Insurance for your Starbridge

I was wondering if anyone has released a plug-in to simulate 'insurance' for ships. One of my biggest gripes of strict play is losing the several Million invested on that new ship only to be blown apart by an enemy fleet whilst waiting to enter hyperspace. I have developed a theory (and alpha test) that makes it possible to buy insurance from an outfitter and have to pay x amount per day, or alternatively charge x amount per month (with an option to renew the insurance). If this hasn't been done before and enough interest is shown, I will post my notes as well as possibly an alpha plug-in. Also, again if it hasn't been done, I'm happy for people to use this idea in their own plug ins, but I ask that people let me know first and perhaps include me in their credits as a source of inspiration.

Although knowing my luck, this has already been done <_<

I think that there are several mostly very complicated ways to be paid when you loose your ship... Involves editing the ncb fields of I think every ship in the game, but I could be wrong.

Insurance on strict play would require the use of escape pods, yes? Very interesting concept. And just like in the real worl, possibilities for abuse. Sure, I'll pay a 2,000-credit downpayment to start my 900,000 credit insurance. I'll pay for a couple of days and then I'll get my ship blown out of the water. FREE MONEY!

Of course, variable insurance for each ship would require a TON of work, and it wouldn't necessarily cover any enhancements. Unless you bought a special policy expander that added another 10,000 to your coverage to cover the purchase of, say, some batteries. But again, potential for abuse. You could buy more policis than you needed and be reimbursed for massive amounts of credits.

purple1, on Jun 13 2005, 03:29 PM, said:

And just like in the real worl, possibilities for abuse. Sure, I'll pay a 2,000-credit downpayment to start my 900,000 credit insurance. I'll pay for a couple of days and then I'll get my ship blown out of the water. FREE MONEY!
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But if your insurance only covered the price of your ship and outfits, you wouldn't make any FREE MONEY!

pp0u20e8, on Jun 13 2005, 08:37 AM, said:

But if your insurance only covered the price of your ship and outfits, you wouldn't make any FREE MONEY

The question is how to keep the reimbursement down to the price of your ship and outfits.
And rmx256, it wouldn't be necessary to edit every ship. You could manage it with a mission (the OnAbort field is evaluated when you use an escape pod, although not an escape ship), you could just edit the shuttle (the OnPurchase field is evaluated when you get it after using an escape pod, although this would require making ship 128 unpurchasable), and I'm sure there are a couple of other ways to do this with very few resources.

Edwards

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The question is how to keep the reimbursement down to the price of your ship and outfits.

I would think there's got to be a way. After all, the engine tracks the trade-in value of the ship, including any purchased outfits. That's just a percentage of the total investment right? Isn't there some way to access that figure???

You could also use a cron to simulate delayed activation, so that a pilot must have purchased and kept the insurance for, say, 30 days before it takes full effect. Still abusable, but not as much.

GutlessWonder, on Jun 13 2005, 01:11 PM, said:

You could also use a cron to simulate delayed activation, so that a pilot must have purchased and kept the insurance for, say, 30 days before it takes full effect. Still abusable, but not as much.
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To me this would cause a bit of frustration if your ship was destroyed within the said 30 days.

fchsjv4, on Jun 13 2005, 11:55 AM, said:

To me this would cause a bit of frustration if your ship was destroyed within the said 30 days.
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It's the way that (some) insurance policies work in real life. It's designed to prevent people from signing up for the insurance the same day as a bad accident, and then trying to pass it off as being covered (a la retroactively), among other scams.

You could create a scale of reimbursement related to the price of ships. You could have a scale of nothing for $0-50k, $50,000 for 50k-100k, $100,000 for 100k-200k, and so on. Outfits would not be covered because they are considered risky upgrades which would often void the warranty. Fortunately the insurance company will look the other way because they don't always pay the full value.
To purchase insurance you would need to have the proper ship, set by an 'on purchase' flag. This would also pick the properly paying mission.

What makes this whole thing odd is that the escape pod description mentions something about no insurance company selling to independent pilots. :laugh:

To avoid abuse, a sort of realistic idea would be to add a probability factor. The longer you owned the insurance, the more chance that the insurance company would believe that you didn't blow your ship up on purpose. If they didn't believe you, then you wouldn't get the credits. If they did, you do. But, I'm not sure how probability would be added 'cause I'm sorta new at this.

fchsjv4, on Jun 13 2005, 12:55 PM, said:

To me this would cause a bit of frustration if your ship was destroyed within the said 30 days.
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Tell me about it. :mad:

GutlessWonder is right about "real world" insurance sometimes working this way -- I had to pay the full premiums for my health insurance for six months before it would pay me for anything other than dire emergencies.

