Thundercraft

Meh. Because ships can only travel so fast in this game, any reinforcements won't show up for a long while. By the time they do arrive and approach said location, any "smuggler" could be long gone, along with the illegal goods they carry. A so-called "show of force" means nothing if the only actual force worth showing is located several systems over. Then there's the intimidation factor. Crews on comparatively small ships should be quaking in their boots at the thought of threatening a whole fleet or a huge ship. Sure, a trade enforcement task force can be brave. But if they don't have the power to back up their threats, that's being blatantly stupid. Even if they belong to a powerful faction, if they have wait for backup, then they're either as good as dead or are an embarrassment to their faction by being ignored. (Idea: It would be particularly evil of a faction to engage hyperspace jammers AND shut down all gates in a system after illegal goods are detected to prevent their escape. Can you imagine? Though, even if they only do it to enforce trade laws, shutting down a system's gates would likely have huge repercussions for trade and be a huge hit in terms of trust in regard to merchants and other factions.) It'd be much more effective and realistic if they called for backup first, wait for them to arrive, approach a smuggler, engage hyperspace jammers, then contact a smuggler about their illicit cargo. Granted, the smuggler will probably be gone by then. But, at least they won't embarrass their faction or waste their lives and ships needlessly. Besides: If a route is worth smuggling illicit goods once, then smugglers will probably use it again. Currently, though, the illegal cargo system is pretty broken. All factions scan player ships regularly. And they enforce their cargo laws religiously, no matter a player's relations to their faction. No matter how profitable, no illicit cargo pays enough to compensate for the huge hits to rep for destroying their ships. Players can be hostile to some factions, but they can't afford to be at war with all of them. Anyway, shipping legit cargo is plenty profitable and pays almost as good. The only way it pays is if you ignore them and are in a ship that's able to outrun them. But even that strategy is fraught with peril because of how easy it is to accidentally hand over our illicit cargo and pay their fines. (See the Please stop spacebar from auto-paying space police topic for details.) Oh, and then there's how there's currently no way to obtain a permit to haul cargo like guns or warheads legally. There should definitely be a way for a player with excellent relations with a faction to either purchase or earn permits to haul cargo like that. We see other merchants haul such cargo all the time.

So that's why the handling is so terrible in this game! That's why I keep overshooting the docking ports, despite turning my ship around to decelerate. Logic dictates that it should work, but it doesn't! >:( I figured out that much pretty quickly, despite the fact that this is also counter-intuitive.

I just updated my list and tried to make it as current as possible, with the information available. Sadly, it seems Apocalyptic Galaxy PvP encountered frequent bugs and wipes and was shut down - at least for now. (I was looking forward to trying it this weekend, too...) Yep. Looks great! I'm really tempted to try out Rusty's Galaxy next. Updated in my list. Please let me know when/if you start to add mods and I'll update it again. (That said, I do have a short attention span. I can't promise that I'll still be playing Avorion next month or even next week.) Updated in my list.

It looks like this thread is mostly about tips for using Build Mode itself, not material or design tips. However, I would recommend that you read the Material Flavor and Analysis topic, particularly the OP, since Ranakastrasz gives such useful data on how material affects different kinds of blocks. Also:

If you just want to scale a module up or down, you could try to scale it in-game. Just apply one of these modules and follow these instructions to scale a ship. I seem to have had some success in scaling the Mk 7 Void Drive. But the stats may not scale exactly like one expects. BTW: I find it handy to convert these modules or parts of my own ships into templates. This can be done through one of the two methods mentioned in the above link. Doesn't even cost money? Can't get much smaller or cheaper than that. It sounds about perfect if having multiple mining drones with 1 mining laser is the goal. Though, I just read this Mining bots topic that claims having multiple mining ships will usually lead to them attacking and destroying each other, especially if they don't have much hp. I'm now thinking that I'm better off with one mining drone with two mining lasers to mine faster. But that would require a crew of 6. (That is, 1 captain, 1 mechanic, and 4 (2 x 2) miners.) Since crew quarters depend on size, I'll need something a bit bigger than that, unfortunately. As I mentioned above, I had some success in scaling the Mk 7 Void Drive. And scaling it to 0.5 x 0.5 x 2 seems about right for adding enough crew quarters for +2 without hurting performance much. Bare bones, this scaled void drive costs $199 and 85 iron, which is still pretty cheap. BTW: Would it be okay to share some Mk 7 Void Drive resizes and derivatives here? Aside from some resizes, I made separate Engines-only and Thrusters-only versions. (Interestingly, combining the separate Engines-only and Thrusters-only versions resulted in less than half the Brake Thrust of the original, but the rest of the stats were pretty close.)

