Sable Phoenix

They're sensor globes.

When we gain the ability to build turrets onto our crafts at construction, part of this problem will be alleviated.

I really hate April Fool's Day. It's not funny, it's just tiresome and annoying.

Well, it's obvious what you don't like. What you haven't given us is any idea of what you'd like to see instead. This is a suggestion forum, not a criticism forum. Why don't you post some ideas. What? Duping what, exactly? And how? Radar is outdated? If that's the case, why does every military and air traffic control organization in the world still use it? And the term itself is anything but outdated. The term "blueprint", while referring to an obsolete technology that's no longer used, has instead come to refer to any type of engineering schematic. Likewise, "radar" (a term for a technology that is absolutely not obsolete) has begun to be applied as a general term for a sensor, which may not actually have anything to do with RAdio Detection And Ranging. If you watch the galaxy map you will see that your ship detects things by emitting a pulse (presumably through subspace) which travels around it in a ring up to the maximum range. I don't see any problem with its function or need for it to be changed. Perhaps you could elaborate on why it's so problematic? That's a good question. I think it would be a great addition if the cooldown and energy use scaled with jump distance. Spherical shields would be nice, but I doubt the game engine supports them. This has been suggested multiple times, but again, I doubt the game engine supports it. We're going to get this, it's confirmed as planned by the dev. No timetable on when we'll see it though.

Could we please get a hangar bay without the glowing blue edge? If you want to build a bay that's just open to vacuum, which is perfectly valid, well... you can't. There HAS to be that obnoxious blue forcefield across it. Also, can we please get the option to change the forcefield color. Maybe the design you're working on is fine with the forcefield, but electric blue doesn't match the color scheme.

True, but again, the heat buildup for dumping that much power into a laser beam is likely to be as dangerous to the ship firing it as it is to the target taking the hit. Unless you're building the laser into a ferrous asteroid to sink the heat into the surrounding metal, you're going to have real trouble operating that weapon. Of course, this is real universe physics. In Avorion, none of that applies.

And that would be the incredibly "obvious part" I mentioned. I didn't realize they were now directional.

Only if the target is not actively moving and evading. At a few light-seconds of distance, it would be pretty difficult if not impossible to score hits 100% of the time, even with a laser. And even with a laser at a distance that guarantees a hit, if the target is rolling, you're unlikely to do any significant damage because lasers do damage through heating up the target, which means dwell time on a single location is pretty important. It would actually be easier for the target ship to dissipate the heat of the laser hitting it than for the ship firing the laser to dissipate the heat of operating it, meaning space-based laser weaponry is likely only going to play a significant role at short range as point defense. That being said, your point is well taken and we are definitely not looking for a reality simulation in this game. If we had that, engagement would take place at distances and speeds which would mean you couldn't visually acquire your target or respond to it in time even if you did. If you want a game that's as accurate to the physics of space combat as we currently know how to predict, you're looking for Children of a Dead Earth.

Since the latest updates, the only thing they affect is roll speed. Big whoop. Roll speed is the least important of the turning speeds. Unless I'm just missing something incredibly obvious, I don't see how gyros are at all useful any more. They're certainly not worth their cost in mass and volume, no matter how small it might be.

I'd be happy just allowing eight degrees of rotation around each axis instead of only four. Being able to mount blocks and subconstructs at 45 degree angles would make certain things a whole heck of a lot easier to build. And it wouldn't make things too difficult to match up, either.

That dome with the lit up cross, tho.

This is a lovely little vessel, I really like designs that look utilitiarian yet maintain visual interest through modest complexity, and this fits the bill perfectly. Well done.

Something can be pretty and still boring. I applaud your creativity and dedication to create the intricate designs on your cubes, but the ship can be pleasant to look at while still lacking any real visual interest. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that we will likely never see sphere or cube shaped spaceships in real life, for two main reasons: delta-v is expensive, and vacuum is a perfect insulator. Therefore, the spaceships we make now, and any we design in the future (unless we come up with technologies that violate the laws of physics as we currently understand them in order to produce things like reactionless drives or anti-gravity), will need to have their primary thrust applied on a single axis and will need to have a huge surface area in comparison to their total volume to radiate waste heat. In Avorion, on the other hand, delta-v is free, and heat doesn't exist. Meaning the most efficient shape is, indeed, a cube, since having a large volume in relation to your surface area is an advantage, not a detriment. Another big contributor to this efficiency in the game is that, as far as I can tell, all of a ship's thrust is applied directly to the center of mass, not to location on the ship where it's installed. Mounting thrusters farther away from their axis "increases" their thrust not because of their physical location, but because it applies a multiplier to the force they exert on the COM. All of this, in addition to the volume-based block mechanics previously discussed, means that cube ships will always remain an ideal design. They may not be required for an effective design, and I don't think it's detrimental to the game, as long as it's something the dev team's aware of and things don't progress any further towards making them the absolute best combat configuration.

