This is just my opinon, but I like that you can only build thrusters on one side, changing that would result in more balance difficulties and probably more ugly ships with engines all over the place.
Well usually when you use a fixed weapon, you'd expect to get something that the guys using turrets don't have! Maybe some bonuses in range and less power consumption, or perhaps more durability? There best real-world example of this would be tanks vs tank destroyers with fixed guns.
Looks like you guys have been pretty busy :) Very nice work. I'm guessing the fixed weapons don't have any advantages over their turret counterparts yet?
I noticed that there's no sound when other players/npcs hyperspace in/out of a system or when they're using warp gates! The sound should be amplified and louder depending on the size/strength of the ship hyperspacing in. Here are some hyperspace sounds from other games:
Homeworld - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jefy9PEFkFU
Elite Dangerous -
Freelancer -
The current meta is to put as many thrusters as you can on your ship, that's why if you force players to put them on the outside you'll end up with thruster-covered ships that look ugly. Thats why i think if you force players to put the thrusters on the outside of the ship you should make them more effective too so they take up less room. To balance that out maybe make them more energy hungry so you need more energy generators if you want a more agile ship.
I actually mixed up engines and maneuvering thrusters. My above comment was referring to engines not thrusters. I think thrusters should stay as they are mainly because having many thrusters outside of the ship looks really ugly (flames everywhere covering the entire ship).
In Space Engineers they fixed that by introducing thruster damage. Any blocks within a specific range of the thruster exhaust will get damaged and eventually destroyed. In Avorion a much simpler solution would be just extending the build radius of the thruster block so it doesn't allow placing blocks right behind its exhaust.
Yes yes, this, definitely this. Also just a small thing, if a ship should loose all of it's crew the autofire shouldn't work for obvious reasons. And as leugim said in his post, we need to be able to tell the turrets what to prioritize.
Makes more sense that you'd be able pick up crew/people from lifepods and sell them to the nearest stations or mines as workers/slaves for a profit. That would also allow for crew transports to be a thing. You could move passengers to a certain destination for profit or entirely dedicate yourself to slave smuggling. Or maybe just collecting slaves and making them work for you in your mines! >:D