Kezzle

While Iorail is right that Territory Warfare is a long way off, I think this post raises fears that need addressing because they are groundless. No. The concept that people need to sleep and have lives out of the game is well-known and understood. There will, I have no doubt whatsoever, be a mechanic that means you will have time to gather your defenses/defenders before the attackers can cause your statics (at least) any damage. The most often-conceptualised approach to this is that your Territory Unit will have a shield of some description which will cost time and possibly also resources to knock down. Maybe there will be turrets. My first original design project will be how to build them out of existing parts. Maybe there will be special static defense weapons, but I would think that's less likely. There might be weapons which are impractical to put on mobile units, or flying ones, or interstellar ones. It'd be good if there were guns that were most efficicently deployed on hover vehicles, so the tank designers can have a go. But nobody knows what will actually be included. That's about it. There will be Territory Warfare. There will almost certainly be some sort of timer to give you a chance to get a defense together and deter random vandalism.

I don't think it's worth getting twisted up about current PvP. It's a placeholder, there, largely, to be able to say "Look! We have Pew Pew! Beta now." It is to be hoped that the eventual model of CvC PvP that is installed will have a few more factors than current. There are indications that some of the silliness underpinning it (like gold and marble armour) has replacements waiting in the wings for the teams to catch up with each other (have a look at the Talents for honeycomb production). Posters above have mentioned several factors which can and hopefully will change the "combat meta", and the server tech will be refined so that even at max speed, any ambushing ships not taking measures to obscure themselves will appear on scopes as they should, rather than being able to open fire before you can even see them because the servers haven't caught up. That said, this is a game with PvP underpinning it. If you do not wish to participate in PvP personally, you need to give thought to how you're going to provide for your defense in alternative ways. Basically, who're you going to pay to defend you? Bear in mind that war is expensive, and remember, folks, bullets cost money. We don't know what Territory Warfare is going to involve; getting the shield to collapse might involve a hefty bribe to the TU maintenance technicians union to turn it off. I believe the intent of TW is to make it impractical to randomly attack someone's base for the shiggles. You're less protected in space, but civilians have traded in pirate-infested waters since the days of the Sea Peoples. If there are enough PvEers, loss to piracy just becomes a bottom line deduction that you have to account for. If there are fewer than that, PvEers shoule become the focus point of space-based PvP outside of corporate warfare. There will be plenty of outfits ready to sell non-combatants protection services, just for the chance of getting a meaningful fight. Or you can do something yourself to reduce your chances of being intercepted. Approaching along a straight line between the CoM of your origin and that of your destination is a great way to get bushwhacked. If fly past your destination without coming into radar range, and approach on a variant vector, the chances of anything being able to intercept you are greatly reduced. You might need to add some brakes to your hauler so you can get through the detection envelope and make atmo faster than a blockade can react and bring you under fire. But most of all: remember this is a very alpha-y beta and far from the finished article. Things will change, and hopefully our participation will come up with a combination of systems that we can all live with which doesn't need lots of artificial "you can't cos we sez so" distinctions.

To build one, yes. And being able to design it from day one will reinforce the aspiration. Which is a Good Thing, since it will encourage people to stick around.

Industry placement skills were meant to affect speed of operation, last I looked. Any increased yield/reduced input skills are applied by the character when they press Start. Without knowing the exact Talent that Thygar is expecting to work, it's hard to say whether it's WAI (and Thygar's expectations are based on a misinterpretation), or if there's a bug.

Once you're at max speed, you can get out of the pilot seat; you won't just stop (that only happens if you disconnect). And you'll stay with your ship so long as you remain close to it. If you've hit max speed, though, you probably don't want to bother refuelling until you *need* to. Which, at least for a few transits is going to mean "once you've braked back to zero so you can correct your course". Stopping from max speed just to refuel is counterproductive as you have to use fuel to get back up to cruising speed. Space brakes don't use fuel and can kill all your vectors. I think the advice about draining your fuel tanks was meant to be that you only put enough space fuel in to get to orbit or a bit faster. Once you're coasting in space at any speed, transfer the mass of the space fuel out of your mass-cancelling backpack into the tanks and set your transit burn going.

Yeah, that free 20T in your pockets isn't for cargo. As the mosquito says, it's a great backup fuel tank...

As joaocordeiro says, the generally accepted opinion is that there will be some sort of shield on your claim that will just collapse a while after it's attacked with sufficient force. Of course this still leaves the "loner" unable to defend their stuff against a massed attack by a competent large Organisation, and solo players will need to get their friends to help them defend their land. There may be organisations out there which will defend the vulnerable from attack by the powerful, and there will certainly be Orgs out there who will be available for a fee to fight your battles for you on an ad hoc basis, or as part of a defense contract. But there are going to be an absolute metric ton of little bases everywhere, and if the mechanic is properly designed, it simply won't be worth the Big Orgs' time to go stomping all the little guys. Far better to come to mutually beneficial arrangements. What the shield (or whatever handwavium they settle on) will do, hopefully is make "casual vandalism" of static cores pretty rare, and to at least some extent, keep armed conflict to fights between significant entities of at least comparable size (by some metric...). You will still be subject to shakedown as you move about, I believe, as I think the shield either won't protect Dynamic cores, or won't go to the edge of the atmosphere.

