Taelessael

The main current difference between and exploration ship and a combat ship will probably be functional range. Dedicated combat ships I have encountered (or seen/built) tend to operate out of bases or off of carriers, they can dish it out and take it, but even with spare fuel they tend to run dry a lot sooner than a dedicated exploration ship. As for combat vs everything else: this being an MMO the general idea would be to either out-smart the combat ship (have someone fly scout/bait ahead to draw off attackers), out-plan the combat ship (figure where they are probably waiting, and fly around that area rather than through it), or out-prepare the combat ship (hire/bring a combat ship with you as an escort). In regards to L weapons, they quite logically have the highest damage, and people tend to take half a look and go "biggest number wins". In practice things can be a bit more complicated, but that is quite heavily scenario dependent. Tracking isn't as huge an issue as you'd think it could be, currently (in my experience) it tends to be more about element damage/repair/replacement and ammo/fuel supply in larger ships, gold or not. Voxel supply can become an issue eventually if the ships manage to drag on for long enough, but I don't see that often before something else becomes a problem (recently anyways). Speaking of gold, it isn't even remotely realistic, and only results from the fact that hp is tied directly to weight for voxel. Because of this two ships of equal mass/weight of voxel, one gold and one maraging-steel, will have identical voxel hp totals. Gold's only real advantages over any other tier 4/5 material is that you can make it thinner for the same hp, and that pure honeycomb is less work-intensive than product. It will still weigh just as much for any given set hp value. The cargo-mass idea is good, that should help get your desired results. If I had to guess, safe engines were built to be the "oh snap, I'm attacked from surprise, must get going to counter" engines... They were intended to try and survive long enough to let the ship they are attached to "scramble" in to combat and would be best served in a defensive role (similar to the WW2 German Komet), something currently less than ideal given the prevalence of safe-zones inside of which one can build their bases/stations. Their value will probably increase when we get other solar-systems that don't have safe-zones, though I can't guarantee they will match the other engines in value or use even then. Also, now that I think about it (being more awake helps), voxel is already its own issue. In short: too much hp (for too little weight). It doesn't stand out so badly if designs use thin-ish hulls and some degree of even vaguely artistic layout, but sooner or later someone brings a death-brick and you realize that even if you strip it clean of external elements, you cant actually kill it without bringing a similarly sized cargo-block full of extra ammo. Buffing voxel would probably only make the issue worse. I wont say such designs should be against the rules if someone wants to spend the resources, but I cant advise doing anything that significantly incentivizes their use.

The whole "M-cores must compete with L-cores" thing I keep seeing confuses me a bit. I don't understand why people think one or two ships should be capable of reasonably competing in combat against something that has 8 times their mass. 2 M each fielding the same crew/weapons compliment and skills as a single L will match it for damage, but that L will still have significantly more tank and repair capacity to it than both the M combined. Additionally, boosting M weapons enough to even it out will just result in L-cores with M weapons instead of L. Limiting the bonus to core sizes instead would prevent this, but it would also just shift the meta to M cores, annoying people that had L and accelerating their efforts in min-maxing due to the increase in gathered info resulting from reduced costs (we'd be looking at cubes again, in M scale instead of XS). Increased ammo cap sounds nice. Trying to push materials away from gold is nice decoratively, but voxel HP is the way it is for a reason. It needs some tweaks to be sure, but buffing any small sub-set by a significant margin is just going to push everything in to being that instead. Resists (when they exist) are a function of tier, hp is a function of weight, and while I can agree that there should probably be a tier 5 that works better than gold, I cant advise putting anything else even close to it as it would risk significantly reducing the cost of armoring those ships belonging to players/factions that can already afford huge amounts of gold. Reducing container capacity would be circumvented immediately by using sub-cores and loopholes (that exist intentionally to significantly reduce game-loading and frustration) in the linking system. Care must be taken with the suggestion of boosting seat-capacity, as NQ isn't keen on having very small groups wield huge amounts of guns (it would reduce the need for cooperative play in what is supposed to be an MMO) Radars/brakes would be nice. Why are we trying to buff voxels and (exclusively) safe engines? Pirates chasing your exploration ship will use this stuff just for the radar, and applying these buffs isn't going to stop a purpose-built attack ship with the same buffs from taking the purpose built explorer down. Cargo sounds nice, but will get sub-cored on to ships of all types as mentioned above. Preventing direct territory scanner attachment will get circumvented immediately with sub-cores. Extra lift sounds nice for haulers. Almost everything already uses more fuel than fright engines, except for the maneuver engines which have less tank than your freights from the get-go. A good concept, and I'd like to see it developed (although perhaps tied to cores instead of chairs), but in suggestions like this a significant amount of consideration must always be given to both "how will people abuse this" because this is the internet and it will happen, and "why is this the way it is right now" because sometimes things that may seem to just be casually there are actually specific choices serving a good purpose. If you'd like I'd gladly discuss this with you at length to see if we can refine and improve on the idea.

