snacker

Thank you, God only knows where I will find the chips. I've spent 3 days looking for a scrap yard. Came up empty. Also if you are having trouble with combat due to lack of weapons or modules the easy way to gain them is to hang around a sector until pirates/aliens attack and then get close to the action without angering anyone and simply pick them up from these battles.

NPC's are random and do not deliver, so your best bet is to trade it all yourself. I have a station that defends itself, I can't remember if I put a captain on it though, with AI ships a captain is needed for autonomous operations so perhaps the station is the same as it is just a converted ship. Considering their expense and the fact that there is no mass penalty because you don't move a station it really is worth getting some heavy shielding on there.

I have copied the galaxy folder a few times to reset the whole game to a previous state so it strange that it isn't working for you. Are you really sure all the contents of that folder is copied correctly? I would check if the folders are the same size on both PC's and contain the same number of files and sub-folders.

Thanks for the tips, perhaps it is that my engineers dropped below 130% as when I am building I normally have a surplus crew to prevent having to stop half way to hunt for new ones if I build too much. I knew it wasn't from dropping below 100% because you notice that. I probably need to do some testing to see what the issue is.

Hey, I understand why you say it isn't a bug but the end result of this is a bugged building system. I really love the building in this game but even if one uses whole numbers when building or a sensible scale one ends up with unsightly shadows in odd places or blocks that just wont line up properly. It gets especially problematic when using copy/paste to create more complex shapes. I am sure you are aware of how bad things are but just in case others don't realise then this is the result of using a grid size of 1 and a scale step of 2 and just placing a 2x2x2 block on to the 2x2x2 root block using local grid, global grid, and block middle. The root block, fine so far: block index="1" color="ffbfaea3" up="3" look="1" material="0" upperZ="1" upperY="1" upperX="1" lowerZ="-1" lowerY="-1" lowerX="-1" local grid: block index="2" color="bfbfbfbf" up="3" look="1" material="1" upperZ="-1" upperY="0.999999881" upperX="0.999999523" lowerZ="-3" lowerY="-0.999999881" lowerX="-0.999999523 global grid: block index="2" color="bfbfbfbf" up="3" look="1" material="1" upperZ="1" upperY="0.999999881" upperX="-1.00000024" lowerZ="-1" lowerY="-0.999999881" lowerX="-2.99999928 block middle: block index="2" color="bfbfbfbf" up="3" look="1" material="1" upperZ="3" upperY="0.999999762" upperX="0.999999762" lowerZ="1" lowerY="-0.999999762" lowerX="-0.999999762 You say that rounding would fix this but you seem not to want to fix this because it reduces accuracy. I can understand that accuracy is desirable but just can't comprehend what in the building system requires the level of accuracy that results in a number like 1 becoming 0.999999762, for example. The smallest scale is 0.05, surely a elegant solution would be to tie the rounding to the scale step being used or failing that to the smallest scale available. Obviously I do not have your skill or experience of coding so perhaps there is some use case or issue I am missing that requires this level of accuracy but I think some rounding would make the building process far less of a headache for the vast majority of people. I hope you can understand how frustrating it is to spend hours on a build only to find out that some blocks don't line up or overlap causing weird shadows and having to track back and break things down to find out where it all started, or finding out there seems to be no way to solve it. I also hope my argument/plea will lead you to reconsider your position on rounding in the build system. Thank you for your time.

On some of my builds adding engines can reduce max velocity at a certain point despite the mass of the engine being negligible compared to overall mass, thrust does increase however. Say I design a ship, add most of the parts, and then start filling up the empty spaces with mass I reach a point where I need to add engines to compensate for the added mass but the results are mixed and incomprehensible to my admittedly simple mind. I searched the forum but couldn't really find any answers, I have the right amount of engineers and I do know that I can just boost the max velocity via adding more engineers but I want to understand what is going on here. Is there anyone that can help me out and explain what is going on?

