[MOD 0.18] Orbital Ion Cannon 1.8.2

[sumdawgy]

1. Launch a one-time Orbital Ion Cannon Mirror
2. Build multiple Ion Cannon Bunkers on the surface which fire at the mirror then reflect to your target.

Multiple mirrors..... IMHO, should be required to increase range...(bouncing from mirror to mirror...)

IE. the more mirrors in orbit, the farther each cannon can reach from it's location.

(Let's be honest.. .. gotta have goals.....)

EDIT::::
ALSO...just putting this out there....

The mirrors should have "life" that could reach zero per use....forcing us to replace/refuel them.
Literally because, maneuvering the reflector would use propellant. a Refueling unit could be launched and be really worth it when we have multiple reflectors for it to work on.

[Optera]

Multiple mirrors..... IMHO, should be required to increase range...(bouncing from mirror to mirror...)

IE. the more mirrors in orbit, the farther each cannon can reach from it's location.

You mean like 3 satellites at most?
No matter the size of a planet, bouncing by 2 satellites is all you will ever need to reach any other point on said planet.

The mirrors should have "life" that could reach zero per use....forcing us to replace/refuel them.
Literally because, maneuvering the reflector would use propellant. a Refueling unit could be launched and be really worth it when we have multiple reflectors for it to work on.

A life expectancy of mirrors or cannon carrying satellites was proposed a while back and I still think it's a good idea to have them wear out from handling the high density beam after ~10 shots.

Refuelling is unfeasible with current technology. Launching a supply rocket with fuel to a satellite has several problems:
1.) docking with something in orbit takes more fuel than putting something into orbit
2.) adding docking capability to satellites would increase their mass and make launching them require more fuel
That's why it's cheaper to let satellites burn up and replace them with a new ones rather than refueling existing ones.

Being in a sci-fi setting where interstellar travel became possible would make refuelling unnecessary.
Current electric drives have a lifetime of several years, some even decades. Though all of the currently used versions like Ion Drives or Plasma Drives still use tiny amounts of propellant. Should the EM-Drive really work (which I doubt as it'd break Newtonian physic) it would be the first electric drive that could literally run forever as long as it has electric energy.

[Skeleton Man]

A life expectancy of mirrors or cannon carrying satellites was proposed a while back and I still think it's a good idea to have them wear out from handling the high density beam after ~10 shots.

Refuelling is unfeasible with current technology. Launching a supply rocket with fuel to a satellite has several problems:
1.) docking with something in orbit takes more fuel than putting something into orbit
2.) adding docking capability to satellites would increase their mass and make launching them require more fuel
That's why it's cheaper to let satellites burn up and replace them with a new ones rather than refueling existing ones.

Being in a sci-fi setting where interstellar travel became possible would make refuelling unnecessary.
Current electric drives have a lifetime of several years, some even decades. Though all of the currently used versions like Ion Drives or Plasma Drives still use tiny amounts of propellant. Should the EM-Drive really work (which I doubt as it'd break Newtonian physic) it would be the first electric drive that could literally run forever as long as it has electric energy.

reusable launch vehicles were invented to solve the issue of needing a lot of delta V to boost a comparatively small amount of fuel into orbit.
changing the orbit of something takes propellant, but simply rotating the vehicle without changing the orbit doesn't use propellant, it can be achieved with gyroscopes.
for the sake of simplicity and gameplay we could just say the cannon takes however long to reach another firing window on your area. there's no real estimate to how big the planet is or what its gravity and orbits are like, so there's no reason to overcomplicate it. In the end having the cannon become unusable after "x" number of firings would just make ion cannons an expensive and consumable artillery piece that would not be attractive for long term operations or beyond a few uses when those rocket parts can just go to science since as you use it you just have to keep pouring more and more resources into rockets and ion cannons.

[Supercheese]

New version, 1.5.2.

The changelog:

• New setting "Minimum Cannons Ready Before Auto-Targeting" that allows you to keep a buffer of ready-to-fire cannons that will always be available for manual targeting.
• Removed "Verbose Messaging" option -- It is replaced by the new "Custom Alerts" option.
• New custom alerts will trigger (if enabled in the mod options) whenever an ion cannon target is designated. These behave just like the alerts for destroyed structures et al.
• Switched from using a train stop to show the ion cannon target location on the map to 0.15's new custom map marker feature.
• New setting: "Map Marker Duration". This determines for how long the target map markers will remain after the ion cannon fires.
• Reworked some text strings & added descriptions to the mod's technologies.

Please report bugs should you find any.

[ZBaconator]

I love the mod. Lately it's gotten a bit annoying in game though: I'm hearing klaxons constantly!

Please tell me how to turn off auto targeting (or if I can disable the klaxon but only for auto-targeted shots).

Thanks!

[Supercheese]

I love the mod. Lately it's gotten a bit annoying in game though: I'm hearing klaxons constantly!

Please tell me how to turn off auto targeting (or if I can disable the klaxon but only for auto-targeted shots).

Thanks!

You can disable auto-targeting in the mod options menu (Options -> Mods; under the "Map" tab).

[ZBaconator]

I love the mod. Lately it's gotten a bit annoying in game though: I'm hearing klaxons constantly!

Please tell me how to turn off auto targeting (or if I can disable the klaxon but only for auto-targeted shots).

Thanks!

You can disable auto-targeting in the mod options menu (Options -> Mods; under the "Map" tab).