Perhaps I am just missing something, but given how BP currently work, this just seems like building an overcomplicated box in to which you deploy it. It makes sense in SE because you cant just link to a container and drop a print, you actually needed a printer for speed-building. In DU we'd need to remove some or all function from the print deployment tool and hand it over to some manner of printer element. It would definitely be cool, but something will need to be done to account for ownership, and some manner of significant test run would be required to ensure a reasonably large portion of the rest of the player-base likes it,

I can appreciate the aesthetic desire, but wheels and SE's clang-engines can stay in SE. Better to just have an element that produces some manner of speed-controlled wheel-hologram, and have elements that adjust their location/facing as a specific feature of that element (or again with holograms that produce the appearance of movement simulating the desired look).

A research system allowing players to produce BP themselves to then either sell or use would be far superior to the fixed "obtain from bots only" system we are currently using. It would be another play-style people could pursue, and it would make the fact that the prints exist to get people to use the market rather than just building their own private mega-factory feel a bit less forced.

From my experience, stuff like this just annoys people, becoming another kind of "tedious durability" to manage. Better to just make it a skin / voxel-type that is always that way if you'd like to fly something with that look. One should most definitely be able to trust in the rust if they so desire, but I must advise against pushing it on everyone. Having to wash a car only a few meters long IRL is enough of a chore, I have no desire to then have to come wash my much larger star-ship off after.

-I can see requiring snow/ice (available on several planets) to feed a recycler making these things, but don't see why you'd need a planet with natural organic matter for this process. Also, Alioth isn't the only green planet in the current system. -If the stuff can still be produced in your pack anywhere for free, people will just stock-pile it that way. -Resources for fuel used to only be available on certain planets, and as much as I liked having the option of hauling something as simple as fuel between planets to make cash, NQ killed it (and now bots sell fuel on every planet and moon last I checked). It isn't hard to guess why. While I wouldn't mind a return to "fuel isn't everywhere", their actions were not without reason and so one must consider as to weather or not reverting to the old way will help/increase the player base, or just help those of us smart enough to bring an extra fuel can while driving off the less careful that would otherwise pay for the game (and by extension, help pay for larger/more important improvements else-ware).

NQ has been in the process of slowly pulling bots from the markets for a while now. This thread is old and does not need to be necro'd.

Debatable. Yes people can multi-box and pay for multiple accounts, but groups of people running only single accounts can also just cooperate. Also, if someone is willing to pay for the half-dozen subs just to collect daily rewards they'd need to outperform a single moderately active miner and have a few extra talents they can apply to a construct via re-logging, I'd be inclined to let them have it. More money to NQ helps them do what they need to do to give us all a better game, and a half-dozen people working together will blow a single guy with a half-dozen alts out of the water near about every time (and please don't argue that it isn't a guarantee means it will ruin the game for everyone forever, exceptions can exist, and all of them are small). When beta launched I was with a group of 20+ guys that b-lined for what we knew would get us easy money at the time. The group would mine, and then since I had classes at the time they were on I would load up the stuff they collected and afk-haul to the market. Sell it, and fly back with the cash. After that, we'd have our 20 guys buy TU, drop them all where we needed more hexes (it was cheaper to have individually owned hexes that were just shared) and keep on. Later, when we got in to PvP, we'd have ships with 1 dedicated pilot, and (if I recall correctly) as many as 5 gunners. We weren't multi-boxing, we were just an actual group of people playing an MMO cooperatively. If there are people botting, then something needs to be done to stop it, but please be extremely careful in complaints of "pay2win-cause-multibox". Most of the time I hear that argument it is coming from people trying to either solo-play the MMO, or play with only a very small group and getting frustrated that they cant keep up by themselves with a much larger faction.

