Emptiness

That is because NQ just makes up these numbers without applying any logic or reason @Kurosawa ..
They are changing things for the sake of changing things and making up reasons afterwards.
 
This is why much of what NQ does is kind of a good idea in principle but the execution lacks. If you apply a reason after you "design" the change, that is what happens.
 
It's textbook cart before horse

Which is clearly a nonsense and broken system. That an org only needs a single tile with 1L of each of the four T1 ores to survive is clearly not what the developers intended. Sure they don’t count it as an exploit (calibration charges Yada Yada) but it is pretty much game breaking. 
 
TLDR:
That 10 players can somehow get 200kL of ore per day from a 1L per hour tile even using a single size S mining unit is a stupid game mechanic. 

is this our problem? Feels like bad game/server design and should have been adressed years and years ago as they very well knew what they promoted during kickstarter. 

Nope, Schematics should be deleted from the gameconcept, the update is not working and drives players away from the game.

The point is to stop this sort of thing from being necessary, NOT to make fighter jet/hauler hybrids.
 
It's nothing but a shell made out of 128 L space brakes, 144 atmo brakes, 176 L adjustors, 16 XL basic space engines, 34 L basic atmo engines, 20 L basic vertical boosters, , 12 L stabilizers (because there aren't any L wings or ailerons), 18 M wings, 10 L space tanks, 8 L atmo tanks, 24 L containers, and a few other things. It's a heavy hauler that needs far too much crap to haul, and even without any cargo turns really slowly. The voxels are mostly just a wire frame to mark where elements go for symmetry, with a very small amount for "looking cool." Tiered engines and the like are too expensive in time/resources (worse because of the schematics) at this point, especially since T2+ deposits have become more rare than in beta (a guy scanned a large number of contiguous tiles and found none at all. On Thades), and getting asteroids is a pretty big competition, so we have to work with what we can.
 
This is why bigger elements are necessary. Tiered brakes/adjustors/airfoils would be nice, but those are more "tweaks" to the basics than realistic replacements for larger sizes. And yes, sadly, NQ will probably just continue to limit everything. From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go" even as they advertise the whole game as "player-driven" etc. That whole approach to development is ridiculous, and it's seriously making me think I wasted the money I spent on 13 months worth of subscriptions.

Reading the posts here, it's clear that calibrations shouldn't give any ore bonus. Just keep the unit at 100% and passive hourly income only.
 
Yet again, NQ creates a game mechanic rife for abuse and economy breaking exploits.
 
Have they ever consulted an economist?

Reading the posts here, it's clear that calibrations shouldn't give any ore bonus. Just keep the unit at 100% and passive hourly income only.
 
Yet again, NQ creates a game mechanic rife for abuse and economy breaking exploits.
 
Have they ever consulted an economist?

Max Lift is possible as soon as you pass the sustentation limit for your construct's weight, depending on the current gravity and thus altitude (for an estimation, in build mode, check the building helper / atmospheric flight engineer / high altitude lift).
To simplify, you can potentially reach max lift as soon as you have at least 1g of thrust.
 
Anyway, the default in-game Flight System only use that potential lift to counter the gravity force and air friction for your given throttle (or cruise speed), unless you hit the spacebar for full lift using all the construct's vertical capabilities. If for one reason or another (too much angle, loss of power, less atmosphere, higher cross-section) you don't have enough lift, you fall, simple as that.
 
If I remember correctly, during early Beta, the Lift Power in kN (kilo-Newtons) was the required power to fly 1t (ton) at 125m/s on Alioth (with a gravity around 9.8, not taking air resistance into account).
 
Since I have some downtime, you're in for a long post, quite a rarity for me nowadays.
 
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Yet with simplified aerodynamics, your Current Lift mainly depends on your Angle of Attack (the ship's orientation compared to the "horizontal" plane: generally pitch is what matters if you are level, plus roll and yaw as well when not properly aligned). Ailerons, Stabilizers and Wings have different preferences before they reach their specific stall angles, which are way higher than in our non-futuristic real world, but may still be a worry.
 
Note that your current lift is not that much affected by the ship orientation but you must stay aware of the basics: "root(cos(AoA))" act as a multiplier. For instance an AoA of 20° "only" provides 97% of your lift, while its reduced to 84% for 45° but then you are close to Stalling anyway (and already have with ailerons). Beware that pitching, rolling and turning at the same time causes cumulative dampening of your lift power... and sooner stalls.
 
