An extremely silly question, buut...

[Baron Munchausen]

Excellent! Yes, I agree it would be cool if mothballed ships were seizable. Defense should be zero. If you can get next to it & board it's yours. But when reactivated it would have zero supplies, of course. No combat tricks of seizing mothballed ships & using them immediately!

Automatic decay if they don't have a space yard nearby to maintain them is also good. Ok, I'll compromise on one component (randomly chosen) per turn as the decay rate. The vast majority of mothballed ships will be in a spaceyard sector anyway.

Now the question is: How do we get MM to do this along with all the other things we're requesting?

[dmm]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
What about allowing you to mothball a ship regardless of whether or not you have a space yard available, but only allow unmothballing with a space yard handy.

Actually that would be worse. You could mothball a fleet, then unmothball it in a single turn with a single space yard ship. [edit: oops, I just realized what a dumb criticism that was, since you can already do that!]

The suggestion to have damage accumulate over time is a good one but might be hard to implement. Much easier would be to destroy all components but leave the hull there. (Is that possible? Maybe need to leave one component, bridge or MC, for example.) This would allow someone to come along and salvage the wreck, but they would need a repair ship and supplies. I wonder if you could mothball it, too? Then someone would have to unmothball it AND repair it. But you probably can't unmothball someone else's ship.

Easiest thing to do is just make it go away. Maybe the Trade Federation takes it as their rescue fee?

[ June 05, 2002, 20:27: Message edited by: dmm ]

[dmm]

Since we are brainstorming:

How about allowing anybody to BUY the abandoned ship from the Trade Federation? (No, they are not in SEIV; I just invented them.) Perhaps they will even provide you with repairs, supplies, and a crew (for the right price). Or maybe the TF gets all technology from abandoned ships and can sell that to any and all who can pay their exhorbitant rates?

So, abandoning an outdated scout ship would be no big deal, but you wouldn't want to abandon something good, like a colonizer. UNLESS, maybe you had just stolen it from your arch-enemy and you wanted to let all of his neighbors get his colonization tech. (This differs from gifting or trading because you wouldn't need to have diplomatic contact with any of them.)

Interestingly, you might also want to abandon a captured ship if it had a bunch of levels of a tech that you didn't have any of. (Example: captured ship has Shield IV and you don't have shields at all.) You could then buy all of the levels from the TF, but it would cost you a lot and it would make them available to everyone else for that same price. But then maybe you could recoup some of your cost by trading the info to allies.

And how about this? Maybe you could also bribe the TF each turn to keep the tech secret?

Well, all this would require major recoding, but I can dream.

[Batman]

Well, if we're talking about a minimum of coding changes to the program, then insert a flag, like

WAS_MOTHBALLED_AT_SPACE_YARD {1/0}

If this is set to 1, then the ship was 'mothballed'. If set to 0, it was 'abandoned' (but the status is the same otherwise). Then don't change the ship until someone comes along and tries to board it. When they do, pick a random number of components and damage them. This could represent the fact that sometimes ships could float for millenia in the cold, preserving vacuum of space, but other times a freak meteor shower etc could damage them severely.

The point is, you don't need to track this, but rather leave the ship intact until someone comes and actually looks inside; the Schroedinger's Ship paradox

Hey, I just had an idea for a modification to this. If the SDD is still functioning when the ship is boarded, it could detonate. This could represent the crew abandoning the ship, but leaving it 'booby-trapped'.

Hmm, but why would you abandon it if you had a functioning SDD? Isn't that how this thread started. Well, I'm confused

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Batman:
Then don't change the ship until someone comes along and tries to board it. When they do, pick a random number of components and damage them. This could represent the fact that sometimes ships could float for millenia in the cold, preserving vacuum of space, but other times a freak meteor shower etc could damage them severely.

The point is, you don't need to track this, but rather leave the ship intact until someone comes and actually looks inside; the Schroedinger's Ship paradox

I do like that, but the only thing is it doesn't allow for an abandoned ship to completely disintegrate over time, unless it disolves to dust when you try to board it. That would be frustrating. "I know there was a ship here somewhere..."

Hmm, but why would you abandon it if you had a functioning SDD? Isn't that how this thread started. Well, I'm confused

ROFL! Good point! I am an idiot for not thinking of that. I suppose the only reason would be that you want to take the chance on recovering it later at least partially intact. Or it could be just meanness. But a minfield would be more efficent.

[dmm]

And how about: Any ship that runs out of supplies AUTOMATICALLY becomes derelict, and runs a risk each turn of being salvaged by the Trade Federation! You'd have to have ships use a tiny bit of supplies each turn just sitting there in order to get maximum fun out of this rule, but the crippled survivors of big battles would also provide booty for the opportunistic TF scavengers. Engine killing weapons would be powerful once again. This would certainly make those Emergency Supply Pods and Solar Collectors more important! And would make it harder to sit on a warp point in the early game.

[dmm]

Originally posted by Batman:
The point is, you don't need to track this, but rather leave the ship intact until someone comes and actually looks inside; the Schroedinger's Ship paradox

Unless someone probed it with LongRangeSensors. At that point you'd have to run the damage subroutine and keep track of it.