@resilient_freighter, on Feb 3 2008, 05:34 AM, said in some spob, govt help.:
oh yeah, what are cargo scan masks and how do they work??
It might be a good idea to read the Nova Bible, as it has the answers to a lot of your questions - you'll find the Nova Bible in the Documentation folder within your Nova folder. For example, the Nova Bible describes the scan mask (in the jünk resource) as:
Nova Bible said:
If this is an "illegal" cargo type, this is used in conjunction with the ScanMask field in the gövt resource. If any of the 1 bits in a ship's government's ScanMask field match any of the 1 bits in a jünk type's ScanMask field, that government will consider that junk cargo type illegal. Set to zero if unused.
To give a simple example with four bits, suppose gövt A has ScanMask 0001, while gövt B has ScanMask 0010. Then we have a jünk (or mďsn) with ScanMask 0001. Since the 1 in the forth bit matches the 1 in gövt A's ScanMask but not gövt B, then A will find it illegal, but not B. A jünk with a scan mask of 0011 would be illegal to both gövts, while one with a ScanMask of 0100 would be illegal to neither, since the 1 in the second bit doesn't match either gövt's scan masks. Note that a jünk with a ScanMask of 0000 will never be found illegal, while a gövt with a ScanMask of 0000 won't find anything else illegal. (If you're good with Boolean logic, the technical way to think of it is that the game performs a bitwise AND between the two ScanMasks, and finds the jünk illegal if the result is non-zero.)
If that's just plain confusing, here's a more concrete way of thinking about it. Suppose you have two pieces of paper, one representing the gövt's ScanMask, and the other representing the jünk's ScanMask. The two pieces of paper have holes punched in them in specific locations representing the 1 bits in the ScanMasks. Then place the two pieces of paper together face-to-face - if any of the holes line up on both pieces of paper, you'll be able to see through both sheets, meaning the gövt will find the jünk illegal. If you can't see through, then none of the holes line up, and so the jünk is fine. The piece-of-paper analogy helps demonstrate why it's called a mask - it's like wearing two masks over your face, but you can only see through if at least one of the eye holes lines up on both masks.
Hope that helps, and I didn't just ramble incoherently about nothing.