Really? But Nova, Nebula, Constellation and Galaxy are actual ship classes used in the Star Trek franchise. Not that this doesn't make a certain amount of sense, but that's blatantly Star Wars. Wait... Are you saying that Star Wars is bigger? Is this a Star Wars vs. Star Trek thing? :o ::) ;D On a more serious note, I noticed that Dashychan mentioned here in the "Can't use Jumpgates" thread that upgrading his ship to 10 slots prevented him from using Jumpgates. And dookiejones mentions here in the "Jump gate ship size limit" topic that his ship of 35.66 million m3 is unable to use them. That's not exact, especially if the game goes by length or something else. But it maybe be enough for a rough ballpark to keep in mind that 9 is probably the limit.

That probably is more historically accurate. I will admit that "Destroyer" should be considered a bigger class than "Frigate". It was hard to judge from the WII data I was looking at. I'll also admit that "Carrier" is mostly about role and doesn't really say much about size. As such, it should probably be limited to describing a ship's role. But we're talking about terms to describe space-faring vessels in a sandbox space sim. We don't have to be historically accurate. I don't doubt that "Dreadnought" is often misused and misunderstood. However, it is already in common use in fiction to describe absolutely enormous ships. I think it's only fair to continue this mis-use, especially considering how epic it sounds. "Super-Battleship" just does not have the same ring to it. Unfortunately, you're probably right. But I'd still like to see some of us agree on a scale and hope it somewhat catches on. After that, perhaps someone would create a mod to incorporate it. But there are problems with using the traditional naval classification: It's already in common use by Avorion players. But players have their own ideas about how they should be used and what size they are supposed to designate (assuming they even believe it should denote size). Even if some of us could agree one what the scale should mean in terms of size, such distinctions are meaningless because we can't know whether or not a given player is sticking to the agreed on size chart. Being traditional and a carryover from historical navies, the terms come with certain connotations and implied meanings - particularly about ship role and armament. This makes it difficult for us to come to an agreement, as this thread has already shown. As such, I propose that a new scale be formed from invented terms. Because: An invented scale does not have to stick to tradition. The terms can mean whatever we want them to mean. It can use terms not currently used by anyone. As such, when it starts to see use, it is clear to everyone that they are using this agreed-upon size scale. Without much in the way of connotations or preconceived notions, it should be much easier for us to assign numbers to the terms. Using invented terms to describe size allows us to continue using traditional Transport / Battleship / Carrier labels to describe a ship's role. An omnicron-based scale could be useful to easily convey a ship's destructive potential. I can imagine using it. However, it does nothing to describe noncombat ships like freighters or miners. And because it relies heavily on the number, type and quantity of turrets and systems, it does not truly describe a ship's size. However, classifying ships based on available module slots is pretty clever. I remember reading that Reddit on Block size and scaling with that beautiful chart. Having a scale increase exponentially is not necessarily a bad thing. The only problem I see is that it scales up a bit too fast. For right now, let's say that a decent invented scale would be "Class {x}", were {x} represents the number of module slots: 1 = Class I = 0 m3 2 = Class II = 51,000 m3 3 = Class III = 128,000 m3 4 = Class IV = 0.32 million m3 5 = Class V = 0.8 million m3 6 = Class VI = 2 million m3 7 = Class VII = 5 million m3 8 = Class VIII = 12.5 million m3 9 = Class IX = 19.764 million m3 10 = Class X = 31.25 million m3 11 = Class XI = 43.065 million m3 ... Most player ships that I've seen would fall between Class 1 and Class 5. I have seem some extremely large ships reach Class 10 or so, though. But there's a huge difference between a 5,000 cubic meter ship and a 50,000 cubic meter ship, though both would be Class 1. How about my scale of "comet" through "supergalaxy"? I could tweak it so it would have 15 categories to represent up to 15 module slots: 1 = Comet 2 = Satellite 3 = Planet 4 = Stellar 5 = Nova 6 = Supernova 7 = Nebula 8 = Constellation 9 = Singularity 10 = Quasar 11 = Galaxy 12 = Supergalaxy 13 = Cosmic 14 = Hyperdimensional 15 = Multiverse

