Ohm is Futile

You're probably right since I normally play with reduced or no collision damage at all, I'm not too experienced with those mechanics. One thing I do know is that collisions tend to induce some rotation which may lead to more impacts. Not sure if blocks breaking help reduce rotation. I dunno, I'm rambling at this point, but in real life, depending on angle, speed and structural integrity, you might break off bits and keep flying (and you'd prefer that compared to having those bits survive but transfer damage to the rest of the structure). If we apply an HP system to this, then what I explained earlier makes sense.

Well, that's slightly disturbing. By the way, beyond comparing with a small child, have you ever seen martial arts? Technique and strengths and weaknesses matter more than just weight and reach. Also, your comparison with naval warfare is rather limited. Most military vehicles have specialties regardless of size and those determine what kind of engagements they can expect to win and lose. It's not as simple as bigger = better. The current problem is that there's very little way to specialize because weapons simply get better across the board instead of having specialties and the penalties for having a big ship are rather minimal.

I absolutely adore the Megalodon. One of the best looking ships I've seen on the forums yet and it seems functional enough. Gonna take a look ingame. I also quite like the Tormentor. Keep it up! EDIT: Tweaked the Megalodon a bit. Looks are mostly the same, although you will notice the use of Trinium engines and thrusters and small bits added to the back section. Shields are negligibly higher and hull, max speed, generated energy and battery capacity are negligibly lower. The most noticeable change is a whopping 35% increased yaw speed and 50% increased pitch speed. XML [spoiler=picture and specs]

I love how these ships look! Quick question, how do you make those nice gifs? Also, why do they all have abysmal thrust values?? Combined with the low yaw/pitch, those are not going to be hugely functional. I'm tempted to repeat what I did with Pub and take a look under the hood to see if I can improve their functionality.

There's little point to ablative/spaced armor except maybe for collisions. If we forget about collisions, then losing blocks is the worst that can happen because it can't be repaired by mechanics, so it's going to cost you. If we DO consider collisions, then the question is "does the damage transfer?" If it does transfer, then there's no downside to having an integrity field covering the part that hits a surface. If it doesn't transfer, then it's better if it breaks off because the integrity field multiplies the base HP of the part by 10, but draws the damage from the total HP pool of the ship, meaning that your ship will suffer up to 10 times the damage overall and you might still lose that part.

Cool! I'll take a look around, give it a paint job and stick it in the collection with due credits.

NEWS Started work on something big... This is the core of the AMR-4XX Minotaur, by far the biggest ship built by Ohm Industries so far. It should have 11 slots when finished, 20 000 cargo, 30 sectors jump reach and a 1 TJ battery. Thrusters, engines, shields, hangars, crew quarters and such remain to be done. Also, basic blueprints for a new combat line are in the works. These may be revamps/new variants of the SW series or a brand new series. Along with the Minotaur, these should be much prettier than previous designs. In completely different news, Ohm Industries has published a tutorial on how to procure better things in the game without use of Turret Factories. You can watch it .

I'd say it's a bit early to say much, although I like that it looks like it's going to look more bold and I like that. As for the original colors, they were dark grey and olive I believe (or was it dark olive? d'oh!). I should make a text file and keep a log of scales and colors I use.

Planned, but not implemented yet. I think Koonschi wants a system similar to the X series where NPCs actually trade, meaning that the restocking would actually happen by having AIs take stuff from factories and to trade stations. Major problem right now is that systems without players are not simulated in any way so factories don't produce anything unless you're there and AI ships also can't take the stuff anywhere unless you're there (assuming that behaviour was already implemented anyway)

Plain wrong. You can usually safely delete the core block as soon as you've placed more than that block's worth of volume. Behavior is a little weird, but destroying the block with the drone is laughable, you'll pay to repair it every time you get damaged, too. Learn not to ram asteroids and when to run from fights. Dying does not happen often then... volume =/= mass... taking a design made of iron and converting it to Trinium will not reduce the number of slots. More complicated than that. In the loading tips, you will notice sometimes it says that your battery can only recharge a maximum of 1/20 of its maximum capacity per second. Recharge rate increases this cap, but this is only useful if you produce more than 5% of your ship's capacity per second. Be wary of upgrades that say recharge rate vs. generated energy, see my previous comment for the difference. Good work otherwise.

