Yeah, sorry, I'm afraid there is no english thread although it's one of the best scripts ever.
HERE is the German thread. I think English t-files are included so you shouldn't worry about that. Unfortunatly there is no English manual so let me give you a (REALLY) quick summary:
The S&RS is extremely useful if you are using Lucike's trading scripts (any will do) because those ships (through L.'s libraries) will be able to yell for help if they are in/spot trouble. It's a player owned response fleet (hotkey included!
)
How does it work?
Well, if you know CODEA you already know about the pilot system. If you don't - every ship needs a pilot, the S&RS needs combat pilots.
You buy a ship and - while DOCKED!!!! - start the S&RS from the ship's combat command menu.
The ship CAN be of any class, m1 through m8 and TL, no TS/TP (use Lucike's Personnel Carrier for those).
The ship MUST!!!! be equipped with
combat software mk1
combat software mk2
patrol software
nav software mk1
a weapon (doh...yeah, I *heard* some people forget those...)
The ship CAN have a jumpdrive installed if you want it to jump around.
Alright. I assume you have bought a fighter (m5-m3), installed the necessary equipment and started the command. If you can't find the ship command check equipment. If equipment is right, check shiptype: m3, m4, m5.
A menu will pop up, take a look at all the available options but all you have to do for now is hit START S&RS.
You will notice your fighter takes off and begins its patrol in whatever sector your set (shipyard sector if you just hit START). Right now your pilot is a rookie which means he can barely fly towards a gate and return. After a couple of hours (SETA helps a lot
) he will eventually hit the rank of Lt.
Once that happened, buy more fighters. Equip them and set their command to FOLLOW the Lt.'s ship, they will automatically be part of the Lt.'s patrol. Isn't that a great feature? No more micromanagement because they will get all the Lt.'s settings!
After a while your Lt. might feel like he's getting bored so check your new recruits. They will get promoted, too. Once any of your newbs is an Lt., order the ship back to the shipyard. Buy an M6. Equip it. Enter fighter's S&RS menu, click transfer pilot, choose new M6. Let the M6 follow your first Lt. in his training fighter, the M6 pilot will sooner or later be promoted to Commander (or whatever Lucike calls the rank in the English version, I'm pretty sure it's Cmd. though).
Well, you get the idea. A commander will not advance further in an M6 so let him fly an M7...and so on. Once you have a couple of captains assign a bunch of M7s to them and keep training more pilots.
Attention! They are pilots. And they want their spacefuel&weed so you will need to pay them (large fleets turn into black holes...money-wise).
Alright! So now we have a couple of M7s with jumpdrives and want them to start earning all the money we thought was wasted. Choose any M7 and open up the S&RS menu.
There's an option like "rescue service". This means it will react to alert messages.
Example: One of your TS class ships is under attack by a bunch of pirates. Normally it will try to escape to avoid destruction. But this time the pirates will face resistance - the S&RS checks if enough ships are available for the fight (so a single M6 won't take on a whole Xenon fleet) and jumps in. Because of the we-can-do-it? check 99.9% of the time it will crush the attackers.
Do not forget to set all M7s to FOLLOW the first M7 which has an activated rescue service.
That's pretty much the basics. If you wonder, what the heck, I have CODEA, what do I need this for ?
Well, first of all CODEA is expensive and you usually use CODEA after earning quite a lot of money. The S&RS can be used with 1 or 2 M6 class ships, just to get rid of those nasty Khaak Cluster or pirate patrols.
Plus, you can define a hotkey which will send an SOS to your S&RS. If you ever get in trouble (playing with IR? You're gonna use this a lot!) and see what happens you will definatly not play without it anymore.
One last note: thanks to Lucike it now is possible to assign the main carrier of a CODEA carrier group to the S&RS...guess what happens if <insert_bugger_here> tries to mess with your private sector. Fully automatic
Enjoy!
EDIT: If you need combat pilots really fast, buy them at military outposts using a CODEA carrier. You can use them for your S&RS.
EDIT2: Adding a life support system to the S&RS ship will enable the Rescue Ejected Pilot system...so you can save all those expensive captains automatically.