If you are looking for extreme performance in a small package and at a reduced cost, I recommend that you take a look at the Scytales Laboratories, Optimized Starter Ships and Ship Modules thread. Scytales has created several "modules" of Engine/Thruster clusters, a Generator cluster, and a Shield cluster that exploits some design loopholes. In addition to the files, he also explains how it works and how to create your own.

A useful technique, to be sure. However, I wish the game had a built in scaling function that would allow us to scale by a specific amount, like x1.5, x2, x4, etc. The shortcoming of this method is that it seems very difficult to scale by a specific amount. I believe that a consequence of scaling by an arbitrary amount is that if we later decide to add more blocks to our design, the new blocks might not fit. That is, limitations of the available Scale Steps and Grid Sizes may mean that new blocks we place will tend to overlap, either preventing us from placing such blocks or forcing us to leave a gap or something.

As mentioned here: How to scale a ship up or down: [*]Click the "Select Blocks By Drawing A Frame" option. [*]Drag the selection rectangle around the entire module to select everything. [*]Press [Ctrl]+"c" to copy. [*]Turn 'Safe Mode' off. [*]Delete the ship, but make sure to leave behind at least one block! (The easiest way would be to either add one more block and then deleted selected blocks, or Apply a basic cube ship .xml. See Note 1, below.) [*]Press [Ctrl]+"v" to paste. [*]Adjust your Scale Step and Grid Size as needed. [*]Hold down either W, A, S, or D while dragging the mouse to scale. Note 1: Optional (easier) way to skip steps 4 and 5; If you saved the base cube as a ship file beforehand, you could simply Apply that. I find that easier. I believe most players call them "templates" because these are all saved in the templates.xml file (found in your C:\Users\ [username] \AppData\Roaming\Avorion\ folder). How to create new templates (bottom of your build inventory window): [*]Select the blocks you want to become a template using either the "Select Blocks" option or the "Select Blocks By Drawing A Frame" option. [*]Press [Ctrl]+"c" to copy. [*]Press [space] to open the build inventory window [*]Press [Ctrl]+"v" to create a new template out of the selected blocks. Sometimes, however, I have need to convert a ship file directly into a template without the copy and paste method. (The copy and paste method may change something.) How to convert a ship .xml into a template: Create a copy / backup of your templates.xml file. (See above for location.) Open templates.xml with either Notepad or Notepad++. At the bottom of the file, right before the last </templates>, insert this code: <template accumulateHealth="true" convex="true"> </template> Open the ship .xml with either Notepad or Notepad++. Copy the ship's data, but only the stuff between the <ship accumulateHealth="true" convex="false"> and </ship> tags. Paste it between the <template> </template> tags in the code above. Save your modified templates.xml file. Profit.

Q1: Do you have a Discord or use voice chat? Q2: Do you consider mod recommendations? I'm looking for a server to call home that uses asteroid respawning and Out of Sector Production (and maybe Highlight other players).

