I know two methods to accomplish what you want. I implemented both of them…wow has it really been three years?

See here and here. Try them out, I imagine you'll like what they do.

The version in the first link, called "abilities", works by letting you start a mission, then abort it in flight. OnAbort you are given a special outfit. There are several varieties in that plug-in. One of them is a very-fast shield recharger (among other effects). Another mission is also started, which causes a zero-armor ship to jump in. When it dies, that mission aborts and removes the special outfit. The duration of the recharging is controlled by the death-delay of the ship. The major benefit here is that you can have multiple active ability missions that each have a different effect when triggered.

The second link has a version called "booster" which is less polished but does work if you're careful about how things are set up. The upshot is you select the booster as a weapon and fire one. That makes you start recharging really fast for a short time. The major benefit here is that you can have a large number of the the same ability (controlled by how much ammunition you have for the weapon) without being restricted by the 16-active-missions cap. This could be modified to have different boosters, but they would be stacking. As in, if you want to get the level 2 effect, it also gives you the level 1 effect. The effects need not have the same durations though.

Oh, right, booster works by having an invisible 1-armor mission ship with ridiculously high shields and shield recharge (if you made a level 2 it would have 2 armor and high armor recharge). You fire a 0-shield-damage, 1-armor-damage, shield-bypassing weapon with huge blast radius (level 2 would be 2 damage). Mission ship dies, mission aborts, booster is granted. Then things happen to make the booster last the proper amount of time, and the first mission restart so you can use more boosters.

If you care about being able to end the infinite loop of missions, use Fxxx somewhere. Or just not even worry about it and let the booster mission always be active, because the only way to get the boost is with the booster weapon, so if the player has no ammo it doesn't matter. The other way to set this up is with planet-type mission ships. That is, depending on whether your scenario already has planet-type weapon or shield-bypassing weapons. If it has both, this is not the trick for you. If it has neither, you could use both to make two separate "ladders" of boosters. Planet-type is probably better if you only use one, since then there isn't any damage to normal ships at all.

EDIT: I should probably mention that to use the Abilities plug-in, land and go to a bar. I had forgotten how ridiculous of a storyline I wrote for that.

And to use Booster, buy the weapon and its ammunition. It's fairly pricey and massy, so you might want to make a chär that starts with a bunch of money and a good ship with plenty of space. Also, Booster make you recharge both shields and fuel the way I set it up, but the tradeoffs are your radar gets complete interference and you can't fire any weapons. To see what the Abilities do, try them out. There are quite a few, and I think each of they includes a special weapon along with its other benefits.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 25 February 2010 - 10:44 PM

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