Daphne Jones

In Athena they raised the speed of light to 60K-ish but applied mass based magic speed limits to appease the faux-PVPers who only shoot at unarmed ships. Now if you're hauling cargo you have zero chance of escaping an attacker. That also means that very light ships can cruise aroun 50K. To get over that speed you have to have rockets and you magically fall below 50K when the rocket flames out. Fantasy physics sucks, but whatever. I also designed a light space-capable ship on the assumption that there will be a wipe. My design can be entirely nanocrafted except for the space fuel. I've done a fuel asteroid runs in it. It works well and filling the nano pack with ore is fast enough that you don't get bored lol. The downside is there's no way to carry a DSAT so it's stuck with already broadcast asteroids. Upside is that it's cheap enough to risk in unsafe space and there's nothing to gain for pirates who attack. (My daily flyer is an armed copy of this design, but I expect it can't deliver enough damage to matter if it ever gets in a fight. Guns are basically for flavor.)

that NQ managed to make the Space Market laggier than D6 Market. But not surprised.

Not sure how such an expansive rep system would work or be meaningful, but, otherwise, these ideas seem workable even within NQ's very limited resources.

I would definitely like to see water physics and some way to build floating dynamic constructs - either a water construct or buoyancy elements. But there are plenty of more important things to fix.

Yeah. Absolutely. PVP already heavily favored pirates to the extent that the rese of us were pretty much locked out of it. Athena made it much worse. I can do most of what I think is fun without leaving the sz and I will. I'd love to have access to combat, because that can be fun too, but I don't have that access in any meaningful way.

Missions are pretty badly broken atm, but there are a couple of easy missions that you can do in a speeder on Alioth. (And the shuttle is free). Nano-craft four Basic Mining Unit S and set them up. You can get a permanent supply of T1 ore and not break you wrist surface mining. That's both in-game money and raw material for crafting simple stuff. Wish we were getting the game NQ has been advertising lol.

I haven't tested running speed since early in beta, but at that time, I got stuck 30km from base and it took almost exactly 30min to get back. So pretty close to 60kph at minimal talents.

Yeah. I agree with this. Were people actually flying a construct to surface mine? You can run at 60kph. How much faster do you need to go? And could you really see anything useful at that speed?

I have a question. With the replacement of getTime(), which returns the client's local time, with getArkTime() which returns UTC, is everyone seeing the same time of day at a given spot on a planet now? Or (same question) does everyone see the sun in the same place regardless of client time?

lol. Oh that's awful. I mostly like the recent vfx and the sound effects too, but yeah there are some colossal failures.

If you need unarmed targets to PVP, you aren't really a PVPer. (That's for many of the responders, not necessarily the OP). PVP is inevitably broken in DU. If you force everyone into it, almost everyone will quit. It's pointless to do PVP that you can't ever win no matter what you do and that's what DU PVP is for 90% of the players - pretty much for any player who wants to do anything other than PVP. For the OP, there's plenty of PVP near the SZs. Asteroids for one thing. Go find an exotic asteroid and drop a mining team on it. Someone will show up and try to take it from you. (Just wait till after the wipe cause no one is bothering with that with the wipe hanging over our heads).

Yeah. I'm definitely sitting on that fence. And definitely telling friends not to join the game till we see how bad it is at release.

It would be nice to be able to do some mining on unowned territories. Currently, there's really no reason to travel to another planet unless you own land there. We've seen the economy build up from zero several times and it always settles out to 1 market on Alioth where you can get everything and all other markets are useless - unless bots are buying/selling everything in which case all markets are equally useful, but not good deals for anyone. So the economy doesn't provide a reason to travel. No one in their right mind would take missions now that the combat system has been skewed so heavily in favor of what we might generously call pirates. Why would you play a game you can't win or even draw? I would like to see ore placed at least 100m down and any contiguous tunnel that goes below -100m should be erased a small number of hours later. That saves needing to designate terraforming you don't want deleted. Maybe make it 200m so you can easily fit a L core underground if you want to.

I applied all the (actual building) skill I've gained since I last built a starter ship to build a really nice, single seat, XS ship that has 100% nanocraftable parts. Assuming BPs survive the wipe (probably a legal issue if they don't - that may actually violate an implied contract), I'll be able to get back to flying as soon as I get mining set up. Without having to wait for the markets to start working again. And then, I'll probably just fly around without really participating in the (mostly non-existent) gameplay. I've also been mining an asteroid per week, cause that's kind of fun, but I may stop that now that my mining ship can't reach max speed.

Chris Roberts recommended the kickstarter on the Star Citizen website.

Agree, but they really should just tell us whether there will be a wipe. If I know a wipe is coming I can just ignore all of my territories because they're going away anyway.

That's disappointing but not surprising. NQ devs rarely get things right. Maybe on the tenth try. I wonder if they'll get it right by the time I can afford to respawn my bases. Not holding my breath.

The rate of ore extraction is finite - and very small compared to the earlier system - think one scoop of ore per hour. But you don't have to actively mine - just calibrate every few days. The old style of mining is still available on asteroids. And asteroids are finite, but respawn every week. You pretty much have to mine to pay your hex tax.

I like the BP visualization. If it's good enough, I might be able to recover my bases after a wipe. The rest of it? Don't care.

You can't BP a ship you captured. At least you shouldn't be able to. That would violate the designer's IP.

Yeah. We definitely need to know this. Do I need to BP my base constructs in the (probably vain) hope that we will eventually get precise BP placement? Do I need to pull off pieces of bases on to smaller core BPs for later recovery? Will we even keep BPs? If not it would be a major promise broken, but not really a surprise at this point. Or should I just give up on this since we're not going to get that awesome game NQ has been advertising on youtube?

Yeah yeah. More BS from NQ.

Yeah. Both ships I checked are careful clean builds. They just has a much higher mass in the PTS. The warp shuttle doubled in mass- apparently the warp drive took a really hard nerf. The other ship doesn't even have a warp drive, but still got significantly more massive.

I don't understand your point. There is not and should not be a distance limit to gravity other then the inverse square law. Athena in particular is venturing off into fantasy physics, but what you mention is not part of the problem. (And gravity doesn't affect mass anyway.)

It's a stealth wipe. Makes our BPs worthless. Small ones at least. Larger ships won't suffer from this so much.