Heh. At the very least, one would expect them to phrase it in the form of a polite reminder and request and preceding said request with the word "Please..." ;D In all seriousness, though, I recall reading something about player-created factions as an upcoming feature. I would hope that NPC factions would not try to enforce their laws on player factions, because to do otherwise is just asking for all-out war. It would be undiplomatic and unrealistic. If merely joining a player-made faction which doesn't mind it's members hauling "questionable" cargo makes players immune to such, then I'd say that's more-or-less good enough. Though, I guess it would be nice to see a size rule on trying to enforce cargo laws.

Request: These modules are all awesome. But would you consider creating a separate Engine module and Thruster module that is similar to The Mk. 7 Void Drive, but with reduced performance and costs? The Mk. 7 is already cheap. But, I'm going to be designing some AI mining drones and I want them to be as cheap and disposable as possible. And while I want them to be fast, they don't need nearly that much performance. Also, I think I prefer engines and thrusters to be separate modules.

It took me a good deal of time to read through all the pages of topics in the Multiplayer area, skimming through each OP to see if they are vanilla or modded. I realized that this would be a big deal, so I took notes and compiled a list: MODDED SERVERS [Germany] [24] Rusty's Galaxy [x2] [EU/NL] {BETA branch} {Discord} (Note: Has a long list of mods, including OutOfSector Production, Highlight other players, & respawning asteroids. Collision is set to 0.5. Difficulty at Veteran, but soon to be increased.) [uSA] [100] CORE COMMUNITY - pup1l.com - 24/7 - PvP/PvE {Discord} {Website} (Note: Roleplaying server? Has lots of custom ships, custom stations, and custom scripts and mods. Has a few off-the-self mods.) [Germany] [100] Omicron Alpha PvP 24/7 MODDED Dedicated {Discord} {Teamspeak} (Note: Long list of mods & game tweaks + OutOfSector Production, respawning asteroids, and /Sethome. Increased Money/Resources & better turrets on start. Difficulty set to Hard and Collision set to 0.15.) [France] [50] Just-Look.net - PvP - 24/7 100 Slot [EU] {Teamspeak} Warning! Ping MUST be below 100! (Note: Has 10 mods, including Sector Cleaner and a variety of much larger Xsotan ships.) [Germany] [30] Tarantel.YT - MODDED/PVE/Random Start - TS3 [DE/EN] (Note: Decreased Alienspawnrate and disabled Bountyhunter Jammer and Factionwars. Changes to Mining Systems and Weapon Factories. Has a ship Salvage command and /Sethome. MOSTLY VANILLA (LIGHTLY MODDED) [Germany] [25] Imperial Galaxy's 24/7 (Gmod - Immortal-Gaming) Int. (Note: Has wreckage cleanup and /Sethome scripts, with plans for more modifications.) [uK] [30] The Holy Checksum - Dedicated Server 24/7 {Discord w/ voice} (Note: Mostly vanilla, but uses a cleansector script and has /Sethome. Difficulty is set at Hard and collision damage is set to 0.5.) [Canada] [50] reagansmaaaaash's Smaaaaash! Avorion Server: NYC, No Rules, PVE/PVP {BETA branch} (Note: Only has a few ease-of-life scripts.) [uSA] [20] avorion.ddz.net - 24/7 uptime, East Coast (Mostly vanilla, but uses the cleansector script and has /Sethome. Collision damage is turned off.) [Canada] [30] Krusty Krab - dedicated PvP/PvE nolag {Discord} (Note: Mostly vanilla so far, but asteroids respawn and it has /Sethome. Collision is set to 0.5. Everyone starts in same sector. Both resources and drops are x2.) [Germany] [100] GameUnity.TV Avorion Server [EU / English / German] {Teamspeak} {Discord} {Forum} (Note: Mostly vanilla, but uses the respawn asteroids script and has /Sethome. Collision damage is disabled. [Germany] [36] Bonig's Public High Performance Beta {BETA branch} {Teamspeak} (Note: Only mods seem to be /Sethome and a "secret multiplayer boss". PvP is allowed. Trade by Admin or TS. Random spawn is disabled. Difficulty is Hard and Collision is set to 0.5.) [uSA] [10] AvorionGame.Claytonia.net - Claytonia Dedicated Server {Teamspeak} {Website} (Note: Lightly modded with the scripts /sethome, /crew, /price, and /save. Difficulty, collision and everything else is default.) [uSA] [50] N0SOV 24/7 server - No Lag - PVP (Note: All goods can be produced and has a /Sethome command. Out of sector production temporarily disabled. Players start in random sectors and PVP is allowed anywhere. Difficulty is set to Insane and