EV Nova bug, quest won't trigger

Solution 1:

Does your ship have enough cargo space to pick up the explosives? They're 10 tons. (What do you need 10 tons of explosives for? I don't know either.) According to https://www.arpia.be/walkthrough/wildgeese.html, neither version of this mission has anything strange going on with the availability bits: it just says "completed the previous mission, haven't completed this one, and haven't aborted the Wild Geese storyline"; and both should have a 100% chance to appear at the Bar on New Ireland. But it does require enough storage space, and I think Bar missions won't even appear if your ship is too small (or too full) to accept them. Note that you can't put mission-critical cargo in a follower ship: your own ship must have at least 10 tons available.

If you're still stuck, you can make a pilot log by creating an empty text file named pilotlog.txt in your EV Nova directory, then launching the game and loading your save, and landing on any planet (which causes it to update). You can then look in the "Mission bits currently set" section. The bits you're looking for in this case are:

• b803, which gets set if you quit any mission in the Wild Geese storyline, which effectively locks you out of the game because it doesn't also clear b511, which locks you out of all main storylines. If you've got this one, you're stuck and in fact you might as well start a new character; your current character is considered too much of a flake to be trusted by any of the major factions.
• b807 or b814, which represent completion of Destroy McGowan's Drug Factory (depending on if Michaleen is alive). You should have one of these.
• b808 or b815, which represent completion of Deliver Explosives to Ryll (again keeping track of Michaleen). You shouldn't have either of these.

If your ship is big enough and your bits seem right, I don't know what else could be the problem.

However, no version of the Wild Geese storyline actually leads to the Rebellion main storyline, either: if Michaleen got killed in Sol, you'll get a choice to join up with the Aurorans or the Pirates (although the Pirate choice is actually labeled "Rebels", because the Rebels don't actually talk to anyone else, so the only way to help them out is to support the Pirate Association's supply efforts). If Michaleen survived the Sol mission (this was a pure coin flip), then you'll get another coin flip later to either join the Pirates (again), or simply complete the Wild Geese storyline with no automatic entry into any major storyline. The actual Rebellion storyline is probably the hardest of the main storylines to find, because the Rebels are so insular; you can only get them to talk to you by either making a name for yourself among the Bounty Hunters, or actively betraying the Federation (neither of which are easy to get to in the first place; both the Federation and the Bounty Hunters require a relatively fearsome Combat Rating before they'll even talk to you).