Take away credits in space?

I have a scenario in which the player ship becomes disabled in space and needs to pay another ship to come fix it. Now, I don't know of any way to actually disable the player programmatically; a nonlethal bomb only causes damage. But it's fine to do the entire scenario in a single text box.

I can use the old "observe invisible ship" thing to set off the text box in space. The trouble is, I'm not sure how to take away some of the player's credits to pay for the repair. I had been thinking to use a mission, but missions can only take credits when they complete, right?

Any ideas?

@lindley, on Oct 3 2010, 08:56 PM, said in Take away credits in space?:

I have a scenario in which the player ship becomes disabled in space and needs to pay another ship to come fix it. Now, I don't know of any way to actually disable the player programmatically; a nonlethal bomb only causes damage. But it's fine to do the entire scenario in a single text box.

I can use the old "observe invisible ship" thing to set off the text box in space. The trouble is, I'm not sure how to take away some of the player's credits to pay for the repair. I had been thinking to use a mission, but missions can only take credits when they complete, right?

Any ideas?

Yes, missions can only subtract credits when they complete. Why not just have the mission which causes the text to pop up be the same mission which removes the credits on completion?

@lnsu, on Oct 4 2010, 03:08 AM, said in Take away credits in space?:

Yes, missions can only subtract credits when they complete. Why not just have the mission which causes the text to pop up be the same mission which removes the credits on completion?

But what would trigger mission completion? You can use an NCB to abort a mission, but I don't think you can use one to complete it.

@lindley, on Oct 4 2010, 05:42 PM, said in Take away credits in space?:

But what would trigger mission completion? You can use an NCB to abort a mission, but I don't think you can use one to complete it.

Check the mission "flags" section of the bible - adding 0x0001 to Flags makes the mission "auto abort", ie abort itself automatically as soon as it is accepted, and adding 0x0002 to Flags2 will apply the mission pay when the mission is aborted. So you can flag a mission with a negative pay value to auto-accept, then immediately auto-abort and apply the credit reduction.

Note my version of the bible claims you need to make a special ship appear in order for auto-abort to work, but I've not found that necessary in the most recent version of nova.

@lindley, on Oct 4 2010, 12:42 PM, said in Take away credits in space?:

But what would trigger mission completion? You can use an NCB to abort a mission, but I don't think you can use one to complete it.

Its an "observe ship" mission - right? Well then you simply use that same "observe ship" to complete it. Or you can just use self-aborting, fail on abort, and pay on fail.