Thundercraft

Sounds like a good idea - in theory. However, one of the strength's of the current system is that we can place our turrets just about anywhere - even on the slopes of wedges and other shapes. Depending on how "turret slots" are implemented, I suspect these will be square or rectangular. And that would limit us to placing them on perfectly flat surfaces, wouldn't it? Anyway, I do agree that it should be possible to save turrets and turret locations on a ship design. I think that is important. Right now there is a turret disappearing bug that will make turrets disappear and prevent us from placing new turrets if we apply a ship design without first removing all the turrets.

When I first tried a multiplayer server, the starting sector was absolutely devoid of any mineral rich asteroids. The only asteroids were the regular kind that gives maybe 26 iron for the whole thing. Needless to say, it took forever to grind enough iron to build my first ship. :'( When I complained about this on the forum, though, someone replied that who ever set up this server must have chosen to have everyone spawn in the same home sector and that was my problem. If set to a random sector, this shouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. But, yeah, I really wish they make mineral-rich asteroids respawn after a while - at least in each home sector. Or they could have the mining portion of the tutorial trigger a respawn. At the least, there should be a server command for admins to respawn them.

Without any sort of integrity field, small bits of ships would break off very easily. A very minor bump would break off lots of stuff. And nobody would bother to add decorative parts to ships like antenna masts or anything like small tubes or poles because they'd break off in combat all the time. Not to mention: Wedge-shaped ship designs are quite popular in Avorion right now. But the pointed edges can sometimes break off fairly easily, depending on the design. So, we'd see much less of those. The bottom line: Without integrity fields, ships designs would tend towards giant cubes. And how boring would it be to fly in a universe where nearly all player ships resemble borg cubes or are very cube-like? (See the How do you make a well armoured ship that isnt a cube? discussion.)

An actual keyboard layout - an illustration of a keyboard with all keys labeled - would be nice. However, you may be interested in the list of keyboard controls that I compiled to be printed or viewed independent of the game. (See the attachment below.) Do note, however, that I've added F10 and F11 as custom keys. And the F11 toggle fire button thing requires an Autohotkey script as mentioned here. KEYBOARD_CONTROLS.txt

That is a good point and I'm glad you brought it up. But how many hours of gameplay do we have to put up with before we can afford a ship big enough to avoid this 'swap out to mine/salvage' issue? As I said, this shouldn't even be an issue, assuming the game was designed to be more user-friendly. There would be an easy workaround to this problem if we could reliably save a ship design with turrets and just swap between a "mining ship" version and a "salvaging ship" version. However, this turret bug I just reported prevents us from doing that. I do realize that the game was only just released on Steam and it's going through a lot of changes. However, the early game is very important because it directly impacts how willing players are to keep playing. And that, in turn, has a big impact on game feedback, reviews, and word of mouth. Even if things get easier and more fun in mid to late game, that's no good if you lose a lot of players along the way.

I'm just now discovering this trade off of how using integrity fields makes my ships weaker. All because of a few PvP whiners? >:( This! We really need to be able to build armor as well as other types of blocks (like integrity fields and power generators) into wedges and other shapes. Limiting everything to just cubes is rather stifling to ship design creativity. IMO, giving field integrity blocks a much higher energy cost would have been a much better balance adjustment than nerfing it like this. Why must we cover up our beautiful engines?! :( I want to cry... I'll concede that the engine glow is way too bright. And I'll agree that this may be a matter of taste. But I think the glow of engines is one of things I like most about Avorion. Depending on the ship design, it can greatly add to the visual appeal! Sound like a sensible solution to me. Though, I think I would prefer if there were two different kinds of integrity field blocks: one that only protects blocks which are directly connected, like you suggest, and another kind which protects like they use to, but with a much higher energy cost (like nitrogameace suggested).

After playing a while, I noticed this too. I thought it was just my home sector. But nearly every sector on the map is extremely hostile. You would think that, eventually, a faction would run out of combat ships and be forced to hold off on their offensives until they can build up their forces again. Not to mention, they should start running out of resources to build new ships and pilots and trained crew to operate them. Eventually, entire sectors should become ship graveyards littered with wrecks of ships. And, eventually, stations would disappear under the weight of constant attacks. Actually... I have seen some stations nearly destroyed from regular attacks. And what used to be a strong defense force can get whittled down until they hardly put up a fight anymore. I agree. Your suggestions would make it more realistic. The way things are, it's pretty nice for players who make a living by salvaging wrecks or who likes to dogfight all the time. But it also makes every part of the galaxy very dangerous, with hardly a room for a breather.

