Discuss- should disposable items disappear when out of charges?

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Scanning artifacts is kind of a pain since there's no quick way to distinguish between empty and valid scanners on the use menu and you have to constantly be selling back empty scanners. Ditto for juggling disposable missile racks.

IMO most or all charge-based devices that aren't refillable (i.e. not the QAC) should have their value be entirely based on their charge and should disappear when they are empty. At a minimum, items with no charges should stop appearing in the Use menu. This would make inventory management and the Use menu much easier. Disposable missile racks should literally be seen to fall off of your ship, it makes no sense that an item that is marketed as disposable would retain so much value after being emptied.

How do others feel about this?
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Currently the engine doesn't support it for installed weapons (AP thinks he may have a workaround, but it's annoying).

In general I feel it should be a supported option. It does block modding to allow reloads, which is problematic.
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No, for the following reasons:
* Some mods introduce disposable items that can be refilled. (Some of my mod disposable items are refillable.)
* There could be mods that allow refill of these items. (i.e., someone makes a mod to recharge analyzers.)
* Disposable items with no charges may be recycled by Teraton fabricator or other similar crafting features that do not care about used or damaged items.
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It should be possible to specify that an item should not appear on the (u)se menu if it does not have any charges left. As chargeless items still have sell value and can have other uses, they shouldn't simply be destroyed.
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I don't see why existing chargeless nonrechargeable items should have resale value for most cases. I respect the desire to retain this functionality for mods, but what exactly does it add to the core game?
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Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:
Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:37 am
I don't see why existing chargeless nonrechargeable items should have resale value for most cases. I respect the desire to retain this functionality for mods, but what exactly does it add to the core game?
It adds a lot of annoyance!

Got to prioritize smooth gameplay and and a simple user interface, so used items should at least be marked with a big red cross or something like that.
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It would be nice to know wether a disposable device is empty or not. But I don't think it should disappear when empty.
However it should be relatively easy to change the description of the device as soon as you detect it is empty. This does make it easier to discard the item, or have it refilled (if possible).
Selling empty items should be possible, this way you can make some credits out of it, even when empty. This adds flavor to the game in my opinion.
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Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:
Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:37 am
I don't see why existing chargeless nonrechargeable items should have resale value for most cases. I respect the desire to retain this functionality for mods, but what exactly does it add to the core game?
Future-proofing. In addition, while it doesn't add much, neither does it detract much (although better displays would be useful).


I fully support the option to have items vanish when expended, but caution is needed when altering the base game content.
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Having the number of charges displayed in lists and in the use menu would work. Adding a charges= tag to the items and superimposing the number of charges left over the Use menu icon would greatly improve usability IMO. The annoying thing is not being able to tell how many charges are left unless you are about to analyze something.

If that happened they wouldn't be so unfriendly to use and you could either jettison them or sell them.
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Is there enough consensus to produce a ministry ticket about making chargeless items not appear in the Use menu by default?
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That seems like a really good idea, and totally unobjectionable, as long as it only applies to items with a specific attribute. (Not being usable when at zero charges would break the Jotun deflector, for instance.) Also, I already have a ticket to show the number of charges in the Use menu.
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Where is your ministry ticket? I was thinking of suggesting that the most annoying existing charge based items (scanners and missile racks) get this disappears-from-Use-menu property but that it not be applied to all charge based items by default for compatibility reasons.
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 Here’s the ticket. You +1’d it, even. ^.~
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So the consensus here seems to be that we should add two properties to any item with charges:

- showNumCharges(default: false), which governs whether the number of 'charges' an item has is shown when browsing the inventory of a ship or station.

- unusableWhenNoCharge(default: true), which causes the item to only be treated as (u)sable when it has one or more charges remaining
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JohnBWatson wrote: So the consensus here seems to be that we should add two properties to any item with charges:

- showNumCharges(default: false), which governs whether the number of 'charges' an item has is shown when browsing the inventory of a ship or station.

- unusableWhenNoCharge(default: true), which causes the item to only be treated as (u)sable when it has one or more charges remaining
 In favor. I’ll put my +1 on that.
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