[Mod] Playership Drones v6

[PM]

Playership Drones v6 has been uploaded to Xelerus. However, due to the unstable nature of 1.08d, most PSD5 files remain on Xelerus for those who stick with 1.08b.

Changes since Playership Drones v5:
First, the good...
* Any weapon may be linked for ships with linked fire slots. Want to link some weapons from WE5 for your Charon frigate or Ranx dreadnought? You can!

* Reduced filesize. Thanks to the new shield effects system introduced by 1.08c, many large files were either eliminated or replaced by much smaller images. The result: PSD6 spans three files instead of five, and the patches are smaller. (Enjoy it while it lasts, because PSD7 will get much bigger.)

Next, YMMV...
* Changed starting equipment or stats for the following ships:
-- EI100/M and EI200 (but not EI500) can use any EI weapon as omnidirectional. (Why? To mirror NPC versions of the ships.)
-- EI500 may (not always) start with barrels of anti-radiation coating instead of regenerative nanos.
-- Sapphire starts with even more cash (4000+). This is to compensate for its now inferior 15MW default reactor.
-- Ronin/B starts with a turbolaser instead of a fast-fire laser. It still has a weak 15MW reactor.
-- Wolfen starts with a default 25MW reactor. (Why? Equipment used by NPC Wolfen ships need that much power.)

* Centauri portable mechanics can only rebuild ships with a default reactor of 100MW or less.

Now the bad...
* New linked fire weapons system does not allow the player to bypass the one launcher per ship restriction. To avert this somewhat for any Corporate Cruisers found for sale, such ships are armed with a custom weapon that fires Gotha-10 missiles.

* Removed Centurion, Molotok, and medium IAV from the starter ship select. This is because their default reactors have more than 25MW of power. This can be remedied by the Select Any Ship patch, if you do not mind its unbalanced level of power.

(Brave enough to face buggy 1.08d with the latest version of Playership Drones? Click the link in my signature.)

[Atarlost]

Now the bad...
* New linked fire weapons system does not allow the player to bypass the one launcher per ship restriction. To avert this somewhat for any Corporate Cruisers found for sale, such ships are armed with a custom weapon that fires Gotha-10 missiles.

You have my permission to use the unlauncher code in WE5 to get around this problem. It'll be one added <ItemType> entry per launcher, but will not clash with other mods as long as the changes are within the <missiles> entry. Completely new launchers would still require a patch, but that's a much smaller patch than PSD5 needed since there are almost always far more non-launchers than launchers in any item adding mod.

[christian]

The EI7000 should not have 3 "linkable" weapons?

[PM]

Christian: Are you asking why the EI7000 does not have more linked fire slots? Why would it? It is a freighter, not a warship. Even the Antares V superfreighter has only two linked fire slots.

[Peter5930]

I'm having trouble with linked weapons. I used the Centauri portable mechanic to repair a Tripoli destroyer, but when I tried linking a couple of weapons, they wouldn't fire, and they got removed from the list of weapons you cycle through with 'w'. When I disabled all the weapons except for the two I'd linked, pressing the space bar would cause the power usage to spike as though the weapons were firing, but there would be no shots coming out. I also crashed the game while messing around with linked weapons (a hard 'this program has stopped responding' crash, so the debug file doesn't say anything about it).

[Peter5930]

I finally got it to work; I didn't realise the linked weapons would only fire when there was something targeted or in visual range, and it took some experimentation to figure out the primary weapon/linked weapons mechanic.

[PM]

All Playership Drones v6 files have been updated to 1.08k and uploaded to Xelerus. To update, remove all old PSD files, then perform a clean install of all new PSD6 files.

Playership Drones v6: Core is now a library. This will make patching ships somewhat easier in the future. It also includes a Settings.xml file, where users can easily find various options, and change them. The options include limits for ship sales and shipwright spawning, a cheat, and an option to fight your drones as enemies.

[PM]

* Changes to starter ships in the latest update:
-- Molotok is a starter ship.
-- Sapphire has less cash.
-- Ronin/B no longer starts with random consumables (but keeps its turbolaser).
-- Wolfen is back down to 15 MW reactor.

[Xanthe V]

Sorry dude, I hate to say this but I'm having many problems playing Transcendence 1.08g with PSDv6... For short, I gotta say sorry but I'm still sticking to playing the normal 1.08 with PSDv5.