Q: Is this arrangement at all profitable? What kind of minerals are you mining to turn a profit? I haven't actually tried this. But, by the time the crew is paid for both your mining ship and any protective escort ships (not to mention the repairs on your escort ships), I would think that would eat up any profit. Perhaps it would work in sectors with lots and lots of mineral rich asteroids?

You do have a point. I agree that there should be further use for it. And your suggestion that later tier technology should require at least some iron (among other ingredients) sounds reasonable. It would also be nice if there was a factory we could build to turn iron into something profitable.

I agree that there should be a hotkey (or a command which could be configured with a key press) to toggle the dampening of inertia by thrusters.

Sounds like a good suggestion to me. I doubt it would be hard to code, either.

20 points each time?! :o I'm going to have to keep an eye out for those mosquitoes! Perhaps that is a big high. But I think it would help to have an obvious, highly visible indicator around them on our HUD, so we don't hit them by accident. Edit: A different idea: Military drones may be considered rather cutting edge IRL on Earth. However, for any highly advanced spacefaring race with hyperdrives and such, that should be old tech or easily managed. So, instead of treating fighters as actual fighters, why not treat them as remote-controlled drones? Pilots climbing into a star-fighter cockpit may make for exciting films or TV shows. But... come on. If technology and money were no obstacles, don't you think militaries would rather have pilots safe in a bunker or on a capital ship, controlling attack drones remotely? I'm suggesting that "fighters" remain as they are, with the exception of the reputation penalty being tiny or nonexistent. This could be explained by the pilots remaining on the ship that launched them, so there was no loss of life.

Yup. I'm forced to juggle between my mining lasers and salvaging turrets rather frequently. It is a hassle. This shouldn't even be an issue since I can't imagine a situation where it could help to use both mining lasers and salvaging turrets at the same time. I feel that the game should allow us to install both, be required to only hire only enough miners to handle the max of one or the other, and have a command or hotkey to swap between them. (Though, I do find that salvaging turrets add a huge punch to my damage when attacking an enemy, assuming that I'm brave enough to get that close.)

It is a good idea. However, I'm usually in a small-ish ship which barely has enough room for 3 modules. Since there are so many good modules to choose from and only three slots available, I have to pick and choose (or even swap out occasionally). I do think there should be a module (or module types) that can increase pickup range. But, also, I think there should be a "Tractor Beam" type turret that can pick up loose cargo, ores, and modules from a respectable distance - like, at least 1 km, if not even further.

First of all: May I suggest that the forum administrator create a separate "Website/Forum/Wiki Issues" area (like how the General Off-Topic area is treated as separate from Avorion discussion topics)? I only searched in the General Off-Topic area for someplace to talk about forum issues as a last resort, because it made no sense to post about it in any other area. I've registered with and participated in over a hundred forums over the years. I've even moderated before. And almost without exception they have a "Forum Issues" type area for members to talk about such. Second: Suggestion: Please consider adding a New Replies to Your Topics link/function so member can keep track of new replies to discussions they are a part of or which they have set notifications for. Again, this feature is commonplace to nearly every forum and online community I have ever participated in. The absence of this feature seems rather glaring to me. I strongly suspect that it should be possible to add this functionality without much trouble. I see that this forum uses SMF 2.0.9 by Simple Machines. SMF is the most popular forum software in the world and one of the oldest. And I'm familiar with many SMF-based forums which have a Show new replies to your posts link, so I know it's possible. Currently, to follow my discussions, I have to click on my Profile > Summary and then click the Show Posts link. Then I have to click on each discussion I've ever participated in, one at a time, to see if there are any new replies. To call that tedious and a waste of bandwidth would be an understatement. I did, finally, find the Unread Posts link. However, it is only visible on the forum's main page and perhaps on area indexes. Most SMF forums have that as an Show unread posts since last visit or Updated Topics link that's always visible in the upper left corner.

