Ohm is Futile

Not bad, reminds me of my own designs. By the way, no point in making a ship 100% out of Xanion, since by the time your reach Xanion, there's going to be a lot of Trinium around and Trinium is the lightest material which makes it perfect to build thrusters, engines, crew quarters, that kind of thing that doesn't benefit from higher tier materials. That kind of makes me sad, it's pretty much the whole point of my own post. Granted, it's been buried by everyone else, but they ARE built to be functional, at least in the beta branch... and they aesthetics are comparable.

This. Although it becomes harder/takes longer to figure out the details that make it go from "looks like a ship" to "looks really good".

I'm sorry I don't share your enthusiasm about this ship. It shares my own general lack of detail in my designs. Its mobility is fine for a ship that size, but I wouldn't say almost as smooth as a fighter, either. The thrust is abysmal. Also, there's no room for Titanium and Naonite on such a late game design in my opinion. Avorion hull is also a waste, it's not as strong as Ogonite because you can't make armor plates out of it, it's heavier than Trinium (in case you wanted to have something mobile) and using hull to cover your ship requires more mechanics and power than using armor plates does. Save the design, create a creative galaxy, apply the plan. Takes a whole minute.

Most people now tag their creations' forum post with the version of Avorion they were built in. Just compare with the numbers you got in-game. That or they add (DTU) which stands for Directional Thrusters Update. What happens if you use a ship for a later version is that the directional thrusters are removed and the ship's maneuverability goes down to a crawl. The opposite is true since the beta builds' thrusters scale off volume and not surface area and are less powerful than they previously were so the result tends to be the same if you use outdated designs with a new version.

To be honest, attempting to artificially institute a naming convention like this is pretty... hrm... futile in my opinion.

Are you using the beta branch builds? Are the designs made for the beta branch builds? Using designs for the wrong version of the game will do this.

Paragraphs. Also, there are some cool ideas in there, but I'd be careful with anything that puts out a large number of projectiles since you have to consider the number of turrets a single ship can have. Then multiply it by however many enemy ships spawn/are there. This could have some rather serious CPU load, not to mention that it would clutter a screen which I find already too easily filled with wreckage, drops, asteroids and projectiles.

You emphasize Pitch and Roll in your fighters? :o Pitch, I can understand. But how do you even take advantage of Roll in combat? ??? Using Roll requires pressing the "Z" and "X" buttons. Myself, I barely find myself using strafe like "Q" and "W", but never roll. And what about Yaw? Do you consider that important? That's left and right. Granted, one can get by with either a high Yaw or a high Pitch, but I think having high Yaw and Pitch is better. It allows much more freedom of movement. As for minimizing profile, I think many players put too much emphasis in this. For most ship designs, I doubt it has as much impact on combat as they think it should. (See my post here in The Cube Meta about that.) To be fair, having a small profile is an advantage. And, as some have pointed out, those really narrow "mace"-style or pole-shaped NPC ships are quite hard to get clean hits on. However, those NPC ships use a very extreme example and I just don't see players using that kind of shape. It would be too fragile. 1. Bind Q and E to roll. 2. Have high roll and only bother about one of the other axis. 3. Roll and use your fastest rotation axis to turn. 4. ??? 5. Profit! Dead meme aside, I find roll more useful than having two different axis to strafe with that I can access quickly. Rolling also gives me fine control over strafing in the sense that if I roll first, I can strafe on any axis instead of only up/down/left/right.

Sometimes I feel like forums are just a place where lots of people talk to themselves without actually listening to each other... just a feeling.

I'm almost 100% certain you can do that already by either finding the file and renaming it or editing a line in it with notepad.

Yes, please.

It's not actually implemented the way you suggested it, but you know, you can hide thrusters, you don't need to tank your stats for looks as it is. Shields already regenerate on top of being able to use modules to help that. Armor/hull also repair automatically whatever isn't completely destroyed via mechanics and you can actually speed that up by hiring more mechanics than necessary. Up to 130%. Meh, could be fun but not such a huge deal to me.