Trading has issues but since the latest beta has out of sector production it should be fairly trivial to fix the other problems with trading in the future. In the mean time there is a simple fix to make trading more manageable but it requires one thinking about the problem a little differently. I had the same issues you had but have turned to mods for help. I use the out of sector production mod and all production chains mod, both can be found in the mods sub-forum. The first one is self explanatory and the second adds in the missing resources to the game via a coal mine, a oil mine, and a diamond mine or factory, the game will add those to undiscovered sectors randomly if you don't want to set up your own stations. The reason I had problems with trading at first was because I did not look at the system as a whole but simply traded what was close/profitable. Once I started looking at the system as a whole money was no longer a issue, I now have a 10 slot trading ship with a 400K crew that sits around doing nothing 90% of the time but in that other 10% it brings in enough cash to keep my little empire going. I use a large ship not only for the cargo capacity but also to use the slots to maximise the jump range and keep the warp timeout low. What I did was find a product produced by one of the high-tech factories that actually sells, drills for example, which can be sold to mines. The reason for choosing a high-tech factory is due to the number of steps it takes to create the end result. With a massive number of steps needed to make a product it is far harder to exhaust the capacity of the system as a whole and since each step results in a profit it is less important how large the profit is in each step. If you only buy when a factory/station is at full capacity and only sell to a station or factory when it has no stock then you also maximise your profit. Here it helps to have at least one station with some cargo capacity in a handily situated system. Every X playing sessions I spend one session simply making sure all the stations in the supply chain are fully stocked. I am certainly not making 500K+ on each trade but I make a lot more this way than just jumping around claiming asteroids. In fact I am almost too embarrassed to put a precise number on it other than to say that it should be more than sufficient for anyone's needs.

Nice that it was resolved so quickly and without too much drama on their part. I am in two minds about the whole issue, on the one hand I am a great believer in sharing and open-source as a concept but on the other hand it is clear that those that create deserve at least the recognition and proper attribution for what they create as well as being as deserving as anyone else to be compensated for their effort if they chose. There is even a disturbing trend growing among companies that are demanding that writers or photographers and graphic artists work for free for a period of time in return for "exposure", something that would be ridiculed if they were asking the same of a doctor or engineer or plumber or any other professional.

Well legally speaking it is a breach of your intellectual property rights, if you live in a country that is a signatory to the Bern convention those rights are automatically granted and a "work" does not have to be registered. You can flag any content on Steam if it breaches their terms of service, and they specifically disallow the posting of copyright content. Just because you are not commercialising your content and are allowing people to use your intellectual property in game free of charge does not mean that others can copy it and claim it as their own. In case you hadn't noticed there is a little flag icon in the picture you posted. So in that sense you are not overreacting, I think at the very least it is insulting that someone takes the fruit of your time and effort and claims it as their own creation.

I realise you didn't intend to mislead in any way but at first glance when I saw those raw numbers it looked like it implied great improvements in thrust by changing the material used and since I always assume other people have to be as stupid as I am so I thought I would clarify things. As to your other point I have only just started to redesign my fleet to take into account strafing because I noticed the numbers didn't tell the whole story. I am scared to say that I don't find the challenge aesthetically limiting to someone like you, who designs beautiful craft, because I take a very different approach to the issue. I like modern design and a key concept among designers is that form follows function, I see the aesthetics in simplicity and paring down the unnecessary until all that is left is there for a reason. So I take my inspiration from industrial design and architectural movements like that of the Brutalists. A trained crew is a valuable commodity, space is a harsh environment for my soft squishy minions so my structural material of choice is the 2 by 2 by X beam of armour that I use as a skeleton for my ships. I also believe in "realism" in design, so all my thruster faces have to be exposed. My latest warship is loosely inspired by the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, nicknamed the Warthog, a close combat fighter that is basically a big gun with a engine strapped onto it wrapped in armour. Designed in the 1970's it is still in service despite the many attempts to replace it with more modern and aesthetically pleasing multi-role aircraft. So I placed all the internals and some giant gyro's at centre mass, wrapped that in layers of thrusters facing in all directions running the whole length of the ship, filled the gaps with armour and plated the whole thing in a 1 block thick layer of armour with the sides and a extra layer on the front being sacrificial and outside of the range of the IFG in case of crashes. I then spent far to much time merging the armour blocks to maximise the mass of each piece so as to have as few weak points as possible. The resulting 8 slot ship uses only 185 blocks which is all the more shocking considering there are 20 thrusters on each side, 24 running top to bottom and 20 front to back all with their faces exposed but recessed 1 block or more in the armour. This gives me 77 m/s thrust in all directions and 2.95 yaw, 2.18 pitch for a 0,27 mt ship. I imagine many people would hate it but it its design and the resulting simplicity gives me immense satisfaction.