I just tried my hand at dog fighting. And while I definitely find it appealing, I also find it frustrating and a trial of patience. The reason for this comes down to one thing: NO AIMING RETICLE?! Consider the likes of the Wing Commander series, the X-series, Freelancer, and countless others. Take a look at practically any space sim or dog-fighting aircraft simulator ever and you will find one thing in common: Nearly all of them have a "lead in" aiming recticle that shows the pilot where to aim. We can't just shoot directly at the target unless our gun(s) are beam weapons that can reach the target at the speed of light and/or our enemy is very close. We must lead our aim ahead of where the enemy is traveling in order for the projectiles to meet them where they are going to be in a few seconds or fraction of a second. Honestly, this is not new tech. This is old technology. During WWII they had mechanical computers to help aim bombs. And targeting computer technology is scarily advanced today. Without a targeting reticle, we have to eyeball our guns and guess where the enemy is going to be, resulting in lots and lots of misses. That's tedious and frustrating. Let me get this straight... Regardless of whether our ship is autonomous or not - regardless of whether we act as the captain and maintain direct control where are guns are aimed - we must still hire and pay for gunners... yet we can't even get an aiming reticle? (And not just one gunner, but two per turret?)

What happened? Applying a ship blueprint without first removing the turrets can and will glitch those turrets so they disappear and can not be removed! :o What did you do to make it happen? [*]Build a ship and save the blueprint or apply a saved blueprint. [*]Add several combat and noncombat turrets, keeping track of which and what kind of turrets you add and how many of each you have left. [*]Apply a different ship blueprint to change your ship. [*]Visually inspect your ship. You will notice that most, if not all, of the the turrets have disappeared. [*]Inspect your Building Inventory in Build Mode and you will notice that you are short one or more turrets that you started with (before building your ship). [*]Inspect your Ship tab in your Ship Window and you will see that some or all of the turret slots are empty. [*]Go back to Build Mode and try to add more turrets. You will find that impossible as you will get the error that your ship already has the maximum number of turrets allowed [*]Finally, apply the blueprint of the ship you started with. (See step 1.) Visually examine your ship and you will see that the missing turrets are back. Inspect your Ship tab in your Ship Window to confirm that they are back. What did you expect to happen? I expect the game to automatically remove any turrets that do not correspond to the new blueprint and put them back into my inventory. Sometimes, the game actually does this! But, other times, it glitches and makes them invisible and otherwise unusable. This may be dependent on whether or not a design has the maximum number turrets installed and whether any modules are used which can affect the number of allowed turrets. File for testing, observations: This is a rather repeatable bug. But it's not exactly predictable. For testing, you could add turrets to my Eos Mk. I freighter without cargo container, then apply my Eos Mk. I freighter with cargo container. This causes the bug every time.

THIS! A thousand times this! Consider other space sims where we get to pilot large ships with turrets and such. I'm not familiar with any which require us to pay for a crew complement, unless it was for a ridiculously large capital ship. The X-series of games were great in this respect. We could use a literal AI program to control whole fleets of ships, without having to worry about salaries or wages. I could maybe understand the requirement for ships that are under "AI" control and which we can give orders to. But, why do we need to pay for gunners or miners when we are the ones who are actually aiming and shooting the guns and aiming the mining or salvaging lasers? Gunners don't actually fire our weapons - unless we build a separate ship and put it under the control of a captain or something. Gunners can't even give us an aim-ahead targeting reticle to show us how far ahead to aim to actually hit a target. Meaning? The gunners aren't doing their job! Honestly, even if we had an actual aiming reticle, gunners still aren't needed unless the ship is supposed to be autonomous. Mechanical targeting computers have been around since at least WWII. And we have fairly sophisticated ones today. Imagine what kind of targeting computers will be available by the time we get to colonize the stars and space militarization becomes commonplace? What's worse is the requirement to have TWO gunners or TWO miners per turret. I mean... why? Is one of them twiddling their thumbs while the is doing all the work? (Well, of course not. Because I'm the one doing all the work and both of them are twiddling their thumbs.) For that matter, I think it's silly that we have to pay an hourly salary of several thousand credits for a captain just to order our ship to either follow us around like a puppy dog or order it to certain coordinates. A dumb computer should be able to do that much. And don't even get me started on the requirement for hiring several mechanics. While it may be true that structures and vessels in space gradually break down (due to the evaporation of metals in a near perfect vacuum), IRL things do not break down that fast! In a matter of minutes, without enough mechanics, our ship starts to take damage. Now that's ridiculous. IMO, unless a ship is truly big, hiring mechanics should be optional. That is, players would probably hire them anyway for the ability to effect slow repairs without having to dock at a repair facility all the time and to save on massive repair costs. Other players may argue that a crew salary is just a drop in a bucket compared with the many thousands or millions of credits they're making. But when a player starts out in a new universe, particularly new players, it's often difficult to make those payments until a strategy or framework is established to earn lots of money on a regular basis. For instance, I can't imagine that setting up a salaried crew on a fully autonomous ship could possibly pay for itself if ordered to mine asteroids. Mining does not seem very profitable to me - especially since most asteroids seem largely devoid of minerals.

