The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Melnorme have a great offer- for every rainbow world you find, they'll give you 500 credits.

This is an awesome deal. You can buy 3 techs with that kind of money, but there's another reason it's so good. The Melnorme can also sell you fuel, at a cost of 1 credit per unit.

Back at Sol, one unit of fuel is worth 20 RUs. While this may not seem like much, I put the numbers in a calculator. If you were to purchase 500 units of fuel from the Melnorme:
500 fuel * 20RUs = 10000 RUs!

Once you find the rainbow worlds, you can put them to work.  Equip your flagship with nothing but fuel tanks and 6 fuel, and go to the melnorme trader at Alpha Centauri. Spend all the credits you can to fill up your tanks, then head back to sol. Unload your antimatter cargo at the starbase, and rake in the resources!

Obviously, you should get the hi-efficiency fuel tanks to help with  this. It takes 10 fuel every trip, so it won't hurt your wallet too badly. Alternatively, you can use the Melnorme whistle, and not have to use any fuel at all.

There are 10 rainbow worlds. That leaves a potential of getting 100 000 resources from going through them all. It only takes a few months to scout them all, so you can afford your favorite ship and fleet quite possibly before the first year is done. ;)

Two things I've noticed about this strategy:
1. You can only unload antimatter one unit at a time at the starbase. It can take a while to completely empty your ship. Oh, if only the left+right keys did 10 units at a time... ;D

2. If you don't have enough credits to completely fuel your craft, the Melnorme will refuse the deal. That means you have to buy fuel 25 units at a time. There should be an option to just buy what you can, perhaps after the Melnorme refuse.

A useful idea if you really want to load up on the RU.  Also if you want something fun to do and are doing something like this, try selling the Burvixese Caster to the Druuge and see what happens.

Umgah say "Them Druuge crisp up real good! Har har har!"

Re: #1, I'd noticed the same thing, but I always thought a better approach would be to "auto-sell" any fuel held in the tank when you sell the tank.  As it stands now, the game refuses to let you sell tanks with fuel in them (the same goes for crew pods with crew in them)  I think I mentioned something about this to coredev a while back, and they were unimpressed with the idea, because it has high potential to confuse new players; but your approach might make the idea workable.  *scribbles down idea on list of things to try*

Re: #2, I asked coredev about their receptiveness to implementing just such a feature a while back, but they didn't like the idea, something about being a "pure port" or somesuch ;)  I for one still think the idea is sound, and squirreling it into a seldom-used part of the conversation tree like you suggest may make it pallatable enough for purists and non-purists alike.

If you do the druuge trip right, you can get 1584 worth of fuel. That equals out to 31680 RU. That is what I call a profit!

I liked this idea so much I coded up a patch for it here (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=617#c1).  It will be folded into the OSX Unofficial Release (http://www.submedia.net/uqm/) "real soon" for all Mac players to enjoy.

People on other platforms who don't mind "rolling their own" can incorporate the patch themselves; otherwise you can wait for someone else to incorporate the patch in an "unofficial" build, or wait for the next "official" version (assuming coredev doesn't laugh the patch off the stage, and actually accepts it into their tree)

I have used the current CVS and the patch provided by Nic
to create a Linux binary. It runs on Fedora Core 2, this far.
hopefully, it'll be fairly compatible across the board.

You can get a copy at
ftp://veggie.is-a-geek.net/uqm

Sweet. How would I apply this patch to a windows version of UR-Quan? Can I use it as an addon, or will I have to compile a version for myself?

Sounds fun.

One thing thats very odd about the Druuge...
If you have 2 crew pods (100 crew) and buy 100 fuel, that sells your entire crew complement...Including yourself?
I didnt have an oppurtinity to test this further, but if you entered combat with the Vindicator with 0 crew, would it die immediately upon warp?

You are the captain. Others are crew.
Note how the bottom dot in combat is blue instead of green. Note how the total count is one more than a multiple of 50 when you enter combat with a full crew complement.

Ahhh now i see, As i said, i never got the oppurtunity to test it out.