How does the repair droid work?

RZetlin

Spaceman
I bought myself an advance repair droid but it doesn't seem to repair the damage to my ship.

I would receive damage my armor and hull and yet I still I have to pay for repairs when I dock.

How do I make the droid work?
 
On my system at leat, none of the repair systems, including the repair driod seem to work. I have leftit to repair some stuff for quite some time and it hasn't done anything. Possibly another bug?
 
You have to add a variable to the vegastrike.config to make it work. It's an omission in 1.0 that will be fixed in 1.1 (see the buglist thread)

I think it's in section "physics":

<var name="repair_drone_time" value="30"/>
 
Oh... but it will never fix the armor/hull. Those are only repairable while docked, and you have to pay for it.
 
Armour Repair

klauss said:
Oh... but it will never fix the armor/hull. Those are only repairable while docked, and you have to pay for it.

I'm probably mistaken, but I seem to remember having some kind of self regenerating hull in the dark distant past.

I thought it was Privateer, but maybe it was either X or The Darkening. I've played all of the "Elite" style space sims, but I thought it was Privateer.
 
stthrobber said:
I'm probably mistaken, but I seem to remember having some kind of self regenerating hull in the dark distant past.

I thought it was Privateer, but maybe it was either X or The Darkening. I've played all of the "Elite" style space sims, but I thought it was Privateer.
I believe your refering to elite, which does have some armour repair thingys. I never had my armour or hull repaired by the repair driod.

BTW: You can still download an amiga copy of frontier and run it on an amiga emulator. Try www.elitegroup.co.uk for the link to the site that has the files.
 
Making Repair Work
The variable which controls how fast the repair bot works is "RepairDroidTime".

In vegastrike.config you will find <var name="RepairDroidTime" value="240"/>

I think 240 might be too slow though.

RepairDroidTime is relative to simulation_atom. simulation_atom ranges from 0.06 ( > 1000 Mhz ) to 0.15 ( 100 Mhz).

The calculation that occurs is

workunit = simulation_atom / RepairDroidTime

workunit is the probability that a repair will be done in a simulation cycle

So if you want really want repairs to happen quickly change the line to

<var name="RepairDroidTime" value="0.06"/>

This value can be used for debugging purposes to ensure you that the repair system is working, but it probably is too fast. You might want to make it some multiple of that, perhaps 0.6 or 1.

Someone else had suggested that the variable name was repair_droid_time, but this appears to be incorrect. Someone else also suggested changing the value to 30 but I suggest that this is still too large.

Remember that the repair system does not repair armor or hull damage.

I have encountered some issues where devices that are only slightly damanged will not get completely repaired.

To discover this information, I looked in the source in vegastrike/src/cmd/unit_generic.cpp

Best,
Hawkeey
 
Armor

Actually, there /was/ a Privateer ability to repair armor with the repair droid. I know because I took advantage of it to just bash my enemies to death with the orion; I bought the advanced repair droid, good shields - and just went bash, bash, bash. I had the damndest time killing that other privateer at the pirate base until I did it - it was quite satisfying just watching his sleek little ship bust right in two as I slammed through him - and afterwords, it just became a habbit. It was a fun way to play - but you really can't do it in the remakes, as its been overlooked.
 
I never experienced automatic armor repair with the original RF. You might be thinking of the isometal armor, which gives you 100 cm of armor protection more than the tungsten armor does--with isometal armor, your external systems (shields, engines, maneuvering jets, guns) all get battered to death long before your ship blows up, so you can safely ram enemy fighters to your heart's content.
 
Repair Jump Drive?

My jump drive is out of comission after waxing Miggs and his cohorts, but the only base in my system is LIverpool, and there is no Ship dealer on this post. My advanced repair droid doesn't seem to be doing squat to fix my Jump Drive. It's not just orange but now greyed out which means completely screwed. Does the droid fix completely busted parts or just slightly damaged?
 
In the original Privateer, this would present a scenario where you're stranded. The droid can't fix systems that are completely destroyed (grayed out).
 
Ouch, that's pretty nasty. I don't think I ever got myself into the situation where a component would be completely destroyed, but losing a jump drive in a system with no ship dealer to buy vital components such as said-destroyed-jump-drive... you just better hope you have kept a good record of save games as a back up...
 
I had the jump drive issue happen to me a few times back in the day when I was playing Privateer as a new game, and once or twice on Gemini Gold.
 
Well, in a 'real' situation, I imagine it wouldn't be too hard, albeit rather expensive, to order a new jump drive to the system you're stuck in (assuming you're not stuck in an uninhabited system!). To pay the bills you could just do random scouting jobs or other intra-system contracts until the jump drive came in.

But my mind wanders. Yeah, considering it's 'just a game', you are indeed screwed without a jump drive...
 
There's been quite a bit of discussion on this topic (dating back many many years), but essentially it's not a lot different from just being destroyed. If you take that critical hit to your jump drive and happen to not have a ship dealer in system, then it's just up to you to pull the plug.
 
But would you be able to install the jump drive, after it had been sent to you, without a ship dealer?
 
I must have missed the discussions... not having had suffered that much damage myself before.

As for installing the jump drive, well, that's why I said you'd better hope you're in an inhabited system so you can make the order in the first place and hire a mechanic to install it in the case that you can't do it yourself.
 
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