To avoid further stalling, and a potential Death spiral dreaded by any pilot, the easiest way in-game is to align your ship back with your current velocity's vector to regain control (use the X shortcut to visualize that trajectory)... as long as you have enough altitude for that maneuver.
 
Since every construct is built differently with a mix of Airfoils, the AoA to achieve Max Lift may vary, but less than in real-life since all in-game forces are applied from/to the construct's center of mass (visible in the builder helper) and the angles are so far the same within an airfoil category. If you are mainly using wings, you are fine up to a whooping angle of 50°. Ailerons have closer specs to IRL wings, which means they stall earlier, above 30°, but help with fine adjusting the torque (by +/- 5°). Finally, stabilizers were not meant to be used as horizontal airfoils, but don't stall until 70°.
 
As a guideline for ascending the fastest, aim for half those values for the Sweet Spot between improving the sustentation power and reducing the lift-induced drag (air friction). You can check the wikipedia article on "Lift-to-drag ratio" ratio for more information and the why. Too much angle and you'll lose too much speed due to air friction, even if your airfoils are not yet stalled.
 
For the sake of information, the Lift/Drag ratio (shown in item inspection) should tell you how aerodynamic is an airfoil. It also hints about which angle would be best suited to land horizontally with, mainly irrevelant since we use omni-directional brakes and hovers (and/or vertical boosters) to achieve vertical landings and takeoffs (VTOL).
 
What affects your overall atmospheric speed the most are Cross-section Surfaces: the frontal one define the construct's current air resistance/friction (the drag, which is the other force going against your atmospheric flight), the horizontal ones is supposed to help you with lift, and the vertical one against drift.
 
Again simplified maths, since as far as I know, the only time when the "real" cross-section (facing your current trajectory) is used is for damage checks during Atmospheric Reentry, so aim wisely: like you would dive in water. Otherwise, the frontal cross-section is used to compute air friction, and thus is one of the main concerns (with mass and its distribution a.k.a. inertia matrix) for ship designers like myself, aiming for efficient and fast constructs.
 
Indeed it means that in space, nobody can hear you crying about the bulking shapes of some constructs, since cross-sections don't matter there. 😛
 
---
Did you know? Atmospheric engines only provide half their power on the vertical axis to begin with, so yes if you provide 1g of vertical thrust with those, your sustentation speed is effectively 0... while they are fueled.
 
At the time of writing I do not know the specifics of how atmospheric density impacts the power of atmospheric engines: they obviously stop at 0%, and min out when you reach high altitude. With a density under 10%, you will need approximatively 1.6 lift more than at sea level, but then the space engines can gradually kick in and help you leave the atmosphere or continue onwards a Suborbital Flight path (which is the most fuel-effective imo).
 
If someone has the formula for calculating the atmospheric density at any given altitude from planet informations like atmosphere thickness and radius, thanks for sharing.
 

Yes, this. So tired of splitting schematic stacks to refill my product producers.

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

Schemitics reduce server load by simultaneously inflating the cost of products while at the same time reducing spare ℏ. 
 
They also significantly reduce fun.  I’ve spent a really dull hours just trying to scrape together enough ℏ with the tiny fragments of what remains of our org by surface scavenging the shit out of everywhere I have permission. 
 
It’s worse than mining used to be. 
 
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The whole premise of “entirely player driven and built” is a laughing stock. 
 
bots control our hex-rent. Bots control our schematics. Bots control our sales taxes. Bots hand out and receive missions. Bots sell pretty much everything anyone needs. Bots buy stupid almost unlimited amounts of ore and bots hand out a daily stipend. And bots control whether or not we can fire weapons. 
 
what is there actually left to play and strive for other than building?
 
why is there no energy required to run anything? Why is there no oxygen requirements for our habitats?
why is there no food or farming? 
 
why are there no threatening box life forms that raid our camps?
 
why are there no mysteries beyond a few lowest possible effort alien cores?
 


 
what an absolute joke. 

 
 

Schematics are just stupid. Remove them already and fire the person that came up with that idea, thanks. 

1. Way too expensive to be considered a "useful" game loop
2. Only being craftable in inventory is beyond frustrating for your smaller/casual audience.

