Ravien

This looks like it will be a really fun mod! Having custom pirate ships is one of the features I really want in the game, plus those ships can provide a better challenge than the randomly generated one. Plus how cool would it be to fight through waves of TIE fighters or Cylon raiders? :D

There is a free camera mode, check the keybindings. It's slow to move though. Here's some footage of me playing around with it:

Normal thrusters, like said above, work in all axis. Directional thrusters work only in the axis they are oriented in. So backwards/forwards, or left/right, or up/down. The benefit of directional thrusters is that you can place them away from your ship's center of gravity and use them to get better turning or break thrust than a normal thruster would provide. Thrusters and engines can be covered with no problems whatsoever. If you want to show an engine for appearance, you can always use a thin engine slice on the outside just to make your ship look cooler while keeping your main engines under the armor. I'm also a big fan of gyroscopes and intertia dampeners, though those do use up a bit more power so it's a trade off. Solar panels rely on surface area and do not need to be covered. You can stack very thin slices of solar panel blocks inside your ship and they will work just fine. I usually completely skip solar panels and mine some titanium to make a titanium generator. You should be able to find a few titanium asteroids in your starting sector though it may take a bit to find them.

If you want to stick to a small ship, just use hyperspace upgrade modules (and a generator upgrade if you need extra power). Maybe in the future they will rebalance hyperspace and you'll be able to make a small ship with a large jump range but it's hard to do right now.

After you use up their 3 free dodges per minute, they "should" only have a 30-50% chance to dodge, at least if the AI fighters behave like the patch notes say player fighters do. I haven't tried the new patch yet but what weapons were you using? I'd imagine a fast weapon would work better than a slow one to take out fighters and might actually give a reason for putting some point defense on our ships.

Yeah AI controlled mining carriers work decently well. Salvage fighters I had problems with though since on larger wrecks, salvage fighters will miss most of the time due to being out of range.

The only thing I can think of without mods is to increase the mass of your stations so they are less likely to be bumped. Using rock is a cheap way to do it since rock armor doesn't use power or crew and is cheap. Hopefully in the future thrusters and intertia dampers will work on stations!

You can turn off flight assist (I think that's what it's called). I forget exactly where you go but you can see a screen with all your ship's systems and you can manually deactivate any that you want. You can also bind it to a key in the keybindings.

When independent firing turrets are set in independent mode (whatever the exact mode is called), I think they will fire on the closest appropriate target within range that they can turn and shoot at. (mining turrets will target ore asteroids, salvagers will target wrecks, and weapons will target hostile ships). Note that while they will not try to target something that they can't actually aim at due to angle, they have no qualms about firing at an enemy that is behind a friendly ship and thus might accidentally hit friendly ships so just make sure to change your position or turn them off when that happens to avoid rep loss or destruction of friendly ships. I actually really like independent targeting. It lets you mix weapon types that otherwise would be hard to use at once due to different projectile speeds and it really helps when mining. I don't like independent salvagers though since they aren't smart at what sections of a ship they target (they'll choose a tiny block of iron if it's closer than a juicy exposed generator).

You can lower or turn off collision damage.

Mining fighters are actually pretty good to use with AI controlled ships. The AI will launch and direct the fighters to mine asteroids. The downside is that fighters can be expensive and when you use cheap ships it's easy to break them down and rebuild them in a new location but if you delete a mining carrier, you lose all the fighters. Salvaging fighters have issues targeting large wrecks. Sometimes their lasers won't even reach the wrecks.

If you are building in creative mode in single player, you can also use the admin tools to automatically add crew to your ship, give you random turrets/modules appropriate to the area you're in, and many other things. This really helps when building because having to travel to stations to juggle your crew with half a built ship is a pain! Just type the following command into chat and a new button will appear on your screen that you can click to access the admin window. Once you have your ship built the way you want and are happy with the handling and defenses, you can save it and then build it on your survival or multiplayer game. /run Entity():addScript("lib/entitydbg.lua")

Also it depends on what material you build your engines out of. While all engines have the same thrust and max speed, they can weigh different amounts. Adding iron engines gives less of a benefit than titanium ones. You can especially see this with thrusters.

If you can find a scrapyard, it's definitely worth the money for the salvage license. Aim for the giant ships with the exposed generator and battery blocks and you can easily get 30,000-50,000 of a resource within a minute. Much faster than mining or looking for pirate/alien wrecks, though not as fun and you don't get many modules or turrets out of salvage yards.

My advice is to design your own ship for them to use. The ships from the shipyards are procedurally generated and so do not have an optimal design. You should easily be able to design a ship that has a 200-300m/s top speed and better turret placement. You can use the shipyard to build a basic ship (so you get the captain), then get into the ship and change it/load a blueprint however you want. But yeah, AI ships seem to move at 1/3 speed or so while doing their mining and until the AI is changed, there's not much you can do to make them faster short of building an actual faster ship.

I'm really not trying to start an argument here as believe me, I understand how frustrating it can be to wait for an update that you're really looking forward to. I just wish people would read the developer's posts before announcing that the sky is falling. :P

Well it is an early access game. You should expect both an inconsistent patch schedule and an incomplete game so there's less content to keep people playing on a server at the moment. 5 weeks is not long to wait for a patch at all, most games wait several months from the time a patch is announced. I'm really excited for the update but in the meantime give them the time needed to ensure a stable and testable patch. :)

There are a million sectors. Creating them all would probably take a very long time on the average computer and eat up a lot of storage space, though if it's feasible it would be a nice feature to have.

That looks AMAZING! Love the details, especially on the engines!

You can move your ships and take your artifacts out of them after. The wormhole is permanent once opened.