collision is set to 0.5.) [Canada] [100] Top Hat Galaxy - PvE/PvP-24/7-Dedicated Server {Teamspeak} (Note: Only mod is /Sethome. Difficulty is Normal. Resources and drops set to x2.) [Germany] [50] Lost-Survivors.com - Lost-Survivors 2 {BETA branch} {Teamspeak} {Website} (Note: Only mod is /Sethome. Random start location. Difficulty is Insane. Collision damage is x2 (or twice normal)!) VANILLA (THE ABSENCE OF MODS) [uSA] [20] rcp.t3stn3t.com - T3stN3t - Ohio-based 24/7 dedicated {Discord (English)} [Canada] [50] Desolation PVP 24/7 Dedicated Vanilla {Discord} [Germany] [40] avorionserver.de - Dedicated Linux Server 24/7 {Teamspeak (German)} {Forum} [Germany] [250] server.eyvalon.de - An Eyvalon Avorion Server - Dedicated public server/community {Teamspeak} {Website} (Note: Difficulty is set to Veteran and Collision is set to 0.25.) DOES NOT SPECIFY Dedicated Koeln Server 256 Players Max "Tested" (Stabel) (German / English) avoriondb.com - Avorion DB - Deutschland - 24/7 - PvP/PVE mumble.net-freaks.com - UK LEASED LINE 24/7 Polski Avorion 24/7 us.hyper-core.net - Hyper-Core Networks Dedicated Server mc.stonelegion.com - 24/7 Dedicated with Discord! mumble.net-freaks.com - UK leased line server server.hadelmia.com - Singularity - 24/7, No Wipe Furion Server! [sWE/ENG] quailgg94.hopto.org - quagmire's server Spark of Insanity MP Server [EU] EliteCorp recruting [ENG/RUS] (EU) with Discord BlackHole server[ENG/RUS] (EU) Naggerknife's New Whitelisted Server with Teamspeak tbts.hopto.org - ToxicBlotch's UK Dedicated Server 24/7 avorion.rine.de - rine77's new open server [GMT] [Germany] [20] Andromedagalaxie (Season Sinope) 24/7 EU/DE [Australia] [20] hodgoes2001's Aussie Dedicated Server 24/7 {Teamspeak} [France] [100] globot.ddns.net - GLobot World Dedicated 24/7 server {Teamspeak} [uSA] [10] minecraftunion.ddns.net - PVE {Discord} (Note: Difficulty set to Normal.) [uSA West] [50] Rionopia 24/7 [PVP] (Note: Will be implementing certain mods "in the future".) [uSA] [99] deadspace.dyndns.org . An Avorion Server {BETA branch} {Discord} OFFLINE SERVERS [Germany] [50] Apocalyptic Galaxy PvP - Dedicated 24/7 {Discord} (Note: Player can claim sector. Uses Out of Sector Production, more player-owned stations, asteroids respawn in all active sectors, and has /Sethome. Difficulty is Hard. Resources and drops are x5.) {Server has been down.} CANCELLED SERVERS? [France] [100] vps354132.ovh.net - Slacking Galaxy for all [PvE] {Disabled: RAM management issues} [uSA] [25] Clan Maelstrom's Veteran Vanilla - 24/7 - PvP/PvE {BETA branch} {Discord w/ voice} (Note: Only mod is /Sethome. Difficulty is Veteran. Collision is 0.25.) {Shut down for lack of players} [France] [20] The Kujiratori Avorion Server - games.kujiratori.com [uSA] [??] NY The Southern Tier (Note: Collision is disabled.) If you don't count /Sethome, vanilla servers seem to outnumber modded. But one can't be certain because most servers won't specify. To be fair, installing and updating mods is currently a bit of a pain. (The dev is talking about fixing this.) But I hope to see more servers that at least support some ease-of-life scripts. Even if they don't use any other mods, I've noticed that many servers are now using one of the /Sethome scripts, which I'm sure many players appreciate. Myself, when I look to join a server, I look for one that uses the Out of Sector Production mod, Highlight other players, the resourcerespawn mod (for asteroids that respawn), and /Sethome (as a bare minimum).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but: I don't believe there is a parameter to keep certain sectors 'awake'. I think the vanilla game is going to make those sectors sleep, regardless. That said, if you are interested in keeping certain sectors awake, such as to make player-own factories and mines useful even when they're not in the sector, you may be interested in Laserzwei's Out of Sector Production mod: While I don't know what the performance would be like on a server, it sounds like it should not impact performance very much. It does not actually keep sectors awake. All it does is simulate factory and mine production. As an added bonus, it also allows players to move those big asteroids that they've claimed: I had it installed for a while and did not notice any bugs. But I've not had a chance yet to test it with player-owned factories or mines. It sounds awesome and I don't understand why I can't find this mod installed on any server...

