Blaine

Sci-fi energy shields aren't remotely realistic in the first place. What you're referring to are conventional ways in which the mechanics of shields are implemented in games, movies, and fiction, and that's really up to the designer's taste.

Some of the procgen block ships and stations look pretty cool, but a lot of them do end up looking like a lump of glue flew through a junkyard, yeah. Still, I kinda like the aesthetic. Most of the procgen ships come in five types: long stick flat sword skinny boomerang boxes3 flying T

Nor was I "butchering physics" with my simplified but accurate description of inertial forces, so now I really have no idea what you're on about... but we agree on the points relevant to Avorion's gameplay, so it doesn't really matter.

Turret slots in general are pretty crazy right now even with only one size of turret. The best M-TCS modules I have are two Exotics that grant +5 armed turret slots, and just one of them in a single slot allows a fairly small ship to fit seven turrets. Seven factory-made Exceptional turrets, with a little luck from the RNG god, are powerful enough to obliterate just about any enemy or group of enemies in the game in its current state. Smaller ships mounting seven factory turrets would have issues surviving sustained firepower, but that's the only limiting factor. Also, NPC ships in Avorion are insanely slow compared to pretty much any player-made ship, even if the player's ship is heavy and they're not using boost or stacking sliced thrusters. This is a bit of a tangent from discussing turrets, but it's related because at the moment players can disengage pretty much at will as long as they don't get seriously in over their shields' head for way too long.

Ah, this is an easy one.

That is one bladetacular ship.

Introducing accuracy multipliers is unnecessary. Weapons with the same accuracy but higher range will naturally tend to be effectively less accurate anyway. IMHO, tracking speed, firing arc and fire-rate are better modifiers. Tracking speed isn't a better modifier than my suggestion, it's already a part of my suggestion—that's what "gyrate more slowly" is referring to, and I've mentioned tracking speed before when referring to EVE's system. Also, I'm pretty sure spinal-mount weapons are already planned. I truly don't have an issue with your long list of personal preferences for how turrets should be implemented; it's well thought-out and interesting enough. However, as written, your ideas would involve huge overhauls of and additions to the game. That's not realistic. I have highly specific personal preferences too, but developers (of any game) most likely aren't going to implement them. My goal here isn't to list my ideal and highly elaborate turret system, but rather to offer a suggestion that I think can reasonably be implemented without majorly overhauling the game or changing the developers' vision of it. Scaled-up current turret models with boosted damage and range stats dependent on size, as well as accuracy penalties based on size and targets' m3 would require minimal changes to the current system, be far easier to implement than what you've suggested, all while still accomplishing the goal: make it so that big ships can't effortlessly vaporize smaller ones, thereby greatly enhancing the potential for nuanced ship roles in Avorion (and going a long way toward fixing the very severe issues with fighters). In fact, that should be quite easy to mod in if the developers don't care to.

Unlike Light Blocks, Glow Blocks don't look like running lights or pinpoint lights at all, no matter how you place them or how small you scale them, and their lighting characteristics are markedly different.

This one is really easy to reproduce with the /give <playername> <#> credits command, and isn't a bug per se. I went over the signed 32-bit integer maximum while trading legitimately, no cheats/server commands used until I hit the limit and needed to test (I would have had 2.5bn after the trade). Giving yourself 1 credit or more after reaching this amount resets credits to 0. I recommend implementing a signed 64-bit integer, as none of us will live long enough to make that many credits in Avorion. In the meantime, I'll keep track of my balance in Notepad++. :D

Those are untrained crew gained from using the "/crew fill" command from Aki's mod, which I only use in my Creative shipyard universe. Otherwise, doing anything is miserable and slow (also, the constant "You must repair your ship before you can edit it" messages are intolerable without crew). It would only take 80 fully leveled mechanics to staff it normally. Thanks for the compliment. Right now I'm trying to make the best of what I can do in a relatively short (3-6 hours) period of time, which means simple and sleek because there's just not time for elaborate and complex when I'm still so excited to continue playing.

Well, this will still be a fantastic game even if bigger always = better (except for drag racing, naturally).

What good is a huge freighter without someplace to keep all of your slaves stuff? Hardly any use at all, so I present my personal space station and home base, "Horizon." Its sole purpose is to store items and crew, so it's not technically a space station in game terms, but don't tell Horizon that. It thinks it's a real space station. Preview: The rest: [spoiler=Top View] [spoiler=Bottom View] [spoiler=Side View] [spoiler=Distance View] It's a big, fancy treasure chest for putting stuff in. The buildings are thin-walled and hollow, mainly to save me lots and lots of materials, but they can also be used to stuff additional crew compartments, cargo containers, and systems into. The size 40,000 cargo bay on the bottom of the station is encased in 500,000 HP of Xanion stone, linked together by duct tape an integrity field. If you want to incorporate it into a real space station, you can put docking twigs on the bulkhead pylon at the bottom, which is what the indicator arrows are for (dock here!). The best part is, you can stick a bunch of Computer Cores and Hyperspace Modules on and move it anywhere! Just make sure you add some temporary engines and scoot it out of the way of the jump-in point.... Stats: Here's the ship plan .xml in a .zip file, direct download (it's too big to attach): http://puu.sh/uaR8y/b06253fb21.zip

It's not up to you to dictate what I post. I mentioned real-world physics in passing because they were relevant to the point I was making about thrusters, and immediately added that realism shouldn't constrain Avorion's game design—yet you still chose to be rude. Well, I can't dictate what you post, either. Yes, the goal is to create the illusion of ships in outer space rather than a hardcore rocketry simulation, and Avorion does try to do that rather than being a straight-up arcade game. The developers have been heavily iterating the way thrusters work for the last couple of patches now, and using real-world thrusters as a frame of reference for what might be done in-game is pretty sensible. Using them as a frame of reference is quite different than arguing that the game has to be realistic.