No mistake, in games where that is a thing (if rare) chain-reactions are the best. Tis like getting a rare item in a game that randomly determines your loot on things, but I do agree that such scenarios would not be the intent of the system. If something goes up and does damage near-by systems it should only risk such a chain-reaction if those systems are already damaged enough to be destroyed by the explosion, and even then they should still only have a limited chance of going up as was described above.

Scanning a lot less of then t2+ stuff has always been the norm for me, but that could just be me. Saving on game-load by filling in the tunnels/caverns in unclaimed every so often sounds like a great idea. Ore-refilling could be nice, but a large part of new-player-mining issues is likely to be the ever expanding blockade of claimed territory they cant dig. Both issues combined aren't nice to new people's time, so something may need to be done about that.

-I'd have to say keep the replace tool, as it is useful if you find yourself needing to swap entirely between materials on a construct for any reason. -A paint tool has been something people have wanted for a very long time, but if one is added it would be far easier (and so get it to us players faster) to have it swap the color of an entire voxel rather than just the color on one surface of that voxel. -Honeycomb needs to be heavier... by a lot... I can appreciate that it is more or less product-styrofoam, but as is the stuff is so light that ships with meter-thick steel hulls seem perfectly reasonable for atmospheric flight just to accommodate the desire for a particular color and the lazy-ness to not hollow shapes out. -It would be nice if product honeycomb produced more per batch than pure. It currently takes more work and material, but has slightly lower average stats than pure.

Nerfing weapons isn't really going to help anything, combat between larger ships can already easily drag on until one side or the other just starts running low on ammo/fuel/spare elements and tries to flee. If your desire is to make things such that groups of smaller craft can reasonably handle larger ones, you'd be better off buffing the damage of smaller weapons up than trying to bring larger ones down.

Perhaps not a guaranteed explosion? Some items would obviously be more sensitive than others, but people tend to put a lot of work in to making sure things are a lot less explody than they seem to be in movies and the like. Ammo magazines get designed to blow out a venting-hatch rather than obliterating the crew or engine compartments, electrical systems tend to blow a fuse or trip a breaker, and several types of fuel will extinguish fires rather than ignite except under specific circumstances. Explosive failure isn't impossible, but often is statistically unlikely... probably because engineers tend to watch the people in Starfleet get blown across the bridge by exploding consoles and wonder why people that have mastered FTL seem to have never heard of fuses/circuit-breakers, and then make extra sure to install them in their own designs. -The weapon dealing the damage could potentially alter the chance of explosions, incendiaries tend to be better at lighting flammable things than simple kinetic penetrators. -I can see this being a higher chance for both fuel-tanks and ammo containers provided they aren't empty. -Engines and weapons that still have rounds loaded should probably have only a small chance of exploding under the stated conditions, as in real life many such items that suffer a disabling amount of damage from something tend to cause little or no damage to the surrounding components even when disabled under full operating load (again significant secondary damage isn't impossible, just statistically uncommon). -Jump-drives and anti-gravs are a bit harder to figure, as we have nothing in real life to compare them to, so it will be up to NQ to say how easily these items do unhappy things in response to bullets. Theoretically, if you can get physics to divide by zero, you end up with a black-hole... Practically if you try something somewhere prevents it... and then that something tends to explosively sublimate/evaporate/vaporize and takes the rest of the near-by components with it. Roughly a penny's worth of copper will attempt to take up the same space as a refrigerator and only puts a hole as small as a grapefruit in the nearest surface of its steel enclosure if the blast has somewhere to go, so if these can go, they could be potentially quite reactive.