That is overkill. I think we should keep this request simple so it might be seriously considered. The only information that is truly needed to convey the true direction of the ship's movement is a simple marker. It could be in the form of a colored or blinking cross-hair in combination with a dotted line, or several ">" arrows or something pointing to the spot. Or maybe it would be some blinking lines or something on the side of the screen that we'd have to line up to find the true movement direction. Though, to line up the ship to fire in reverse, we'd also need an indication of the exact opposite of the ship's true movement. That may require either two indicators or a key press to switch between forward movement and what is needed for reverse movement. Having an option to automatically use our ship's main engines to slow down definitely seems like cheating, especially if you don't expect the ship to have to do a 180 and face the opposite direction. Anyway, such an option would pretty much defeat the purpose of having a Brake Thrust stat and diminish the importance of good Thrusters. If you think ships in Avorion are hard to steer and maneuver, then you must never have tried one of the Elite games.

One feature that I would really appreciate - even more than sharing ships via Steam Workshop - would be the ability to easily share individual template designs with other players. By "templates" I'm talking about the custom predefined shapes as found at the bottom of the Build Mode building inventory window. I suppose we could share the whole "templates.xml" file. But who wants to do that? The only somewhat painless way to use someone else's templates is to replace our own "templates.xml" file, but that replaces any custom templates of our own. It's either that, or opening it up in Notepad to copy and paste the relevant sections of the code. But that is intimidating and not very convenient. I reason that if it was as easy to share templates as it was ship blueprints, we'd already be seeing some players sharing their templates. But, AFAIK, that does not happen. The reason I want it to be easy to share templates is because having a large library of templates makes it a lot easier to design complex and cool-looking ships and stations. I'd like to be able to have templates like conning towers, radar masts, and cargo pods, in a variety of sizes and shapes. Currently, Avorion comes with only 8 very simple templates. And those are huge and only seem suitable for building stations.

Yes, this would be extremely useful. I hate having to try to figure out where to aim the nose of my ship to properly decelerate rapidly with a full engine burn. I usually end up aiming wrong and either not delerating much, or making it worse and overshooting. I've never played Kerbal Space Program. But I seem to recall seeing a velocity marker like the OP is talking about in other space sim games. In other words, this true ship direction (which is independent of where the ship's nose is pointing) would be to engines as an Aiming Reticle would be to turrets. It shows the player exactly where to point for maximum effect.

