I believe that it should work.

There are several things that have to be taken care of to make an escape ship work properly. One of them is making the weapon a "Fire only with KeyCarried" so that you can't launch it as a fighter. Try out this Escape Ships plug that I made way back on EV:N v1.0.3, but never posted. It uses oütf RIDs 580 through 591 inclusive and wëap RIDs 354 through 359 inclusive. You can buy escape ship systems (includes auto-eject) based on the Viper, Manta, Phoenix, Firebird, Anaconda, and Thunderhead. The system is totally automatic, the only way to make it function is to have your ship get destroyed. The outfits will be available on Earth, Kel'ar ly, and multiple Auroran spöbs, but only if you have a protective technologies license. The plug was developed on a Mac, so if you're a Windows user you'll have to convert it to .rez format after unstuffing it. If anybody has any problems with it, just let me know.

Attached File(s)

• EscapeShips.hqx (5.5K)
  Number of downloads: 19

This post has been edited by Arturo : 31 July 2005 - 01:55 AM

Thanks, Arturo! This particular behaviour has been bothering me for some time now, and that plugin should be most useful for my purposes. Getting a properly working escape ship is a joy.