Thanks! I never thought to check there.

[nucleargen]

I love the mod. Lately it's gotten a bit annoying in game though: I'm hearing klaxons constantly!

Please tell me how to turn off auto targeting (or if I can disable the klaxon but only for auto-targeted shots).

Thanks!

You can disable auto-targeting in the mod options menu (Options -> Mods; under the "Map" tab).

Minor idea: What about new building called for example Targeting Center and able to connect to logic network? To provide control of auto-targeting by network signals. Appropriate technology exists already.

[Slayn25]

I love the mod. Lately it's gotten a bit annoying in game though: I'm hearing klaxons constantly!

Please tell me how to turn off auto targeting (or if I can disable the klaxon but only for auto-targeted shots).

Thanks!

You can disable auto-targeting in the mod options menu (Options -> Mods; under the "Map" tab).

Thanks! I never thought to check there.

You can also disable the sounds in the in-game menu. Mods > player tab

[Sedar]

New version, 1.5.2.

The changelog:

• New setting "Minimum Cannons Ready Before Auto-Targeting" that allows you to keep a buffer of ready-to-fire cannons that will always be available for manual targeting.
• Removed "Verbose Messaging" option -- It is replaced by the new "Custom Alerts" option.
• New custom alerts will trigger (if enabled in the mod options) whenever an ion cannon target is designated. These behave just like the alerts for destroyed structures et al.
• Switched from using a train stop to show the ion cannon target location on the map to 0.15's new custom map marker feature.
• New setting: "Map Marker Duration". This determines for how long the target map markers will remain after the ion cannon fires.
• Reworked some text strings & added descriptions to the mod's technologies.

Please report bugs should you find any.

This error is appears very often in my testsave. I had to turn off your mod
This save with learned all technologies(creative mod), but even without launching a single rocket/orbital cannon.

If you need more info I will give it.
Thanks for the mod.

[Supercheese]

Hmm, funky error. Even though researching the Auto-targeting tech before having any ion cannons in orbit is not supposed to happen, I thought I had put enough checks in to make sure it still wouldn't throw any errors. I guess it wasn't enough, so I added an extra sanity check for the next version.

[Sedar]

Hmm, funky error. Even though researching the Auto-targeting tech before having any ion cannons in orbit is not supposed to happen, I had though I put enough checks in to make sure it still wouldn't throw any errors. I guess it wasn't enough, so I added an extra sanity check for the next version.

When i know about the cause of the error i can simple to avoid it. Now all is work fine.
Thank you for reply.

[abordoli]

Did you render your opening page graphic yourself? If not, no worries. Please give me the source so that I can talk to the artist.
Regards,
~B

[Supercheese]

Did you render your opening page graphic yourself? If not, no worries. Please give me the source so that I can talk to the artist.
Regards,
~B

If you mean this image, I simply found it via Google search.

[abordoli]

Did you render your opening page graphic yourself? If not, no worries. Please give me the source so that I can talk to the artist.
Regards,
~B

If you mean this image, I simply found it via Google search.

Thanks! I'll try to find out who the modeled that graphic. I need something like that modeled myself related to Factorio.

[Starwind0]

Hey any chance this mod / dependencies will be updated? My mega base depends on this mod a little too much Least the core seems to work but my 100 hour map is growing into all directions with trains for mass mining.

[robertpaulson]

hey there, great mod! I hope you wont mind me asking but why is there two "projeciles"? as in "crosshairs" and "dummy" version of it. They seem to have exact effects, I can only see the dummy one being called within the entities.lua...

[Supercheese]

hey there, great mod! I hope you wont mind me asking but why is there two "projeciles"? as in "crosshairs" and "dummy" version of it. They seem to have exact effects, I can only see the dummy one being called within the entities.lua...

The "dummy" projectile is there to give more appropriate information to the player about the damage dealt by the ion cannon strike while holding the Ion Cannon Targeting Device, as shown here:

Tooltip.jpg (1.48 MiB) Viewed 9377 times

The "true" projectile not only deals the stated damage, but also applies the DoT effects across the blast zone multiple times, both before and after the direct-damage portion, in order to deal with the situation where destroying an entity spawns more entities, such as is the case in the Swarm mod. Not only that, but it also does some other shenanigans to make the blast look the way it does. If all of this projectile information were to be included in the Targeting Device tooltip, I discovered that it ended up rather confusing, so I used the dummy method to consolidate things as much as I could.

[sapid]

Bug report:
If there are no players left in game.players when on_forces_merging is triggered, a headless server will crash.

Error while running event Orbital Ion Cannon::on_forces_merging (ID 28)
__Orbital Ion Cannon__/control.lua:107: attempt to get length of field '?' (a nil value)

This makes Orbital Ion Cannon incompatible with Oarc's scenario. To reproduce, install Orbital Ion Cannon and create a game with Oarc's scenario. Join as the first player, create a "near" or "far" spawn, then leave the game within 5 minutes.

If a player leaves within their first five minutes, Oarc's scenario tries to save resources on the server by getting rid of the player, their base, and merges their force back in to the default force.

A potential workaround may be to check if game.players is empty before trying to iterate over it in control.lua:107, but I'm not familiar enough with Ion Cannon to understand why init_GUI is being called there.

[Supercheese]

All right, I've uploaded v1.5.3 to address this new bug above, as well as the one previously reported.