Sorry for the wall of text... TL/DR: Consider the wider player base first (on both sides of the pvp line). In regards to the issues of: -How stuff played in backer week / when "X" bug existed: It was imperfect, it needed fixes, and for the most part they were implemented. Wanting to wipe the world because some folks got lucky and played an easy meta for a bit without breaking the rules is like wanting a wipe because you aren't the greatest after joining a persistent world late. Wiping the world to deal with the guys that abused an actual bug somewhere to get absurdly wealthy must be weighed against the loss that would be suffered by all those that didn't break the rules. Yes it is possible for portions of the gains of such problems to survive anything short of a wipe, but is completion-ist "the fruit of this bug was totally removed" worth burning everything everyone else has when some more targeted responses against just those abusers can be used to deal with the majority of the gains? Barring some extremely good reasons a lot of players would probably just quit if they had to lose all their stuff they spent all this time collecting (and worry about losing it again) because some other guy abused a bug and got an L-core cargo-block's worth of fuel/voxel/ect... -Automated Mining: This is a mixed bag. Mining is tedious, but more or less required for most of us to actually be able to afford to do things. The game needs a reduction in mining tedium in a bad way, and automating mining will help with that, but as with every change people that are better prepared to make use of it will have an advantage over those that are less prepared. -"The Warp Problem": Much as it annoys pvp'rs, the care-bears need somewhere to play, and the Alioth system is supposed to be DU's equivalent of EVE high-sec. Additional systems are supposed to be free of safe-zones, and interdiction will let you tag people that get careless with warp. It's on their to-do list, just got to wait for it. -NPC stuff: Part of where the game suffers right now is a simple lack of stuff to do. There are no missions, nothing to gain from exploration other than sight-seeing, no points of value for pvp players to fight over, ect... Players can make content, but until they do NQ has to pick up the slack to keep the player-base interested. -PvE combat specifically: There is no simple way to work this. NQ doesn't want one guy flying an ISD armored with script/AI-controlled guns (and, I do mean armored with guns, if you've played SE and seen someone coating every flat exterior surface of a death-brick with turrets you know what I'm talking about), or worse one guy commanding a fleet of drone ISD. They can work around it, but it wont be a short few lines of code if they want to keep a player-ship/station's crew requirement. Personally, I wouldn't mind some manner of pve combat if they added it in (properly, killing static targets by out-ranging them or abusing respawn gets boring really fast, and tricking reckless L core NPCs in to killing themselves with a ram would both get old quick and break the economy again). It would give care-bears that combat-lite many of them enjoy long-term, and it would generally be another thing for the wider content-starved player base to do.

You can't really inverse-ninja and MMO, any buff you give to single newer players is going to end up in the hands of older and more experienced players in large factions. More to the point, radars are for sale on the market (and they all have the same max detection range), ore is for sale on the market, and anyone can fly to any planet and go mining for the stuff they need in a safe zone. If I had to guess by the sound of it the asteroids will just be "mega-nodes in space".

-Surface harvesting has its place, but the rocks seriously clutter things visually, it may be advisable to cut their number down (say to a tenth) while increasing the time to collect them and their payoff. -Mining units will be a welcome addition for those of us that find mining tedious, but care must be taken as to their implementation lest you either end up with wealthy players immediately turning a hex with "good stats" in to a money factory that craters the value of materials gathered by newer players, or cause the existing player-base to go grab-happy and claim every tile they can afford to drop a TCU on (thus risking locking new players out of mining if too many tiles are either un-minable or stripped clean). -Shields will be appreciated for people with visually complex designs and people that find repairs tedious, but it will probably need to come with a sizeable nerf to voxel if you don't want people to abandon it entirely when they realize they probably can't carry enough ammo to kill a shielded cube under current voxel stats. -I look forward to finally having more/variant skins for weapons. It would be nice to get them on other elements too (not even major re-shapes, just alternate colors on the main color section so we aren't only stuck with bright red space engines, yellow containers/hovers, and grey everything else). -Visual improvements to planets are appreciated, but there must also be care taken to ensure to doesn't slow loading things down, most pilots and explorers tend to appreciate the visual appeal of the terrain a lot less when they need to worry about the ground suddenly deciding to jump up and swat them from the sky, or shifting up slightly after they landed but before ship physics unload and breaking their ship.