It will kill your game in the long run. How is money distributed to players? By selling ores to bots? *Insert big brain .jpg here*
So the entire goal of this game is to grind T1 ore to sell it to bots, to be able to afford schematics for their production. Buying stuff/parts from other players in the markets isnt worth it since they will put the schematic price on top.

I quit during alpha/beta when schematics were introduced and came back to review this on release. This system is still beyond garbage, considering I have to manually look up all the schematics needed for a product. Should at least give people the option to "Que up all required schematics for this element" button.

Cheers

To be honest, with the npc marked and the ship marked next door with good working NQ buyable ships what is the use of emergent gameplay? no-one will buy my designed ship as the costs and effort i invested will never outweigh the cheap ships NQ offers. 
 
In short, once we were told no npc in DU but at the momens the whole game is dominated by them, market, missions, shipselling, all elements of the game that players should fill but were needed to mask that it just does not work if you need to rely on players in the setup DU has chosen.  This also includes the killing of the community page, that page was used to sell stuff, show stuff, promote news and organizations, frankly the killing of that page did alot of damage to the community and to the active backbone of DU but that has been ignored since the moment they killed it.

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

It's msoul, so this is expected. Really not worth replying with more than a single line.

Let's set aside for a moment that wiping beta player constructs at launch was always unfair, given past commitments. NQ have now heaped insult on injury with a number of stealth nerfs at launch:
 
Alioth T2 Distribution: 
I did 80 territory scans on Alioth at a ~3 tile spacing and found zero T2. None at all. Zip. Nada. No T2 - after spending 3 days building the XL assembler and scanner. This is a broken gameplay loop. Combined with the removal of Malachite from Alioth, the stealth nerf of ore distribution on Alioth resulted in a week of wasted effort. Forcing effort with no payoff is not gameplay. 
 
If NQ had been transparent with us before launch, said they were going to nerf T2 on Alioth, I wouldn't have wasted that critical week. I would also have rebuilt my base before launch so the BP wasn't made of 500,000M3 of Copper. Now, to deploy my BP I have to swap copper for another honeycomb, and then go back and untangle where the new material has blended with the same material already in the BP. More rework, on top of the wasted time.
 
1000m Build Height: 
This was self-evidently dumb. By choosing a 1000m cap instead of 1128m, it's impossible to build a 1000m AGG pad without placing your foundation core at an exactly multiple of 128m (since you won't be able to place the top core if there is less than a 128m gap.) Even then, you can put nothing on your 1000m pad, no elements, no structure. And you have to either use smaller cores for your top layer (increasing server load) or build your base from the top core, down - which means tall temporary scaffold structures first to place top cores and work back down - while others complain about griefing the entire time. 
 
A large number of pre-launch bases had AGG pads at or slightly above 1000m. All these pre-launch base BPs are now bricked.
 
This misstep demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of their game's own mechanics by devs, and poor understandng of players. To make matters worse, the change wasn't even included in patch notes. The only place it was mentioned - just wks before launch - was in 'Ask Aphelia #12. Few players had any opportunity to fix their builds before launch. This mistake (1000m vs 1128m) would easily have been picked up if players had been warned.
 
In summary, not only did NQ reneg on prior commitments to honour our builds in their 'persistent' universe - the only compensation being retained blueprints - they went on to stealth nerf the BPs we kept. 
 
[EDIT: Because this rule is not yet being enforced, and it is still possible to place a core above 1000m, this will create even more pain for players uncertain or unaware of the rule - should NQ decide to delete structures after they are built. And for as long as the rule is unclear, it is impossible to safely place the foundations of a tall structure.]
 

 
Missing STUs for 'Contributors' (and Surface Natron):
By making Sanctuary the only place with surface natron near Alioth, Alpha contributors already had a significant advantage at launch - since natron is needed to make many popular elements: screens, lights etc.. NQ then messed up further, by jacking up the distribution of STUs meaning only some Contributors received them. ~10 days later, this still has not been fixed. This means a small number of players, purely by chance, have the only access to surface natron near Alioth.
 
