Kezzle

I think they gave us a couple of weeks' free to both compensate for "wrinkles" during early Launch, and because they gave new fish some free days at the beginning if Launch too. I don't remember seeing it being announced... I will offer the guess that your "main" account might get the free time next time you're due to re-up; that's when mine kicked in; I was headed to activate another DAC on the website, and it just popped up.

It's a good idea, worth repeating if it has been brought up previously.

'Sokay,. Thanks for being gracious. Likewise, sorry for the counter-snark.

DU's materials science is a 20 minute placeholder*. Same as so many other things. * By which I mean they spent 20 minutes chucking something together as a placeholder in alpha and haven't done any proper thinking about how it should work to enhance gameplay and worldbuilding since.

Well pardon me for trying to help. Nice reaction. Good projection of your own motives onto others. Lovely.

Your x,y,z keys for voxel chunk manipulation are emphatically not random... They dependably depend upon what surface your target reticel is "raycasting".

Having artificial money sinks is certainly a great way to take the air our of a player-to-player economy. At any point, there needs to be a balance between money in and money out of the system. And the money supply needs to grow along with the size of the economy, or deflationary difficulties will arise. That's not the same as the "easy money" scenario with full-on Q-faucets and abyssal Q-sinks that we currently have.

What needs to change so that income can be made from sources other than NPC/bot "Quanta faucets"? Obviously, "players with money need to start spending it on things other players have made/dug up". Why doesn't that happen (more/enough to make the "easy money" loop unnecessary)?

Certainly, making HP (and/or Shield HP) even partially dependent on mass alone is a sure way to nonsense as people gimmick ways of increasing mass...

The problem is that NQ are quite happy to see "small industrialists" fall by the wayside, since Schematics are primarily a means of limiting the quantity of Industry their servers have to calculate for. So making it easier, and letting people actually build active Industry is contrary to the purpose of Schematics.

Just DU it. Aphelia's Lore is pretty much lies/nonsense/delusion anyway. What you make won't be any less valid.

Fetch also works when you've buried your wreck 100m deep in a Haven tile you don't, and will never, own...

It's a small team and doesn't include a Director of Communications... And it shows.

"We" don't need schematics. NQ needs schematics, in order to make megafactories difficult to run. If NQ make using schematics easier, they defeat the object of the game system's existence. What "we" need is for the servers/software architecture to be able to handle large quantities of industry, then the scourge that is schematics can go away entirely.

Yeah, you can add all sorts of wrinkles. Especially if you have an energy management system to back it up. Some shields might leak more of different types of damage, others might not leak any of a particular damage type. If you have the concept of a threshold individual hit damage below which nothing leaks, that could be different for different damage types or shield types. You could have thresholds for degrees of leakage: if a small shield gets hit with a big shot, maybe it leaks 5% instead of 1%. Maybe some shield types don't do this.

Nah, sorry. When copper is harder to isolate from its ore than aluminium, your game's physical reality is too borked to be credible. When, even though you can precipitate matter from energy to create a real object out of a data item, with a personally portable equipment, why in Ifni's broad expanse would you ever have to dig up ore and refine it? With matter precipitation, you no longer live in an age of scarcity. Anyone can have pretty much anything they want. But oh no, that's not how DU's 'verse works. The game's setting's systems are an incoherent and irreconcilable mess of pseudo-realities. Anything based on this will have holes in it so big you can drive the Arkship through them. Even if Aphelia is an insane AI and is lying/deluded about things, these are only two examples of "in-game empirical truth" that make the world-as-built unstable and impossible to base anything serious on. However worthy and noble the effort put in. It's doomed to fall to the "But why not just...?"

All you need to do is keep coming back to calibrate the MUs that feed the factory... Edit: Oh, and an infinite supply of schematics, and some money to pay the rent on the territory... So probably not going to happen as "abandonware", unless someone wanted to do it for the the shiznitz. Which is a shame. The idea of a planet that's been cored out by one factory to create a similar volume of "spaceships" up on the surface, just clanking away, aeon after epoch, popping out a craft every time there's enough minerals been scraped out of the hollow world...

I knew my cynic detector was going crazy for a reason!

OK, understood. I was thinking it'd be superfun to design a factory that had the capacity to self-adjust, So one day it's building basic speeders and the next (month or so) it's churning out an L core Battleship. Big Fun for an Industrialist, easy life for others. Yeah. That's "almost" trivial. Just a matter of counting. Commonplace, nowadays. Yup. That'd be hilarious! "Who forgot to turn off the fighter line?!"

You can? Put a BP in a container (or sumfink) and the factory configures itself to build the right elements and voxels to deploy the ship once it's all collected together in the output?

Ooo. I missed that one. Sounds like it would've been neat. Right up my alley..

The size (as in "area presented to the shooter" of the target "ought" to have something to do with how hard it is to hit (along with its maneuverability, and loads of other factors). I have a suggestion, several, but let's start with one. I didn't originate it, but it seems reasonable: shield leakage. As it stands, ships don't need voxels, because they have shields. If shields didn't stop all the damage, you'd have to put some voxels in your design to give yourself at least some core combat strength, otherwise the first point of damage leaking past the shields would pop your core, leaving an eminently salvageable, hardly damaged wreck. It doesn't have to be much. One percent leakage would do. You could have larger shields have a "threshold" so that some (smaller) ammo doesn't cause leakage. Forcing combat design to have some voxel to have any durability in combat opens the door for design decisions: more voxel slows you down, but lets you stay under the guns for longer. So you can choose where on the spectrum you want your design to sit. You'd probably want to limit Shield size to core size in the same way as weapons are, too.

That's just bonkers. Not that you have them; that's just "wot orter've 'appened anyways", but that NQ didn't trumpet this from the actual rooftops.

That makes as much sense as having CSA be part of the speed limit calculation in a vacuum (to whit: none).

There's an option to turn HTML back on, in the settings screens. Does that help?