posted: 02 Dec 2012, 19:00
OK, here's a weird one. I triggered it, I think, by buying a Lvl 4 engine for my Centurion off the Vega Strike screen (which in base Privateer you aren't supposed to do).
Anyway, it worked fine. Lvl 4 engine and shields made me one buttkicking merc. BUT- I did this before I took on the third Tayla mission (the "hidden compartment" run). When I accepted it and Tayla's folks installed the smuggler hold (apparently), things got strange.
1) Suddenly I had a "cargo expansion module" on my Centurion- a permanently respawning item, in other words I could sell it, step away, and there it was again, to be sold over and over again (I guess there's a lot of money to be made that way 2500 creds at a time). Even stranger, though, was that now I had an amazing cargo capacity of 350 units! This shows up on the Quine, and is reflected in the Commodity Exchange where one can indeed buy 349 units of cargo. (However, computer/guild missions will still turn you down for 'insufficient cargo space' if you're carrying over 40).
Great deal, right? Massively profitable cargo runs in a Centurion! Except it's a trap- you can spend a ton of money buying all that cargo, but when you arrive at the next base you'll find nothing but 49 items and an artifact- 300 cargo units vanished into the void.
2) But that's not the worst of it; that Magic Cargo Module I'm not supposed to have replaced something- my engine! Now neither the in-flight repair screen, the upgrade "sell" screen, nor the Vega Strike screen show it; it's gone. However, the game engine seemed not to notice- my ship still performed exactly as if it had a Lvl 4 engine installed. No problem, right? Well, not until I quit for the day and then came back- on restart, my bird had- yup - no engine at all- meaning no burner, no guns, no shield regen. Worse yet, the game's buy/sell routine seemed to think I still had an engine installed, so I couldn't buy a new one! I'm screwed!
Only fix I could figger out was to go back to an earlier save, trade in the engine for a Lvl 3 (at a massive loss) and start Tayla 3 over again. No bug- but I took a huge financial loss (and had to fight Riordan over again).
I assume this could have been fixed by editing the save file, but I have no idea how to make sense of anything beyond the first line of that gobbledygook.
The colour and lighting behaviour of the engine takes some getting used to.