This idea could actually be an incredibly useful way to add either new elements or element skins to the game as well as the originally mentioned hand-held hardware. Players could have their avatar shunted in to a private zone (or possibly shared with other selected players?) in a way similar to how tutorials put them in a private space where the can work on a substantially scaled up version of the item or skin they are working on (thus permitting both the use of pre-existing voxel tools, and fine detail-work that can be difficult or impossible when the scale gets small enough). -The addition of an actual-size model on a "mannequin avatar" in the same space that mirrors the model being worked on could then be included to help ensure player-hardware that is being designed looks as it should, while an actual-size model of an element skin could serve the same feature for skin design. The resulting creations could then either produce a schematic as Context suggested, or be submitted to NQ for review (and/or the player-base at large for voting on what they want NQ to consider rendering as a regular element).

This seems like (more or less) what they are already doing... or is this some kind of request to produce what is effectively compactification on otherwise non-compactable constructs for hauling missions? (or giving haulers permission to maneuver-tool/parent full constructs to be transported?) Am I understanding this about right?

Ah, and before I forget, will there be a method of preventing "loading traps" where in ya get in to an area and are suddenly rammed by a storm of logout-paused speeders that someone got away from via the "force respawn on login" function?

Flight anywhere near major markets right now will be more of an issue because of this (crashing out mid-flight because you cant load it all), but that is more the result of how overcrowded those locations are than it is unloading the physics. People can fly carefully and use an ECU like the rest of us already do when multi-crewing in to those areas.The only real questions I've seen so far for the speed fix will be related to pvp: -"Will someone that has a ship locked continue to load its physics?" If the physics can be paused while a ship is being shot at, then it can be used to force a pursuer to burn huge amounts of fuel and/or lose a target entirely via the following: 1) Pursued ship uses a logout-pause. 2) Pursuing ship slams on their own brakes and/or uses a retro-burn to slow down to keep the target on radar, possibly overshooting the ship they were chasing and forcing them to burn back toward the target. 3) Pursued ship's pilot logs back in and their ship instantly re-accelerates to its previous speed, forcing their pursuers to expend fuel to perform possibly another retro-burn and then re-accelerate after the ship they are chasing, possibly losing their target entirely as they are incapable of the same acceleration. Solution: To prevent this I'd suggest that physics are kept loaded by people that have locked the ship. -"Will a ship that has been killed continue to drift every time someone tries to get close to it?" If the answer is yes, then pirating in space goes out the window for anything other than griefing, as pirates will not be able to raid a destroyed ship for parts (because it is effectively impossible to get in to the same loaded area as a drifting ship at even 4000kph due to frame of reference issues), and players will be unable to recover their destroyed ships because the ship will move when they get close to it and because it is effectively impossible to get in to the same loaded area as a drifting ship due to frame of reference issues. Solution: To prevent this I'd suggest that the ship is stopped if its core is destroyed when in less than 1% atmosphere.

This is a fiddly topic, as there are issues with things like people throwing walls of glass up (there are trolls out there than think it a good use of 7$ to greif until they get banned) or the terrain on Ion spontaneously loading mountains in to the same space you are currently flying through as you try to land. Sanctuary and Alioth should retain ownership for a large period as these are the starting areas for new players, perhaps two weeks, as it easily permits time to recover, but allows salvage on things when people crash and then quit or for some other reason dont come to re-collect it. Thadies and Madis probably need the same as it provides time for new players doing their first interplanetary run in the safe zone time to get back to their stuff after probably slamming in to a planet at top speed with their only interplanetary ship. Other planets in the system should give you a few hours so you have time to contact an admin to deal with griefers, with the caveats that this grace-period be removed when the safe-zones are taken from those planets as it will officially be open pvp, and that there be a universal 24hr grace-period after any patch deployment to deal with bugs.

If anyone can get the hud in the cockpit to display like the hud for every other control unit, both in first person and in third, I would love to know how.

Hello. This game seems interesting (it is a game with the ability to build and design starships, so it isn't surprising), though it would be nice if there was a way to keep the voxels from deforming when I am trying to create a 2x1 slope.