Other wrinkles to consider:

• You can use a "rank" to create continuing automatic insurance payments (negative income).
• Make additional (or better) policies available for freighters -- freighters may usually be more vulnerable but, unlike warships, they don't usually fly recklessly into the face of danger.
• To make the system easier to implement, you could restrict insurance policies to only being avalable for stock civilian ships (incl. the adventure-worthy ones like the standard Starbridge and Valk) -- everything else is a military vehicle, a probable stolen ship, or an upgraded "custom job" that represents an incalculable risk for insurers.
• Cooperative insurance schemes might be offered by certain employers: large corporations, guilds, etc. Flags already in the game could be required to get access to the outfits. United Shipping could use a perk....
• Here's a tough one, based on the union health insurance a friend gets as a freelance technician in Hollywood: the insurance is only active if his employment is active. In game terms, this could mean you had to, say, accept a United Shipping cargo mission every two months or lose your insurance. Might that be doable with crons?

Are any of our TC-smiths or plugmeisters considering adding this to their works? I like the idea, with or without the arcane complications I just suggested.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 13 June 2005 - 10:05 PM

more accurate would be for the rates to explode (pun intended) as you claim more and more incidents. You could also have a hefty deductable, like make a 3mill trade in starbridge only insurable for like 2 mill. Well, maybe the full three, since that still means you sunk a lot more than that into it in the first place.

Hmm, I'll have to compile a set of notes and post them on my theories. Basically in order to cover every individual ship I would have to modify the onPurchase bit, already realised that. The essential way it works is buying an insurance 'outfit' which activates a purchase bit, then there will be a set of missions each based on your type of ship and your combat rating which have about a 10% chance of activating (cheap time-delay trick). All missions work by being invisible and activating when landing with a message of approval/denial based on rating and type of ship eg. You just bought a new Carrier but have no combat experience probably wont get you good coverage or something. I was thinking of using rank to make negative payments, however equally I could assign an invisible escort that would charge the money. The way it currently works is on destruction of the ship (unfortunately also on disabling of your ship) the mission is 'failed' and activates an onFail bit, which activates a second auto-abort mission that simply pays the amount on your next landing.

The aplha plug in I had charged no money and only had one payVal, however it proved possible to get a payout after the destruction of the ship. Whilst I know this is a very complex system I thought I would post my findings as I've only started EVO modding and this was my first main idea that hadn't been tried to my knowledge.

EVO?

Wow! That's dedication!

How very interesting a concept
I like the idea, and will probably give it some thought after the exams. But I doubt it will be included in Arpia 2

To give my direct input, changing the OnPurchase fields would force the person to pay insurance, which isn't necessary. So I would suggest using a mďsn resource for it instead.
And, no, I don't believe there is a way to calculate the ship value. I've tried many times, but one would need to create a separate program (I believe so at any rate)/hack the EV(N) engine to figure out the ship value.

And bravo for doing it for EVO, I have to say. We don't see many EVO devs around these days.

Released? Doubt it. Will release? Almost definitely.

If there's a neat feature that makes the game that much more realistic and isn't insanely hard to implement, chances are, it's already in or will be in SS.

Hell, we have mortgages, insurance only makes sense.

In any case, even complicated implementations are normal to Masamune. He made a "simple" mission: people wanted to go to Africa from a random other spob. However, it didn't make snese that every single passenger went for the same reason. So what did he do? He made a few crons to randomly set one of 8 different bits at a time. So, a standard place-to-place mission for him = 1 misn, 8 bits, and several crons.

orcaloverbri9, on Jun 15 2005, 09:58 AM, said:

In any case, even complicated implementations are normal to Masamune. He made a "simple" mission: people wanted to go to Africa from a random other spob. However, it didn't make snese that every single passenger went for the same reason. So what did he do? He made a few crons to randomly set one of 8 different bits at a time. So, a standard place-to-place mission for him = 1 misn, 8 bits, and several crons.
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Pah, that's perfectly easy. It's just that most people tend to forget about thinking laterally when they see you can "only" have two different texts with one bit check

And orca, the thing is many ideas that are in SS won't come out for a long time. Plugs like Retribution and Arpia 2, however, will be the ones to show a few of them early

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Hell, we have mortgages, insurance only makes sense

Hey, that just made me realise, using a similar technique it would be quite possible to have a 'loan' outfit as well by making an outfit which pays x amount, then adding a mission bit that detracts x amount from your account per day until the time limit is reached (and aborting causes a full payout to be made...) The only problem would be setting a flag to confiscate your ship if the player runs out of money...

Put an onfail bit expression that exchanges the ship for a stripped down shuttle.