Hi, I'm finishing up a port of an old EV plugin to Nova and I noticed that when I capture ships and take them as my own, I end up in the new ship, but disabled. It's been a while since I've played vanilla EV Nova but I'm pretty sure this is not how it's supposed to work. However, I have no idea what resources govern this mechanic. Thoughts?

You're right, it's not supposed to work like that. If you switch ships, the ship you just captured is supposed to be repaired to 33% armour. My guess is something is wrong with your copy of EVN as I'm fairly sure that procedure is hard coded into the engine, no resource can alter it.

You got me worried so I ran the following tests.

1. Vanilla Nova does not exhibit the bug. My armor was set to 34% and I was able to drive away.
2. Unmodified EV Classic does not exhibit the bug. My armor was set to 33% and I was able to drive away.
3. EV Classic + plug-in does exhibit the bug, both in plug-in ships and unmodified classic ships. Furthermore, I've noticed a pattern, where the first column is the total armor of the captured ship, and the second is the percent armor it starts with when captured:
250 -> 3% (2.5?)
400 -> 4%
600 -> 6%
1,500 -> 12%
2,500 -> 16%
4,000 -> 20%
10,000 -> 26%
15,000 -> 28%
20,000 -> 29%
32,000 -> 30%
I'm quite sure that these numbers do not vary. The data fits well with a function like 30x / (x+1), which also behaves roughly linearly for small x, which explains why the first three terms seem to fit nicely on a line.

I hope this is convincing enough evidence that the plug-in is at fault. The remaining question is why on earth the game should behave this way. I confess I am utterly confused.

So, I have an update on this matter for anyone who cares: the bug does not occur for newly created pilots. While I'm not satisfied with this, it at least means that I can release the plug without having to solve the problem. If anyone has thoughts on why the bug appeared in the first place, I'd still be happy to hear them.

I'm just as puzzled as you are. This update you've posted is helpful, though, as përs ships work the same way. If a plug-in containing a new/altered përs ship is installed in EVN but the user doesn't start a new pilot, they will not see the new përs ships nor see alterations to existing përs ships.

Since this bug seems to affect only pilots existing before the plug-in is installed and not pilots created after, it sounds like it works the same way. However, I still have no ideas as to the cause. Still, I find bugs like this fascinating and would love to hear about any more information you can gather on it.