Awesome!

I strongly disagree. I am utterly convinced that altering turret stats based on size would dramatically improve Avorion's gameplay. Larger turrets would deal more damage and have a longer range, but would gyrate more slowly (unless turret-locked, of course) and would also have progressively larger accuracy penalties vs. progressively smaller sizes of ships. Conversely, smaller turrets would have a progressively easier time hitting progressively larger ships. This is realistic, logical, and most importantly allows for much more nuanced gameplay and specialization within a fleet, because then gigantic ships would be unable to effortlessly evaporate tiny ships by the fistful, allowing smaller ships to perform roles other than being cannon fodder. Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, and XL would be a good range. Tiny turrets would fit on ships with 1-2 upgrade slots, Small would fit on ships with 3-4, Medium 5-6, XL 7-8, and XL 9-10+. Medium turrets would be the most versatile, easily hitting Medium through XXL ships from a respectable distance, and doing quite well against Small ships too, since the extra damage and range would mitigate the accuracy loss. Medium-sized ships with Medium turrets would be great all-rounder, jack-of-all-trades ships (which they already are now). Larger ships could still fit smaller-classed turrets if desired, and a Medium could probably manage a few Large turrets or even one XXL, if desired. The flexibility to go above/below turret class in certain situations is also a desirable feature. You may be thinking, "So wouldn't a capital ship just fit small turrets, so that it can hit everything?". Sure, until it's evaporated by another capital ship of around the same size whose guns deal far more damage and reach much further. This isn't just my personal opinion, but one held by many purists. It's considered fairly mediocre space sim design when a ship's size and the size of its guns make it flat-out better than smaller ships on a linear scale; being more expensive and less maneuverable isn't enough to make up for it. You know how pretty much everyone thinks fighters suck right now? A very significant part of the problem with fighters is that massive ships with lots of guns can simply mow them down with near-perfect accuracy.

Fighters are a seriously underpowered money sink currently, but the devs are looking into it. In my opinion, they should be survivable enough to last awhile even during large battles, and a mechanic wherein they beeline back to the carrier for repairs when they're below half health would be in order. At the end of a big battle, you might lose 5-15% of your fighters that didn't make it and a smaller fraction of your pilots whose pods were destroyed, unless you're in way over your head.

My current superfreighter has 36,000 cargo (17,000 base + 4 gold/exotic % upgrades) and that's STILL not enough for trading full batches of accelerators, but I'm not making it any bigger. It's already too big!

These are really cool. They remind me of the Auroran ships from Escape Velocity: Nova.

I'm going to use some of your Nemeses to "mine" pirates and aliens where I'm building my stations. Cheers!

Lookin' good! Very elaborate, industrial-looking, and cargo ship-like. A freighter is the first ship I posted in my thread, too.

Ah, that's excellent advice. I've never seen a Prime system/HQ without an Equipment Dock, come to think of it.

I call this game X: Stillbirth. They couldn't have screwed up the X series any worse if they'd tried. Part of the reason it was so bad is that they'd planned to release it for X-Box and/or PlayStation as well, which was discovered when people found vestigial (leftover/unused) console development-related files in Rebirth's file structure. Let's hope X4 lives up to its predecessors.

Currently, there's no virtually no reason to use A-TCS modules unless you don't have enough M-TCS or C-TCS modules. It's pretty much always better to use dedicated M or C versions, and swap them in and out as desired. They're easy enough to come by once players are around mid-game. Since numbered turret groups can be activated and deactivated with the number keys, I believe gameplay would be enhanced if only activated turret groups counted toward total turret hardpoints. That way, we could sacrifice a few slots and use a bit more power, but gain additional versatility. For example, if I put two A-TCS-3 modules into my ship's upgrade slots, outfit my ship with 8 Railguns and 8 Salvaging Lasers, and assign the Railguns to group 1 and the Lasers to group 2, I could then use either all of my Railguns or all of my Lasers, but never both. As things stand now, I can just go into build mode and switch between M-TCS and C-TCS modules (and weapons/mining and salvaging lasers). This isn't as interesting as a more versatile setup would be; I'd be willing to give up 2-3 of each turret in order to have two banks of both types of turret. Of course, this should only work with A-TCS modules. Otherwise, players could have a bank of every weapon type to swap between, which would be pretty cheesy.

The low brake thrust wasn't a huge problem in smaller ships, since I could just spin 180 degrees and come to a halt by applying main engine retro thrust. Unfortunately Avorion's physics aren't quite Newtonian physics and ships constantly try to control themselves automatically, so in large ships, when I spin around and apply retro thrust to brake, I instead go off on a diagonal, even when I don't apply any thrust until the indicator bar is solid orange. This may also be the "drift" trait I've seen tooltips refer to.

Join the club. There's literally nothing you can do except keep looking, or perhaps grab a mod and build your own Research Station. I tend to run into them fairly regularly, and I found three just a gate or two away from each other in one civilization's space, ripe for me to sell accelerators to and make some more billions. I've only found one Accelerator Factory S after exploring all or nearly all of 8-9 civilizations, though. It's understandable that they're rare, because finding a full Accelerator Factory and an empty Research Station pretty much awards you hundreds of millions of credits, provided you have excellent relations with that civ, enough capital to buy them, and an enormous superfreighter to carry them. It's all down to RNG, but some of these NPC stations are as rare as the Holy Grail, and then when you do find one, it might be emptied out of what you need. The economy in Avorion isn't fully functional yet, either, so you pretty much have to bring an empty rare factory its resources and then wait for it to produce. There are plenty of full Cink Mines, Noble Metal Mines, Cattle Farms, etc., though!