Yep, I definitely noticed this. And this property can add up to ridiculous size differences. As an experiment, try making a matrix of incredibly tiny thrusters - say, about 0.05 x 0.1 x 0.1. Start with about 9 of them, then copy and paste to make a matrix of 81... and copy that a few times to give several hundred. (Just be sure to give thrusters plenty of air space. They don't seem to work if completely covered.) Now compare the thrust of those several hundred small thrusters with one big thruster of the equivalent volume. There's no comparison. I heavily exploited this effect (i.e., cheated) when I created my Eos series of ships. The amount of Brake Thrust, Yaw, Pitch and Roll I get is just insane. It practically turns on a dime. Then again, I've seen big ships other people created with a comparatively tiny amount of Brake Thrust, yet those can sometimes decelerate faster than mine? Either the physics engine this game uses needs an update or the thruster needs to be recoded or at least tweaked. Another benefit is that small thrusters allows us to spread them all over a ship, making it difficult for an enemy to destroy them all. Regardless of how big they are, it seems that one hit by enemy fire is enough to destroy a thruster. Spreading them out means that you will likely still have thrusters to use.

Currently, there still aren't very many Avorion ships for players to download. And of these, even less are iron-tech and geared towards beginners or a new game. So, I thought I would share this: The Eos Mk I (iron) freighter with a large 345 unit cargo container. Max acceleration is 19.5 m/s/s and max deceleration is 11.1 m/s/s. Has 961 HP with cargo container. Another view of the Eos Mk I (iron) freighter with cargo container, along with the complete stats. The Eos Mk I freighter without a cargo container. Now max acceleration is 23.4 m/s/s and max deceleration is an impressive 16.1 m/s/s. Note that it has 414 HP without the cargo container. Another view of the Eos Mk I (iron) freighter without a cargo container, along with the complete stats. COSTS: Eos Mk I no cargo 3980 iron 5344 credits [*]Eos Mk I with cargo 5687 iron 9137 credits DOWNLOAD: MediaFire: Eos (iron) freighter.zip The download contains two files of the same ship, one with a cargo container and one without, giving players more options. Myself, I plan to ship cargo with the container version, then (for the return trip) go into Build Mode and swap it out for the design without a container to obtain more acceleration. DESIGN THEORY: This was not designed for fighting. However, it can haul a decent amount of cargo for it's size and tech. It was designed for maximum maneuverability and deceleration, while not breaking the bank and still having a decent acceleration. I was only able to get this much maneuverability in a small package by adding hundreds of very tiny thrusters. Further, all thrusters are hidden safely inside so they won't be destroyed with a lucky shot. CREDITS: I did create this from scratch and spent time on it. However, the design was heavily inspired by one of Dead8Eye's ships. (See this post in the Dead8Eye´s Shipyard thread.) Also, I believe my Eos is scaled differently.

Just thought I would ask of anyone has any tips on making money. Mining or acquiring minerals like iron and titanium is pretty much a no brainer. But I'm finding it difficult to accumulate money. And I'm sure there are better ways than selling the minerals I mine or even selling my extra modules and turrets. Are doing missions a good way? If so, is any particular kind easier, faster or more profitable? What about buying, transporting and selling cargo from one station to another? Is that a fast way to earn cash? Though, I realize this depends on how much cargo space our ship design allows. And a lot of cargo space often means a tradeoff between speed and other factors like defensive capabilities. It's also a pretty big investment. The main reason I'm asking, though, is because I want to find a way to offset the absolutely insane costs of hiring and paying enough crew to maintain a decent sized ship. I mean... $15 k to $50 k just for crew salaries, due every hour or so? :o I'm finding it hard to believe that anyone can turn a profit in this game. (Crew costs alone is making me reconsider quitting and going back to playing the X-series of games.)

Q: How were you able to use a grid for a background in the first several images? Is that an actual grid, or just a huge wall or station made up of perfectly square parts?

Have thrusters changed at all since November? Or do they still work exactly like this? You mentioned "this is about to change I have read"...

By "static" weapons, did you mean weapons that are not part of a turret per se? Though, your Traverse and elevation mechanisms could aim fixed position weapons (within a size limitation) as if they were part of a turret, effectively functioning as such (perhaps with a slower response). I didn't notice this thread earlier. But I guess this is a lot like my Fixed or Spinal Mount Weapons suggestion.

What command line version? ??? Is there a simple chat command I can use to set the current sector as my home sector? Because, that's all I really need...