How to ensure all child planets of a star have the most recent OTA updates?

[Christopher King]

Do planets automatically periodically query their parent stars for the most recent OTA updates? Or is there a one-time "push" when updates go out that is not repeated? If the latter, if the stars happened to be offline when the OTA went out I'm assuming that it won't get sent out. In that case is there a way to manually trigger a check for OTA updates so the child planets are all updated?

[Philip Monk]

Child planets subscribe to the star, and when the star decides to send an update it notifies all its subscribers.  Like all Ames messages, we periodically resend the packet (with backoff up to 2min) until we receive an acknowledgment.  Thus, as long as at some point both the star and planet are online, the notification will get through, and the child will request the update contents and subscribe to the next version.

The same mechanism is used between galaxies and stars, or in general between any ship and the source of its OTAs (which you can see by running `|ota` with no arguments).

[Christopher King]

Ok, great! Glad this is handled. Thanks for the response.