I was thinking it would be nice to be able to copy a specific NPC ship or station. I do realize that we can visit a faction's shipyard where we have the option to build a new ship in one of three "styles" of the faction. However, I don't believe that is the same as creating a perfect duplicate. That is, I'm thinking of the ability to select an NPC ship or station and pressing a key combination (like [ctrl]+[F7] or something) that would create a new blueprint in our /ships/ folder - automatically named "npcship1.xml" or "npcstation1.xml" or something. We'd still have to expend the required materials and credits to make them of course. I'm just talking about the blueprint. Good idea? Bad idea?

Thanks. That is a good point. Another thought: Perhaps the volume at which a ship is too big to fit through a jumpgate should be the basis for another part of the scale? If the game's definition of "Battleship" can fit through a jumpgate (and say 'if' because I don't know), then would "Dreadnought" on my scale be the size at which a ship is barely too big? Or does the jumpgate restriction have more to do with cross-section diameter than it does volume?

Looking in the Creations area, I see that several players have started to use terms like "frigate", "cruiser" and "battleship" to describe the size and/or role of the ships they've designed. And this got me thinking: What sort of tonnage or volume constitutes a specific classification like that in a game like Avorion, where we can build ships kilometers across or even to ? I'm not sure that traditional naval ship classifications are appropriate, especially since such classifications are for combat naval ships and often speak as much or more about the role as it does size. But here are some traditional classifications I've been thinking of (in increasing size): shuttle gunboat frigate destroyer light cruiser cruiser battlecruiser battleship dreadnought mobile fortress mega-fortress sd-fortress (super-dimensional fortress) Alternatively, perhaps it would be better to use an arbitrary classification system? Perhaps something like: Class I Class II Class III Class IV [snip]... Or, if that's too boring, maybe an arbitrary scale system should convey a sense of size? Perhaps: Comet Asteroid Satellite Planet Stellar Nova Supernova Singularity Constellation Quasar Galaxy Supergalaxy (Yes, that is a thing. Look it up.) Once we've settled on the type of scale, there's the matter of assigning meaningful numbers to them. And should such scales be measured by tonnage or volume? I'm thinking volume, because tonnage can vary greatly depending on the materials and block types, etc. I'm also thinking the scale should be logarithmic instead of linear, so it could meaningfully cover ships even if they are kilometers across. Though, I don't think a scale should go into ridiculous sizes until the last few entries near the end. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Looking good. I'm especially liking the angles on the Cormorant. TIP: The forum may only allow 192 KB per post and only 128 KB per individual file, but if you compress a ship's .XML into a .ZIP or .RAR it will become much, much smaller. You'd probably be able to fit your ship files without a problem, then.

As mentioned in the Custom Predefined Shapes topic, we can add our own custom shapes to the templates window in build mode. I've had the experience of wanting to delete one or more templates that I created. Unfortunately, there currently does not seem to be an easy way to do this. The way I finally managed this was by opening up my templates.xml file (located in C:\Users\ [username] \AppData\Roaming\Avorion\) in Notepad++ and carefully deleting the right <template></template> brackets. This is made difficult by the fact that none of the templates have a name. So, I have to judge which is the right one by the order in the list and the size. And that brings me to my next suggestion: The ability to change the order of templates in the template portion of the window. Currently, the order can not be manually changed - aside from editing it via Notepad or something. Even so, I have seen the order of templates change automatically after re-opening build mode. (Or was it after reloading the game?) Also, it would be nice to be able to attach a name to a template.

Neat! You know... I could imagine the dev making using of this design when the game first loads. Or maybe we'd see a short flyby of this as the intro to the next official Avorion video?

That 482 m/s/s Brake Thrust is just insane! It really does stop on a dime. Having 120+ m/s/s thrust isn't shabby, either! And all with just 1 mechanic and no engineers? :o I guess this "void technology" really is the cat's meow... at least until the dev updates in a way that changes how it works. Anyway, really nice job with designing this. I can imagine a lot of uses for it. I'm particularly, interested in trying to copy-n-paste several of them as part of a big ship. P.S.: You may want to mention the costs: 511 Iron 1180 Credits