Rock Hermit Beacons OXP

Rock Hermit Beacons

Most Rock Hermits start as mining communities in an asteroid-rich region, often on a shoestring budget (it's a huge capital investment), with no beacon - or a beacon with very limited range but still useful to find the way home in the asteroid field.

As time goes by, their wealth hopefully increases and they can afford wider range beacons, which they might need since they have to go further to mine, as the asteroids closer to them become depleted of useful minerals by their mining activities.

Finally, the time comes when there are few useful asteroids around them, and they have the choice of moving on to richer fields, leaving an abandoned rock hermit, or converting into a station-like business, offering servicing, equipment, market, accommodation, etc., for which a still wider range beacon is needed to allow them to attract a larger clientele.

Rock Hermit Beacons OXPs tries to bring the Rock Hermits closer to that story. It:

adds beacons with diverse ranges - from 50km up to the whole system - to the majority of the Rock Hermits (Pirate Coves included), allowing them to be found through an Advanced Space Compass and be seen in the 'In-system distances' Station Interface screen (F4);

adds and maintains an asteroid field around the Rock Hermit, the number of asteroids based on its beacon range.

The beacons are added to the Rock Hermit themselves, no Navigation Buoys are involved.

It doesn't add beacons to all Rock Hermits it finds, since some of them would be true hermits (and desire to be left alone), some would want to keep a low profile and not attract attention (from the government, from the police, from criminal gangs... the reason would vary with the Rock Hermit role and system government's meddling), and some simply can't afford yet to buy and maintain a beacon.

Note for OXP developers

This OXP doesn't create Rock Hermits, it acts on the Rock Hermits it finds, and it waits a bit after startup for other OXPs to create them..

It does three things, and all of them can be controlled by properties in the Rock Hermit's ship.script, so the Rock Hermit's creator can control what this OXP does with its creation.

The first thing this OXP does is create beacons for the Rock Hermits a few seconds after startup. This can be controlled with the property ship.script.$rhbCreateBeacon; Rock Hermit Beacons OXP will not create beacons on RHs that have this property set to the value "no".

The second thing this OXP does is create and mantain an asteroid field around the RH. The size of the asteroid field can be controlled through the property ship.script.$rhbAsteroidsQtt.

Finally, it manages beacon visibility based on their range and the player's ship position. The beacon's range can be defined (in game meters) through ship.script.$rhbBeaconRange, and whenever ship.script.$rhbCreateBeacon is "no" Rock Hermit Beacons will not change the beacon's visibility to On even if the beacons's range is defined and the player's ship moves into range, allowing the RH's creator to keep the beacon Off through that property.

License

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

The beep.ogg sound is based on JustinBW's buttonchime02up.wav available at https://freesound.org/people/JustinBW/sounds/80921/ licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0).

Acknownledgments

This OXP started as a re-write of Eric Walch's Rock Hermit Locator (which was based on Frame's ideas), since it doesn't include a license allowing modification, but it took a life of its own after some suggestions from phkb induced me to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, so my thanks to Frame, Eric Walch and phkb for the inspiration!