That's a challenge I'll happily take on ;) I'll sit down with the Rhino and see what I can do. edit: this might take longer than I thought, your block shapes are all over the shop, all multiples of 0.1 ie 14.2x0.6x3.8 it's a pain to work with a grid size of 0.1 on something this large My first point of advice is when building big sections work to a multiple of 1 or 2 going no smaller than 0.5 for slabs, so 14.2x0.6x3.8 becomes 14x0.5x4 it becomes a lot easier to then align everything to the grid and clad it with angled blocks. Actually, I find it decently easy to work with, I basically went with multiples of 0.15 for the Rhino I think. Most of it should actually be either off of 0.6 and 0.3 with only the smaller blocks being 0.15. Everything should work out nicely if you use a grid size of 0.15 (or 0.05 for the really small stuff). Some of my earlier designs were a bit more... let's say messy in terms of scaling. The most glaring exceptions would be hyperspace cores because of OCD. I tend to make sure they result in integers. Anyways, I usually work with multiples with the smallest unit being divisible by 2 for easier grid management.... but I do get messy sometimes :P

Yeeeeaaahhh.... but hull also requires power and more mechanics(fairly significant number of mechanics, actually) per m3 than armor. But yeah, you do save weight. That said, I think that ton for ton, armor provides more HP than hull, which could also translate in being straight up better depending on the thickness. AKA, if you're going to apply the same amount of hull as armor, then yeah, hull is lighter, but if you're going to apply a certain amount of HP, then you can actually "stretch" armor over a greater surface by making it thinner and achieve the same HP values for similar weight and then save on mechanics and power.

take a look at data\scripts\entity\merchants\researchstation.lua ... other than rolling stats for the new module/turret, it's all done via scripting. 1. picks rarity using # and rarity of input items. 2. picks turret/module using input ratio of turrets/modules. if it picked "turret": 3. picks weapon type using ratio of input turret weapon types 4. picks turret material using ratio of input turret weapon materials 5. picks "has independent targeting" using ratio of input turret having IT modifier. 6. generates a random turret of the selected material/rarity/weapontype, overrides IT modifier of result to what 5. rolled. if it picked "module: 3. picks module type using input ratio of input module types 4. generates random module of the selected material/rarity/module type TLDR: If you put in 4 chainguns and a cannon, you get chances of 80% chaingun and 20% cannon. Thanks, that corresponds to what's intuitive (imo, anyways) and answers my question. Perhaps more interesting is that the "quality" or rather the previous numbers a module/weapon had don't matter, all that matters is material, IT and type. The rest is completely randomized. Did you see anything regarding tech level? My current assumption is that it only depends on how far or close the research station is from the center of the galaxy rather than the tech level of the individual items.

Freelancer ships are incredibly small for most part, with the only exception being the capital ships, which you couldn't fly without mods. That said, I'd say even the capital ships were kinda small. Actually, it's kinda hard to say, ships were HUUUUGE compared to planets, but if you look at the cockpits, they're freaking small.

Lots of retired EVE players around I see. I'm one also. Very nice remakes!

Colony wars, aah, the nostalgia! I don't really like building off existing designs, though... but I guess my designs could use some... inspiration. Anyways, to add to the list: Freelancer (came up a few times already, but hey, it's missing here) Endless Space Star Conflict Starpoint Gemini Evochron Mercenary Escape Velocity ...probably forgetting a bunch of other space games and shows but that's all I could think of off the top of my head...

I made some quick changes to it, if you look at my previous post's second edit. I can put the XML in here, too. Actually I'll do that right here, no reason not to. Broadhead, Ohm refit XML EDIT: Yeah, but my ships are among the least impressive in terms of looks compared to the average stuff posted on these forums. It does reflect my design philosophy, although it shouldn't be too hard to implement much better aesthetics, but it would require me to spend a lot more time designing. Anyways, there's merit in cheaper designs like the Broadhead. Building my Rhino in my normal campaign was annoying due to the high upfront cost in Trinium and it totally wastes the resources you gather earlier. I feel progressing into a Broadhead would be a lot smoother.... and it looks so freaking good to boot! I found it fun to look at it and improve on it, though. I should make a point of doing that with designs I like. Maybe people could prettify my designs, too. :P Going off on a tangent here, but I basically sketch the basic shape of my designs and then build the core of the functional blocks near my guesstimate position of where the CoM would be from my sketch. Everything but thrusters. I keep a decent amount of space free for thrusters to be put in last. I also make sure that the space I keep is going to be as far away from the CoM as possible to maximize maneuverability. Then I slap on some armor and/or hull, glow blocks and add some details. Coat the thing in some paint job and call it a day. EDIT 2: What? I found it more orderly than a lot of my designs, save maybe the Rhino which was built from huge blocks. All I had to do was remove the back plate to make most of the changes. I did have to "ghost" through the hull by zooming in and use the selector tool to tell what I was looking at to replace the materials though. But if you think the Broadhead is a mess to look at under the hood, you better not strip the Nomad or the Taurus. Those are a mess of trying to get precise numbers, filling in gaps in the sketched hull and optimizing the final product.