So, this patch makes it so that your resources and credits are hidden on the UI by default and only display when you enter build mode or interact with something that can buy and sell. That's fine, but there's not even the option to turn it back on. I don't want to have to go into build mode just to check my wallet. Can we get a UI option to re-enable the summary of our stockpile?

Either replace them with something else (I'm not sure what), or better, eliminate them entirely. This is primarily a building game; restricting your color choices to random drops, especially when most of the variants of a particular hue are virtually indistinguishable from each other, is... well, I won't say the word I'm thinking, but it's not a good idea. I'm basically required to go into creative mode to paint my ships, since you get all the colors there immediately. Given that, as I mentioned, most of the variants of any given color look virtually identical, our actual color palette in this game is far more limited than the dozens of color swatches would suggest. I routinely find myself selecting multiple color swatches, all of them similar to each other, and painting a block repeatedly before giving up and just going with something that is the closest approximate to my original idea. It's very frustrating. Integrating the system color picker would allow us far more freedom to color our ships how we want.

Not really. Arguments brought on Atomic Rockets site do not apply to Expanse universe in majority of cases, as they're not conclusive, but reductive. Whereas stealth is mostly impractical for more advanced technology era (beside the fact, that more advanced tech might work on principles completely alien to current scientific theories), Expanse makes place only two hundred years from the current time scale. Stealth technology is based on use of particular composites, that seem to prevent detection by IR (low thermal emission), LADAR and optical sensors (Super Black coating and erratic asymmetrical geometry mimicking the rocks). It is recent, uncommon, expensive and shunned technology with no countermeasure tech known. Most of the action happens around the Asteroid Belt, where high-technology is scarce. Stealth frigates in question are only hidden while completely immobile, etc. Long story short, pretty much any argument on Atomic Rockets can be refuted in relation to Expanse series. Avorion is a whole another case of course. Which is why I say that The Expanse is not diamond hard SF. In real life, any ship is going to be hotter than background, even when at rest. If you're hotter than background, you're detectable, period. If you light a drive, you can be seen from one end of the system to the other. If you turn off the drive, even if you're somehow invisible, you're now flying by Newton and all those people looking at your drive flare before you shut it off will know your velocity vector and trajectory and can find you any time they want. If you coat your ship in superblack something or other, not only are you absorbing heat in the form of infrared, and thus either cooking your crew and systems, or shunting that heat to be emitted somewhere else (making you detectable), but you're also occluding visible light which there's actually quite a lot of in space, so you'll be visible from long range as a spot of darkness where there shouldn't be one. And this is all with off-the-shelf, passive sensing technology available today, to say nothing of the improvements such technology might undergo 200 years from now. Stealth in space is a zero sum game. If it's "refuted" in respect to The Expanse, it's because The Expanse is ignoring the physics of the problem. Or in other words, if arguments about why there ain't stealth in space don't apply to The Expanse universe, it's because The Expanse universe is not behaving the way reality does. That's not to say I dislike the show. The Expanse is some of the best SF I've ever seen on television, the only hard SF I've seen on television (hard SF movies are rare but hard SF television was, as far as I can tell, nonexistent till The Expanse came out), and my favorite television show currently running. But it handwaves certain laws of thermodynamics in order to tell a more entertaining story.

