Bugzilla Bug 503

Having the tractors on the moon simply disappear when shot was always a bit
disconcerting to me; 
I always thought it would be better if they exploded or somesuch.

Created an attachment (id=240) [details]
lander.c.patch

Here's a patch to make it happen.  I used the explosion frames for the planet
lander, which oddly enough has an almost identical palette to the tractors, so
it looks great.

Try it, you'll like it.

Though I have not tried the patch yet and not to put Nic's effort down, but I 
think this would make the game inconsistent. The lander fires a stun gun which 
stuns (temporarily, mind you) bio-organisms, and anything non-biological seems 
to get destroyed one way or the other. If the lunar robots blow up then most 
minerals should too, e.g. hydrogen should burn half planet's atmosphere, 
radioactives should nuke it and exotics should probably destroy half the solar 
system, incidentally, blowing up your flagship ;-). This might make for a 
really nice addon in the future (do not shoot radioactives if you want your 
crew to live!).
As it stands right now, I would not put it into the UQM code trunk.
This also presses the issue for someone to start designing a system for addon 
DLMs (dynamically loadable modules) with API entry points and event 
notification system.

Short answer:

Dude, just try it.

Long answer:

I debated putting similar "else" code in for when minerals are shot, but decided
against it for a simple reason: you're not supposed to shoot minerals, and
having them disappear when shot conveys the point quite clearly that "you really
should not have done that."  Having them provide any sort of feedback other than
disappearing would give players a "reward" of sorts, and an inappropriate one at
that.  The moon tractors, on the other hand, are there purely for target
practice, and since they aren't worth any bios, I think it fitting that the
player gets some manner of positive feedback for hitting their target.

This, and the fact that your "stunner" is capable of destroying up to 30
kilotons of, well, *anything* in a single shot, leads me to believe that the
game has a few inconsistencies built-in already. ;)

The more reasonable argument against this patch has already come from SvdB: this
code is quite trivial (even if it did take me a while to figure out) and if TFB
wanted such things to happen, they would have done it that way originally.  I
still disagree with this viewpoint on the grounds that the moon tractors are an
edge case (albeit a highly visible one), but I cannot dispute that it is an
"unnecessary deviation from the original".  Even if it does make the moonbase
the most fun part of the game for me now.  =)

coredev has rejected this fix, for all versions prior to 1.0, marking as
"LATER" so that it may be revisted 
at a later date.

Created an attachment (id=575) [details]
lander.c.patch

A refactored version of the patch against modern sources, and removing all
traces of the "cargo cult programming" anti-pattern that was previously
employed to design this feature.

The end result is a smoother animation with no frame skips when firing the
lander's stun bolt, and less shame from the submitter.