You could make them draw more energy while they replenish, draw even more to get them to restart if they went down. Heck, simply taking a hit could cause a small energy loss. Although, to be honest, I don't think that stacking modules is such an issue nor are the "magic fenders" much of a problem. One thing I can agree with is that shield upgrades can be "too good". The replenish your shields by X amount if they go down once every X seconds is a bit crazy. The fact that some upgrades simply consume an arbitrarily small amount of energy is also a bit nuts when compared to those that give -X% generated energy. I think shield upgrades should cost an amount directly related to how much your ship's shield consume, instead. One balancing element that I'd love to see in the game is different combat AIs and faction preferences for certain ship designs and fighting styles. As such, some factions could mount significant +X% damage to shield weapons as a preference and cause issues for people who use lots of shields and little to no armor. Similarly, weapons with X% chance to penetrate shields could cause problems. Right now, it's just too random and NPCs are not built to exploit anything.

I find those values to be higher than necessary for most purposes. That said, in the current beta branch builds, the easiest way to achieve high rotation speeds is to use directional thrusters facing the most advantageous way as far as possible from your center of mass. This usually means that I begin building my ships by putting down the core blocks I need for the main features of the ship near the expected center of mass and leave a various amount of space in my predicted hull shape around the edges. As a rule of thumb: Yaw: mirrored forward-facing thrusters placed in-line with the center of mass on the sides as far as possible. Also possible is side-facing thrusters placed in-line with the center of mass from the front or back. Again, the farther, the better. Pitch: up-down facing thrusters placed in-line with the center of mass from the front or back. Forward-facing thrusters in-line with the center of mass from the top of bottom. Roll: up-down facing thrusters placed in-line with the center of mass from the sides. Side-facing thrusters placed in-line with the center of mass from the top or bottom. This is the most efficient way to do it currently.

So the poll has closed and we got 40 votes. Not necessarily the most statistically significant number, but it's a start. 57,5% of people voted for a system similar to what we have currently, with potential tweaks. The remaining 42,5% is split between all the other options with no clear preference, although there is a trend towards the options that add more blocks and player control over the turrets' stats. Even if we go as far as adding more or less 25% of the current votes towards each option to account for potential bias, I think it's safe to say that out of the 40 people who voted, people would be happy with a system similar to what we have, but would like a bit more control over the aesthetics and stats of turrets. As such, I guess that Koonschi's blueprinting feature should satisfy a fair share of the community, especially if it comes with potential tweaks/modding ability. I'm no expert in statistics, though, so feel free to comment.

Hmm, that shouldn't be the case, I'll check it out soon. EDIT: On second thought, you probably aren't using the beta branch if you are getting those values. All these ships were built using the new thruster mechanic.

Yeah, I'm not overly happy with the existing SW series in terms of looks. And by evolution you mean me ripping off ideas from the creations' subforums? :P In other news... Another major update! Two new AMR-1XX models and the new AMR-2XX series! Also working on a buyer's price catalog with basic, core information about each ship. Check the original post for more information! EDIT: Quick buyer's guide here: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2306.msg12133.html#msg12133

Well, that's going to make the debate rather difficult. There have been some rather significant changes to thrusters and movement in the game in the later beta branches... The non-beta branch works totally off of surface area and has all kinds of artificial multipliers that are hidden and that allows players to make ridiculously mobile ships, as long as you make thin slices of thrusters. This is quite different in the beta branch. As far as I know it's virtually impossible to just scale a ship up and expect it to have the same values. Just copy-pasting a ship design and using the "w" key to scale everything up, even by a few steps, shows smaller speed/rotation values for the same design. It's not a perfect test, but still. Is that realistic, not necessarily. Does it help smaller ships, well yeah.

...aaaaand with all that technical talk, which makes sense by the way, I think it's already the case ingame that larger ships need to dedicate a greater percentage of their mass/volume to thrusters to achieve the same accelerations, which is unrealistic, but favours smaller ships in that sense... or am I crazy? I'm not saying it's impossible for a larger ship to achieve the same values or greater than a smaller one, only that doing so means you are giving something else up for it. Of course, part of the problem is that the thing you can give up is simply more resources, go even bigger and get insanely high shields/HP anyway and still make up for a loss of thruster efficiency by simply going even bigger. ...and there is no disadvantage at that point to just spend your resources on getting a bigger ship...