But my point was that the test results were very misleading even though that was obviously not the intention. Someone could look at those results and mistakenly think that in a "real world" application they could see a 20% or more improvement in brake thrust or strafe speed by changing the thrusters to use trinium over xanion, for example. To better illustrate the point I partly redid the test but by building a simulation of a real craft, I say simulation because I only added the necessary blocks without any thought for ascetics. I simulated two craft out of trinium with perfect or near perfect stats, one a ultralight highly manoeuvrable 5 slot ship and another slightly more realistic 7 slot ship with higher mass to account for some use of armour. I designed both to have perfect yaw/pitch/roll and 100m/s brake thrust and thrust on all axis in the case of the 5 slot ship and perfect yaw/pitch roll and 80m/s brake thrust and thrust on all axis in the case of the 7 slot ship. I think these exceed what most people achieve in a real world design and therefore still exaggerate the impact that thrusters have on the design of ones ship. The ultralight has 200m/s thrust, 108 m/s brake thrust, 10 sector jump reach and close to twice the power that it needs as well as ample crew room, it has a volume of 0.9 mill and weighs only 13.9 kt. The 7 slot ship has 68m/s thrust (I ran out of engineers), 88m/s brake thrust, 17 sectors jump reach and 40% spare power as well as 122K shields, it has a volume of 5.1 mill and a mass of 91 kt. So it has a bit over 5 times the volume but 6.5 times the mass of the ultralight ship. The original test implied using trinium over xanion for the thrusters would achieve 22% more thrust, but in my testing even on the ultralight the mass increase was only 1 tonne or 7.8%, brake thrust decreased by about the same amount but the ship with xanion thrusters used almost 1.2% less power than with the trinium thrusters. For the 7 slot ship the difference was obviously even less, brake thrust was reduced by about 5% because using xanion as thruster material only increased the mass by a similar percentage. Due to the increase in energy consumption of the much heavier ship the power savings were approximately half that of the ultralight ship. 5% better thrust is of course still significant but this is 4x worse than the original test implied and In the case of the 7 slot ship simulation, given that most people most likely don't design perfect ships with perfect yaw/pitch/roll and high brake thrust, and a lot of ships are going to be bigger/heavier than the 7 slot ship then in the "real" world people just aren't going to see the drastic improvements the original tests suggested. Comparison of thruster material: http://imgur.com/a/rBAod

I found your post(s) very informative as I am still trying to optimise my own designs but I wanted to point out what I think is a flaw in your testing of the scaling of materials for thrusters. The mass of the thruster you are adding in the images is much larger than the mass of the ship as a whole, this distorts the test because the mass of the material used in making the thruster has a disproportionate effect on the total mass of the resulting vehicle. I just tested this myself with directional thrusters and a large block of armour as my base to test on. Then the material used had no effect on the effectiveness of the thruster when its mass was small relative to the block(s) I was placing it on but as soon as I scaled up the thruster in size (and therefore mass) relative to the armour block the thrusters appeared to be more effective when made from lighter materials, but obviously only because their mass was contributing less to the overall weight of the resulting craft. In conclusion the takeaway from this is that while thrusters do not scale in effectiveness with material their relative combined mass in relationship to the overall mass of ones design might make it more effective to make ones thrusters of the lightest material possible.

If you rotate a gyro block it changes the axis it affects. Personally speaking I think a lot of the design/aesthetics issues people have are based upon a faulty premise for which bad sci-fi and graphic artists in the film industry are to blame. The so called aesthetically pleasing designs mostly seem to be loosely based upon creatures or a vehicle aesthetics "language" that evolved on a planet with a atmosphere (earth) and corresponding air-resistance or drag as a issue. This is art not design. In good design form follows function, with there being no atmosphere in space, no air resistance, and with ships being too large to practically land on planets or be built on planets there is no need to take account of the factors that drove the evolution of creatures on a planet like earth, or drove the design of vehicles on a planet like earth. Your concept of aesthetically pleasing is a product of your environment, perhaps you could consider thinking outside the box (or in the cube hah), and breaking free of the artificial limits this is setting on you.