Year 20 - Day 103

After many years of being on the ToDo list, I've finally implemented Misjumps for ships that are attempting to jump to a different star system via IAP. There are many factors that influence the chance of a Misjump happening, which include:

• Size of Ship - the bigger the ship, the more likely it is to misjump.
• Stability of IAP - some are more unstable than others
• The Astrogation skill of the Navigator or Captain of the ship.
• Damage to Jump Engine - this can be bad, very bad.

Depending on how bad your chances of mis-jumping are, the misjump is rated from Minor to Catastrophic. Consequences can range from much longer jump times, damage, and ending up nowhere near where you thought you were going. Damage can be enough to blow up a ship.

Speaking of blowing up ships, I've added another item to the list that when a ship blows up because one section has been destroyed, it won't just disappear. A "wreckage" asset that belongs to no one will be created that can be found by scanning and scavenged. This can result in finding damaged modules and cargo.

Year 17 - Day 33

I've been drifting about working on some of the content design items recently. Tonight I got busy and after fixing a few bugs I created a screen to help me track IAPs and then created a routine to randomly generate comets for a given star system. Below is a test run for one corner of the Marvin(1) system. I've got a small bug on the Details section in this screenshot, but it shows results nicely.

I'll probably tweak the code a bit so that two comets won't show up directly adjacent to one another.

Comets will be places to harvest Monopoles and possibly contain anomalies and other adventure nodes. Comets will not display on the screen until you've discovered them by performing a scan within one square of a comet, or you purchase a copy of a scan someone else has done.

Scans

Not a lot going on today, but I did make some changes to the way ships find Interstitial Access Points (IAPs). IAPs are basically wormholes and are how ships jump from one star system to another. To find an IAP, a ship has to be in a space square and use the Scan System Square command, which will probably take about 20 minutes - the Sensors skill of your ship's Science Officer.

Once the scan completes, if you're in the same space square as an unknown IAP, your ship will discover it and it will be added to your company's library. If you're not in the same square as an IAP, the report generated will tell you approximately how far away you are from the nearest unknown IAP. This will allow you to triangulate in on the unknown IAP until you finally discover it.

Originally, I had it set so that the scan just told you how far away you were from the closest IAP, even if you already knew the location of it. I thought that might be too frustrating though, so I've changed it to this new method.