No real trick to finding asteroids with specific resources. However, you can tell what stations are in a system you have already visited by mousing over that sector in the map (m key) view. It will tell you exactly what stations there are, how many ships of which factions and the number of asteroids. Sadly, the type of asteroid is missing.

...but smaller ships need gyros even less than large ones...

You know you have a match shape checkbox? You also know you have a scroll menu that allows you to change snapping to "block middle" right? The example in the OP is the result of not being aware of techniques that help with this. That said, there does seem to be a problem with the grids. The larger a ship gets, the more chance that you'll get weird offsets that may not even be multiples of the scaling/grid steps you are using. Very weird. Quick tip in case you didn't know, use a scaling level 2x your grid steps. Helps a lot. or even 4x allows more fiddling with different scales when you get to finer details. You use edges back to back. It's not perfect, but you can make shapes like this one using this technique: In case it's not clear, imagine you are looking at the parallelogram at the front in this picture. Takes its top left corner and imagine you are drawing a line straight down. That tells you how to place your edge. You can do the same using the bottom right corner by drawing a line straight up. Does that make sense?

OFC that the same ammount of players per side should win the ones with bigger ships... ...But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking of what to do when the Bully of the server comes to your door with a gigantic ship simply because he WAS FIRST on the server. That's why it's balanced now... Because with enough players in far smaller ships with a fraction of the resources you take down that big ship... ...A PvP game that doesn't work as this, is dead before even starting... Some tittles make this mistake, and they kill the initial flux of players in no time. I get the feeling that creative players want to mimic the big powerful multiturret capital ships they have seen on their prefered Scifi... Meanwhile the problem comes when PvP griefers get this same net operative advantage that can make life misserable to ENTIRE GROUPS of players. I thought we were talking about balance, not griefing. I mentioned the number of players because in a fight, you can't not account for players as a resource. Erm... The fact that WHILE rotating you are denying your own shooting capabilities and the fact that your "dodge technique" will just make yourself a target following a stable trayectory? Try that on the current game... Even AI shooting cannons with its basic predictive behaviour (Target Lead = Target Relative Speed * Bullet Travel Time) will hit you all the time. In fact, your tactic HEAVILY favors the multiple ships against a single Big one... Because the current target can do that (Forfeiting his firepower) while the rest keep attacking the Big one. Dodging fire is about moving your smaller axis back and forth so you become unpredictable... Can be done by increasing YOUR ACCELERATION and reducing your "dodge axis"... The Bigger the ship the harder this become (in fact this simple factor ALSO helps fighting the "cube syndrome")... And it's not accidental... That's why there are instant weapons on the game that deny this fact... And that's why SO FAR they have less range than the proyectiles... The Dev seems to be perfectly aware of this, while at the same time provides the tool for ppl to "customize" their experience between Big vs Small on their servers... They just need to "remove" this key factors. EDIT: Sorry for the multiquoting... I'm used to forums that also link the user also on partial quotes, I added them manually... Hope it gets clearer this way. I didn't exactly interpret maneuverability as the ability to dodge fire. To be honest, it's pretty hard to dodge anything (except missiles) at ranges less than 4km. Even with a fast ship. Within 4km, dodging a volley is going to require rotation + forwards boosting. Also, I still stand by what I said. If your ship can rotate pretty fast, then it can strafe pretty fast, too, unless you are using gyros as the main source of rotation.

Have you built a large ship with gyros/dampeners? Have you?

I'll chalk this up to misinterpreting what I said, but what I meant is that gyros and dampeners are not hurting the game, especially not gyros in their current form. It's a lot better than it used to be and it's in a place where it makes sense. Larger ships require a larger percentage of their volume to be dedicated to movement if you want them to go fast. Technically speaking, if you could scale thrusters while retaining efficiency, you could realistically get any size ship to be as fast as a smaller one. That is real world stuff. Right now, this is not the case and it's fine. You use more space for the same speed which means that you will be weaker or have less of other conveniences in exchange for that speed and that is achievable using thrusters and directional thrusters only. So no, gyros and dampeners do not break the game. I'll admit that after toying with dampeners a bit I found that their potential is great, but it comes at a much higher cost than using thrusters and does not have the same versatility since it only helps braking.