You can create exactly bupkiss without having the parts to hand. So a beginning character can make infinite variations of 3-atmo hover-2 stabilisers. Yay.

Aye. I got badly teased by some Malachite on Sanc. Moon. It was just over the border, and I so thought it might be just my side. Turns out I have Natron, which is no surprise, since I'm based out of Madis. Inevitable, really.

The problem is I believe currently understood to be that when you pick up a control Element, the LUA it contains is saved with it, which makes it a "unique" item, and therefore no longer eligible to be used in a blueprint, or be stacked with other, ostensibly identical Elements. Renamed elements behave similarly. You can see why this might be the case, but it is, indeed, vexing, and needs sorting ASAP. Finding a method that won't annoy just as many other peopole might be a challenge though. A "pick up your entire construct" button with warnings that "custom LUA and other changes to Element properties will be wiped" or a way to manually wipe such things from an Element (plus the signposts that you have to do that, in the error messages) might work, or an option to sanitise at deploy-time if the only available Elements are customised in this way.

Another thing that might help if you're element-restricted is to train a talent or two in atmo flight (just the cheap-and-easy levels) if you haven't already. 10% more thrust and 10% more airfoil lift is an easy win, if you're not already stepping down those Talent paths. There's a Talent in one of the technician trees too, which adds a smaller amount to a wider selection of elements and doesn't say "when placed"; that's also possibly worth taking.

There is: tokenisation. Or just abandoning it and walking away. Any means of involuntary forced transfer (like replacing a TU granting ownership) is already PvP. It's just not shooty-PvP. I'll take your word for it, and applaud the restraint Entirely prepared to have missed something.

This. A hundred (or maybe 250) times. This is also true. Why the interface isn't looking up the actual data table used by the industry process, is a mystifying question. Why industry has such a backend impact is also something that bothers me. The backend difference between doing 10 batches of [6 plus 4 makes one] and one batch of [60 plus 40 makes 10] seems so trivial that I marvel at their architecture choices when it has such a marked effect.

If only this game had space radars that worked in safe zones. Like all the ORGs using "mobile billboards" to recruit on the District parking pads, and outlets for shipwrights.

Have you cleared your cache? Can you force respawn? And does that fix it? If you don't want to respawn out, you'll probably need to raise a ticket.

Creative mode? No way, not ever. But not having a design mode is pure nonsense. Don't they have CAD, in this world of magic nanotech and teleportation/compute-enough-to-image-and-store-a-working-human-being? Or even SketchUp? Boeing don't have a hangar where they jam parts together until something works. Space Agencies don't just stack rocket parts together until they get a combo they like the look of. You don't have to have all the lego pieces in your box before you start designing. Experienced DU shipwrights have a good handle on the sizes and shapes and capabilities of the elements because they learned in creative mode. By which I mean, they got free, or effectively free, access to every element on the market for a lonnnnng time. Good luck finding an ORG that'll take a newbie and hand them a library of multiple copies of every element to futz around and learn DU functional design with. Having an environment which permits blueprints to be created from any element can't be bad for the game (done right). The bloops still have to be resourced and then tested for pseudo-world effectiveness before they have any material impact on anyone else. A blueprint alone is pretty useless. However, I will not vote for "creative mode", because that is nonsense for different reasons, in the idiom of DU. "Creative mode" implies, it seems to me, almost a copy of the pseudo-reality, in which the "creative" constructs could be deployed and enjoyed. That's 100% counter to the raison d'etre of DU, which is to get us all in the same space using our constructs. While the "Don't they have simulators in this world of magic nanotech and compute power....." argument applies if you're looking for plausibility, I think that's the boundary where the principles behind the concept of the game can be allowed to override verisimilitude. No, a design mode would be purely an interface for bringing together elements and manipulating voxels in an offline, static, largely non-interactive (with the construct) space. It would be a single player environment, and could readily be run locally rather than occupying server and network resources. It would just allow viewing of elements and voxels, their insertion into and orientation within build boxes, linking and interacting with switches and such. It would provide nominal numerical data about the construct a la build helper box. It could have a parameterised skill list so you could see what levels of skill were required to make links work and how they'd affect the construct's calculated characteristics. It would include the LUA hooks so people can design cockpit interfaces and complex element interactivity. You would not be able to climb in the thing and take it for a spin. It would not grant achievements in Builder. At best you'd be able to export a BP, but even if you just had to remember what you did, it'd have a useful place. If blueprints with no bits are useless, what's the point of reaching for the verisimilitude of a design mode? As I see it there are a few advantages: Secrecy - your shipwrights will no longer have to have a closed hangar to keep their projects safe from prying eyes. Tidiness - you won't have in-design ships cluttering up your base. You wouldn't have abominations like my industry structure being a "work in progress" for weeks and weeks as I get distracted/need to mine the resources to complete; it'd at least look like a real building rather than a bunch of machines and containers hanging in thin air. Appeal - people who are more interested in design than other things will have a slot in the game which they can pursue. And if they want their spiffy designs to be built they'll need to interact inside the game and get the bloops sold. Many designers want to see how their ideas perform in the real world; that's where they get their kicks, and those are the designers we want to attract to the game, rather than those who just want to make things for their own satisfaction. Reduced server load - if it's a locally-hosted tool, the server doesn't have to support as many constructs, since most of the ones in the design phase will be offline. Plausibility - CAD for DU. It makes sense. Speed - design would be much faster. Aspiration - if you've got a design that needs a certain level of resourcing, there's a push to get out there and get the resources in that isn't there if you're just noodling that design around as a "might fit together" concept in your head. Heck, you could even have it not produce blueprints, if you wanted to retain the aesthetic of structure skeletons rising like the bones of antediluvian gargantua as the first one is put together. Much of this could be achieved by simply releasing some assets in a common design tool format. That might even bring people into the game, if they find a bunch of DU bits for SketchUp, say, throw a design together and want to see it built. That probably wouldn't cover some of the in-game limitations on design, and I don't think could automate construct attribute calculations like thrust. Could probably do mass though.