If that's possible? I read that Koonschi does not want to release the code because the game is deeply tied to its engine. Anyways, been ages since I seriously looked at code at all, if someone can find that out then nice. If Koonschi is willing to disclose the information that would be even nicer. For now though, gathering data is the best I can do.

Some NPCs actually spawn with shield penetrating weapons. Admittedly, they probably won't cause that much damage even if you don't coat your whole ship in armor, but, if you're unlucky and reckless enough with your designs, they could knock something expensive or important off your ship.

I'm gonna do the same with the Broadhead, see if I can pull a bit more performance out of it by switching something up under the hood because that thing is too gorgeous to pass up on. EDIT: Okay, the biggest thing is the computer core. The Rhino is all "real" volume. The Broadhead isn't. You can gain some rad/s and thrust/speed by making the thrusters and crew quarters out of Trinium instead, though. Playing with it a bit more reveals that you overdid the computer core a lot. If you only make the piece closest to the CoM out of Xanion, you still get 7 slots AND you can remove all the other computer cores. I'm gonna mess around with it a bit and post a shot of the refit. EDIT 2: Here's a screenshot of the new stats with minor adjustments. The shields are nearly doubled and you have almost 0.1 rad/s more yaw and pitch and a bit more than that in roll (may not seem like much, but that's almost 25% faster turns). Thrust is marginally improved. Stats are with exactly 100% engineers efficiency. The price is lower overall, but it uses more Trinium and less Xanion. It could be improved more, but it would probably come at the cost of looks.

I'm sorry, but I disagree that this is a "core problem", as such I also disagree with most of what's being discussed here. As I said before though, I do agree that some modules need to be tweaked because they're just too good right now. I'm not sure how that "fixes" anything. In fact, it would just make bigger ships snowball even more. As you progress you get rarer, exponentially better modules (because of more effects from higher rarity) AND more slots with larger ships.

I'd be really interested in people keeping track in terms of what you put in for weapons and the results to figure out the chances of getting say a chaingun instead of a cannon if you put in 4 chainguns and a cannon, for example. Seems like a large scale sample would be best to figure that out because that has a large influence on what you might get for weapons and mining/salvaging lasers.

No point in that, you are right, but I'm talking about actual thrust, not max speed. And with that combination of pitch, yaw and braking thrust, it's going to be annoying to dock at a station, even more so going from station to station. Trinium is lighter. Aah, thruster slices. Glad those are gone in beta. That said, no point in making thrusters out of naonite, Titanium or Trinium are the best for those. Same is true for all blocks that don't benefit from material type beyond weight and HP. Aah, alright, that explains it. Anyways, don't let me get you down, if you enjoy the ship then all's well and good. I'm just saying you may have overdone it a little bit with your description compared to what people are posting here on average. But do keep at it, I think everyone's first ships are nowhere near what they can do after practicing a bit. :)

Hmmm... after taking another look at your ship I'm guessing you are not using the beta branch (since it looks like you have a million thruster slices in there). This is likely your problem with most other people's designs.

Those ships look amazing and I'm generally impressed by the functional stats. My one caveat would have to be the Broadhead so far. I think its stats are a little subpar. It definitely looks better than my Rhino, but I can't figure out why it gets outclassed on nearly every aspect. The Rhino is bigger, yes, but it doesn't use Xanion. It also lugs around a huge cargo bay, has better yaw/pitch/roll, more shields, more brake thrust, has higher hyperspace reach and practically the same cooldown (!?) more power and battery and uses less crew!? Not trying to brag here, I just don't get how it could literally only beat the Rhino in forwards acceleration. Admittedly , it's pretty much half the price across the board and has a much "smoother" material requirement than the Rhino and it looks pretty darn sexy.