Spalling is not a huge concern any more with modern armors. Read up on what little information is out there about Chobham armor (most is still classified), which is specifically designed to not only eliminate spalling but to stop HEAT rounds, which basically ignore the existence of almost all other armor types due to the way their shaped-charge is designed and delivered. Also, rather counterintuitively, spalling is more of a problem when the rounds impacting the target are traveling slowly. If the force of impact is distributed over a wide area of the target surface, spalling is much more likely than if the force is concentrated at the point of impact, either due to the round's design or its speed. It's consistently demonstrated that a high-speed round of small size or sufficient hardness can easily pass completely through a soft target and inflict only local damage from its penetration effects, whether it's small-arms fire or naval cannon rounds. It's perfectly realistic to expect AP rounds fired in space with no windage or friction to punch right through their target, especially since even combat spacecraft would be minimally armored; moving mass through space is extremely expensive, and considering the typical speeds object can be expected to reach in a vacuum, almost no type or amount of armor is going to be doing you any noticeable good anyway. Whipple shields would be one possible exception to that, but only against extremely high-speed objects with low mass -- the Tachi/Rocinante does indeed have a double-hulled design specifically to serve as a sort of Whipple shield, and we see it in action when it suffers the railgun strike. The superheated fragments left hanging in the vacuum of the cabin as the PDC rounds punch through are also an indication that the Whipple shield is having an effect, although ironically, as fast as they are, the bullets are still traveling too slowly for the Whipple shield to completely negate them. The incredibly close ranges aside, this scene (and even moreso, the Donager battle from the Season 1 episode "CQB") is actually one of the most realistic portrayals of what we could expect the effects of a space battle to be like that has ever been put to film. We don't know, of course, because nobody has ever yet done it, but based on the physics involved, nothing in it seems out of the realm of possibility or egregiously handwaving the laws of physics. Check out the Atomic Rockets website and the Rocketpunk Manifesto blog for all the information you could ever want about the real physics behind space travel and potential combat. In fact, the worst violation committed by The Expanse in that scene (outside of the ships not having radiators glowing white hot from all that heat they must be producing) is that there's a "stealth" ship at all. As Atomic Rockets demonstrates conclusively, "there ain't no stealth in space." The Expanse is hard science fiction, but not diamond hard; it explains away the delta-v problem with the fictional Epstein drive, and completely ignores heat radiation problems and the ubiquity of detection for the sake of drama.

So explain to me, then, if the majority of players have no problem with the current drop-only, turret-only weapon system, that we constantly, repeatedly see requests for the ability to build and customize our own weapons and turrets? Seems to me that relying solely on the RNG to give you the weapons you envisioned your ship carrying when you built it isn't what most people who play this game want. We want it to be fully equipped, as we envisioned it, when it's built, not thirty hours later when we've just happened to find some drops and turret factories that give us approximately (but not really) what we wanted in the first place.

Your ships are so freaking pretty. Especially that Revenant. So much detail.

Wow, this is absolutely stunning. As far as I can tell, 100% accurate. If it weren't for the texture differences and the lighting, I'd almost swear it was a screenshot from the show. How long did this beautiful monstrosity take you to build? Stargate Universe, yet another of the long list of great science fiction shows cancelled before its time...

And that focus, frankly, needs to change. This is primarily a building game, not, I repeat, not an action-RPG. Game devs need to recognize when their vision conflicts with their audience (this is an industry-wide problem, not just for this game). The audience Avorion attracts will be the type of people who play Starmade, Space Engineers, From the Depths, and their ilk, not the Diablo series or Path of Exile or Torchlight. That's not to say those two audiences are mutually exclusive, I myself have played Diablo 2 and I'm sure many other gamers enjoy both types of games, but generally speaking, the type of gameplay and the desires of the playerbases are extremely different between the two game styles. The ability to build your ships with/around their weapons is not just a nice feature, it's outright mandatory for this kind of game. If we can't custom design and build our weapons themselves, that's fine. I know when to pick my battles. But at minimum, the ability to place turrets and weapons on your ship at creation is required, or the building side of Avorion will always remain incomplete. Giving us the ability to customize our ship itself to a degree unequaled by any other game of this type, but then restricting our weapons choices to the tyranny of the RNG, is not only at odds with this style of game and its gameplay, but given the frequency with which new posts about this topic appear (about once a week or so), it's at odds with the desires of the vast majority of the playerbase as well.

That Pioneer is a thing of stunning beauty. Incredible work. How many hours for that build?

The Expanse is a phenomenal series, and that scene was full of pulse-pounding awesomeness. I'd love to see this kind of combat in Avorion. This kind of combat would be pretty rare in deep space though. The battle was complicated by the existence of the station, which granted something almost impossible to find in space: cover.

What balance reasons?

I didn't say anything about player ability being removed. Independent targeting shouldn't replace the ability to manually direct and fire your weapons. Why would I want that? Presumably, while using direct targeting, you as the ship's captain are issuing commands personally to the fire control computer. This is why I suggest that weapons should be operable without gunnery crews, but only in manual control mode. I debated including the idea that there should be an accuracy reduction for independent targeting weapons, then nixed the idea. There should be no penalties at all for that property included in the weapon itself. If my approach is taken, and the weapons require crew to achieve independent targeting, meaning you need to pay them and maintain life support and crew quarters for them. Additionally, as I mentioned before, the weapons that are targeting independently will be spreading their damage between multiple targets, meaning a higher time-to-kill per target than a focused barrage. Those two drawbacks should represent plenty of opportunity cost for the convenience of being able to cover multiple firing arcs at once, and avoid the real world stressor of holding down your mouse button.