Repairing things: You need "scrap" which is a "Consumable" you make in your Nanocrafter (henceforth, "pockets") from pure materials. It's pretty quick; just use the pure that you've the most of. Have the scraps in your active container, double-click them and you should pop out of your inventory view, with the repair tool in hand, and loaded with scraps. Any damaged elements on your construct will highlight in yellow. Destroyed elements highlight in red. Destroyed elements need "restoring" to "damaged" before they can be repaired. Damaged Elements with fewer than half their hit points will smoke. Just raycast the element and click LMB to fix things. Setting things the right way up: by default the 7 slot on your toolbar is the "Maneuver" tool. With that selected, click on a dynamic construct, and then you can raise it up by changing where you're looking, rotate it around the three axes with WASDEQ and push it further away or pull it closer with the scrollwheel on your mouse. When you are done, hit 7 to stop using the tool and the construct will hang where you've left it. It'll drop to its minimum floating height when you get in the pilot seat. You can learn about industry from your crafting menu. Make sure you deselect the "Nanocrafter only" button. Have a look at what the various Industry Elements are, and what they can make. You can 'click through' recipes to see what the recipe for any of the components is. You'll only want to start with T1 mostly to begin, but those recipes don't tell you which Industry you need to build the components, since you can do it in your pockets; looking at a more advanced recipe that needs higher tier mats will tell you which industry machine you need to build to make whatever-it-is. If you fancy trying to figure it out for yourself, that is.

Whereas to me it sounds exactly like intended behaviour. I'm not seeing any serious exploit, and none at all that won't go away as soon as territory warfare becomes a thing.

I agree. For one, there should be no arbitrary effect of controlling a certain number of hexes on a planet. Not that I think any single entity will ever be able to afford the territory claim units to cover a significant proportion of a planet, if the costs to do so are properly set by NQ; if the Quanta-to-place cost increases faster than linearly, it will become more and more difficult to find the cash to place the next TCU. Control would be defined by being able to exert one's will over an area. That can be achieved by negotiation, threats, simple obstruction, or any other tools of diplomacy. If you can enforce a blockade, you could be considered to have control of the celestial body. If you can persuade other people to pay (taxes/protection money) and acknowledge your control, you have control. Any mechanism that suddenly hands rights to an entity for 'proportion of land controlled' is nonsense and shouldn't even be considered. Something to bear in mind: the British Empire, ranked largest ever in Wikipedia, could never have been considered in control of the whole of Earth. As the biggest human empire ever, in terms of area actually controlled, it had just over a quarter of the land area of the planet. This says two things to me: no entity in DU should even begin to approach controlling a quarter of the hexes on a planet no entity in DU should directly control a whole planet.

Extra vote for not making prospecting any easier.

Why do you say that? You won't be able to place any cores, sure, same as if it were unclaimed land, but ownership of the land doesn't grant any rights on the constructs on that land, does it?

That's your mistake, right there. You paid your $30 to take part in a beta test. Good feedback though.

Making a good landing and plotting a good course are also satisfactions. Getting a medium-can hover hauler back to the "last cliff before base" with a full load of mostly-hematite without falling off said cliff when the brakes were broken (sliding towards the cliff edge, backwards with the thrusters at full...) was a satisfying moment, too. Once the pucker had subsided... I'm still waiting for the second of those

Is it an acceleration, or just a residual vector from your orbit exertion that you hadn't cancelled before you began your acceleration burn towards your destination? The trajectory line (press X a couple of times) should give you some information to determine whether your vectors are all lined up.

One of our ship designers has some in that orientation; he attests that they only fire when he pushes the throttle past 60%, which seems like an advantage, since you're generally wanting to lift at high throttle, and once you're at cruising altitude you can throttle back and save some fuel cos the angled thrusters turn off.