Jukka's Mod
Heya all!
To begin with, I'm the author of the 2002's modification to JJFFE, commonly referred to as "Jukka's Mod" or "Jukka Mikkonen's mod".
I've been away from Elite for the past ten years, but got sucked back. Only to see there's not one but two new versions since JJFFE was the latest.
Anyway, I've seen a whole lot of misconceptions about it flying around, so here's a mini-readme.
Jukka's mod (tries) to address the following issues:
1) No variability in ship designs in terms of cargo space/hull tonnage ratio. Since hull mass has no other gameplay importance besides hitpoints and dragging down your hyperspace range, I deemed it a bit strange that f.ex. freighters didn't have more cargo space - AFTER deducting for its hyperdrive. Conversely, heavy fighters had their hull strength increased while gaining a military drive as standard.
2) Many tiny ships were just too tiny - you couldn't mount much of anything besides hyperdrive, even if many designs boasted several missile pylons. So the ship cargo holds start at around 20 tons. (Except for the Interplanetary vessels, which MUST have been a joke to begin with.)
3) Most would agree that installing anything past 20MW beam laser is rather pointless. That's because weapons get stupid overpowered long before that. Hence, I drastically reduced the power of upper end weapons, to about a square root of what it was. Now you'd actually WANT a Large Plasma.
4) Trading. It was just *too* profitable in so many ways, especially compared to the risks involved if you only did milk runs between Sol & Barnard's. Main culprits here were double price BBS ads - you mostly saw those for stuff that was already high-priced to begin with, rendering most other trade items totally obsolete as soon as you could afford buying a cargo hold's full of Luxury Goods. Fix: I (tried to) make sure you'd never see out of stock on anything but low to medium priced items. You'd still see the occasional "Out of Stock" item in low-pop, civil war type systems, but having fought your way in, you pretty much DESERVED it.
5) Smuggling. The same deal as with trading - double price for everything just as long as you can afford the occasional fine. Perfectly safe, too, if you select some of the infamous routes such as Sol - Van Maanen's Star. Fix: Only thing I could come up with was a general division by ten of ALL trade items. It's still lucrative business, just quite not stupidly so.
6) Other professions. Sure you could get some pocket change by bounty hunting, but come on - getting to Elite status, many times over, just to be able to afford a Panther Clipper on bounties alone? Fix: Increased bounties all across the board, to about ten-fold.
Now the big question: Is there any interest for such a mod, if I were to try my hacking skills on the FFED3D binary and/or collaborate with them?