HTML/SVG nerf and Indiscriminate LUA Changes: 
The disabling of HTML screens was long rumoured, but took so long to be done it appeared to have been abandoned. Waiting till launch to tell players all SVGs and HTML are also now bricked is also poor form and counter-productive. Because a large number of ship BPs from pre-launch contain screens using HTML, and virtually every factory monitoring set-up, any player flying these ships or running these factories, will now simply go to settings and re-enable HTML, to be able to play the game - undermining the point of the exercise to phase out HTML, and prolonging the inevitable pain and frustration when it is finally done. This pain is now unavoidable given the original misstep of building a new API with zero compatibility with HTML/SVG. (The new API should always have been implemented in a way to minimise the effort of reworking existing content for players - rather than forcing ground up rebuilds of all screens. Better still, existing content should ideally have been ported on behalf of players.)
 
Combine this with the frivolous renaming of a number of LUA cmds, additional rework has also been created for players to reimplement scripts written before launch - for no apparent reason. 
 
STILL No Static BP Placement Snapping!: 
We asked for this in the Alpha Trello 3 yrs ago. It was poorly implemented on day one - snapping new cores only. Hundreds of players have asked for it to be fixed for static BPs over the years. It never made sense that new cores snap into place, but static BPs work of a bizarre raycast that doesn't even align with the player camera and - annoyingly - nudges by 2 voxels instead of 1. This feature was already long overdue, but now made more critical since it is essential to redeploying any mult-core construct after the wipe. Finally... finally, it was coming! In the launch livestream it was promised for launch here, at timecode 35:38:
 
Instead, we now learn this was skipped, rendering all multi-core static construct blueprints useless. 
 
Summary:
 
- Forcing players to constantly rework their builds is not gameplay.
- Reworking existing content is a poor proxy for new gameplay loops.
- Player input is invaluable. 
- Last minute, uncommunicated changes rarely if ever have a positive outcome.  
 
The culture at NQ of disregarding the time and effort of players, and lack of consideration of impacts on our gameplay, is worrisome. More worrisome, is the tendency to continuously rework existing content - mechanics, terrain, boolean noise - rather than develop significant new features, many of these features requested years ago. NQ are still missing the winning strategy of successful 'player generated content' franchises like Minecraft, where the focus of the first several years was on adding new gameplay loops - as opposed to continuously reworking existing ones. Reworking existing content decays player satisfaction by forcing the constant rework of our own builds. And making changes by stealth only magnifies the problem.
 
Until this is understood, the future of this franchise is fraught. 

NQ obviously wouldn't be able to do this at launch, but a little later on, I think it would be a great idea to make the free trial server a recent snapshot of the persistent server.
 
This would naturally make the game more playable, and a much better representation of what the actual game is like. Players would be able to:
*VR over to a vast array of placs to look around.
*shop the markets, loaded with player orders.
*Visit any player-run shops, and buy from dispensers, like GottMart.
 
They would be able to make some money, get a bigger ship together easily to play around with. Get a DSAT to play around with asteroids, or buy a Scanner and TU's to see how that gameplay works, buy weapons and ammo, and look for someone to shoot in the PVP zone (Maybe NQ could spawn constructs at some location, so players could have something to shoot at.)
 
I don't think this would be too much for free players, and it'd be great advertising, letting them see what the game is actually like currently, with there still being the obvious downside of frequent resets, still driving them to sub if they really wanna play after trying it out.

Are you trolling? If not, your post is grossly offensive and attention-seeking.

Are you trolling? If not, your post is grossly offensive and attention-seeking.

It seems you don't understand anything.
 
 

Imagine the public airports didn't have the height zoning restrictions in your city, what a roller-coaster ride that would be, fun fun fun!
And the many many crashes that would happen as a result of such poor policy making would be condescendingly explained - "an actual pilot would avoid obstacles fairly easily".
 

If you use Windows 10, check Settings -> Ease of Access -> Color filters. I've been mostly ignoring my colorblindness for years but finally checked after DU's settings prompted me and I can actually see everything now. Those tiles literally pop out against the background.

agree, just get rid of them

Schematics just need to vanish.
 
They have two purposes: they are a money sink; they put a restriction on the quantity of running industry in the 'verse.
 
They function poorly as a money sink, since people in need just pump harder at Aphelia's "Quanta Aquifer", and the money flows faster. And why do we need all these Quanta anyway?
 
If the game's servers live or die on the industry that's idled by lack of schematics, there's something wrong with the underlying architecture.
 
 

Do the VR station atmo challenge and just use it as a way to learn to fly ships better without the stress of actual loss.