UPS Courier
Contents
Intro
In the universe there is a lot of commercial traffic. Goods and documents are transported from one solar system to the other system. Like transportation on earth, only a small part of the jobs is offered on the open market. Almost everybody can accept such free contracts provided it's ship has the right cargo capacity. However, most of the lucrative transport-jobs aren't offered on the open market. You have to use connections to gain such contracts.
UPS is only one of the many organization in the universe for delivering goods between planet systems. Normally they use their own ships and pilots. On rare occasions they ask strangers to do some deliveries for them. If they do it well, the chances rise of getting more offers. Only the very skilled pilots get the best offers. UPS is present in the whole universe with business points in every solar-system with a political level of Multi-Government and higher. They don't have their own combat-ships to protect their transport-ships, but rely on police and occasionally on unbound fighters like yourself.
Earning money is hard and competition is strong in the universe. For regular transport missions UPS pays very little. If you don't find the payment enough, go to the passenger / cargo contract market. Maybe there it a better offer written out. But bear in mind: For their regular delivery pilots UPS sometimes has very good paying jobs to offer.
Overview & Download Link
This OXP adds several random mission that run simultaneously. There could be up to 5 missions simultaneously active. The first sets of missions that are offered are mainly various transport missions. After you ran enough transport missions, a series of combat jobs is offered, but the main focus of the OXP stays at friendly transports. See the missions as a more advanced version of the Passenger/Cargo contracts that are offered if you press F8-F8. Unlike most mission OXP's that offer a story that is only run once, this OXP will continuely offer random missions, but with a low probability of appearing. You will get an end-message when the last type of regular combat mission has successfully ended and nothing new has to be expected. There could however still come small variations on existing ones. The OXP itself never ends as long as it stays in the AddOns folder of Oolite.
Most missions only work as long one stays in the galaxy where the mission is accepted. On intergalactic jumps those mission are aborted when there is no solution in the new galaxy, but a new mission will be presented soon in the new galaxy. So intergalactic jumping in the middle of a mission should do no real harm. Because of the nature of this OXP you can leave it in place and forget about it. It should be compatible with most other mission OXP's.
Download UPS Courier v 1.3.2 (Currently only useful for testers of Oolite 1.70. It will do the same as 1.2.3 but now with JS) Zipped with Mac Stuffit 8.02
Download UPS Courier v 1.3.2a (Currently only useful for testers of Oolite 1.70. It will do the same as 1.2.3 but now with JS) Zipped with Mac's OSX 10.4.11's internal zipper.
Download UPS Courier v 1.2.3 (For all normal users)
Difficulty Rating
"Medium". The ships appearing in the OXP are within the power-range of the standard set of ships. No new type of ships are added, none the less, mission ships have more often than usual the maximum shielding and firepower for their type of ship. You wouldn't need a full Iron Ass to take them on, but you should have some basic upgrades fitted such as a Beam Laser, fuel injectors, an energy unit and perhaps a shield booster.
Update Notes
The version posted on the Wiki is the latest version of this OXP. (Updated 01/02/08).
Version 1.1.1: Added slave mission.
Version 1.1.3: Added a scooping mission.
Version 1.2: Added a mining mission mission. Prepared for Oolite 1.70
version 1.2.1: Removed a bug introduced in version 1.1.3 that prevented offering of some combat missions.
version 1.2.2: Removed a bug introduced in version 1.2.1 that prevented accepting of the 2nd combat missions.
version 1.2.3: Small AI changes in the final mission. Some JS introduction in ship scripts.
version 1.3.2: Four mission series are translated to Java Script.
Installing and Playing
To play the OXP, unzip the download file. This will create a folder named "UPS-Courier V1.x.x". Open this folder and you will see a folder named "UPS-Courier.oxp" and a readme. Move the UPS-Courier.oxp folder to AddOns. As with all OXPs, its the folder ending .oxp that you need to put in Oolite's AddOns folder, otherwise Oolite will not read it.
