I'm working on a plug-in that's a sort of alternative Vell-os storyline. I want the player to awaken to his telepathic abilities when his ship spontaneously explodes, and he makes a telekinetic cocoon to protect themselves.

The way I planned on doing it was to make the shell an "escape" ship, and secretly give it to the player as a fighter along with a bomb. I've already come up with misleading names to use in the outfit dialog, but I'm having trouble hiding the actual fighter bay from the player. The bomb will explode shortly after the player takes off, but there's a chance of the player firing his primary or examining his secondaries before the explosion.

While testing it, I found that if the player launches it before the bomb goes off, it follows him like a fighter should until after the explosion, at which point it sits above the planet (it doesn't have fuel for hyperspace). I've already set the reload time to be ridiculously long and the "don't use ammo until after burst cycle", so the player can only launch one and is still able to escape in a second "fighter" even if he launches the first.

Does anyone have any ideas? Does anyone know:
a way to hide a secondary weapon?
a way to stop a primary weapon from firing? (reload time doesn't cut it here, they still can get the first shot off)
a way to make the bomb go off earlier?
how to make the fighter cloak quickly, either as a fighter, released escort, or both?
how to make an alternative escape pod? (I don't think this is possible short of removing every instance of escape pods from everywhere else in the game)
any techno-babel to explain the odd behavior?

...or any other ideas as to how to tackle this. I've seen some crazy mission juggling in ARPIA2, missions that make stuff happen just by being in a system, there could be something there. Also, if anyone has some creative input (even "this is a lame idea"), I'm all ears.

I figure there's a solution somewhere in here, but I'd appreciate any help finding one.

Only add the fighter to the ship, not the weapon itself. Or something like that.

If you want to give players an escape which they can't launch as a fighter, just create the weapon and give them the ammunition outfit, but no launcher (bay). This way, they won't be able to fire it, but it will still launch when the ship is destroyed.

I don't think you need a bay if its an escape ship, but I'm not too sure.

Erm, wait. Three people saying the same?

And 100th post! Woo-hoo!

That solution works fine, but there's another that I'll mention just for the hell of it.

Make a new beam weapon with length 1 and the "prevents others from firing" flag. Make it and the escape ship primary weapons, and make the beam have reload 0 and a lower ID number than the fighter.

Of course, this solution takes more time and resources along with interfering with other primary weapons, but I figured I'd mention it anyways.

However you plan on going about this, this sounds like a very interesting plug-in. How cool would it be to wander the galaxy as a Rogue Vell-Os?

Both ideas are brilliant! I didn't know the escape ship would work without the bay, and the "prevent others from firing" idea never would have occurred to me.

Thanks for your support Warlord Mike. That's exactly what I plan on making in the plug.

EDIT 4-22-2009 (for completeness sake): the escape ship would not launch when player did not have a bay. I ended up using Archon's solution.
In other news, I am still working the plug-in, though it's slow going.

This post has been edited by n64mon : 22 April 2009 - 01:30 PM