Daphne Jones

I have some haulers with guns and some without guns (mostly light enough to warp). I did say within reason... that would include some thought at the design level to how your ship will defend itself.

A L core hauler should be viable against xs cube (or real non-BS ships) with xs guns on them. But some reasonable number of those xs ships should be a threat, i.e., the hauler should be able to defend itself, but not just ignore the smaller ships. This is a tough game design issue. PVP is always a tough game design issue. (which is especially funny since the prime reason to design a PVP game is devs trying to avoid work - thus PVP usually sucks.) It's hard to do, but everything should be able to defend itself and everything within reason should be a threat. I think the best way to do this is to emphasize player skill, but that ship has sailed and reached the new world already in DU.

Well, lead at 11 kg/L is much less dense than gold. But depleted uranium rounds exist in RL (for shooting through tank armor) and that's just a smidgeon lighter than gold (19.1 kg/L vs 19.3 kg/L)

ROFLMAO. DU might have to actually be a game first. SC has an army of A-list devs. DU doesn't (on either point). BTW, atm, I like DU better because I can have exactly the ship I want. And if my whim changes, I can have that ship too. And it doesn't cost real money.

"ratting" - like putting rats on other people's ships? Nasty.

I've lost maybe 100 million in ships doing asteroids, but I've made 500 million. Not currently doing it though because ore prices are too low to be worth the risk. Not even doing sz asteroids because ore prices are so low. You can watch the radar while mining by having a programming board attached to a radar. This may limit the distance you can get from your ship - or make a follower construct with the PB on it. Mining followers used to be quite popular. You do need some scripting skills or a friend with scripting skills to build one. The number one thing that has kept me off the PVP asteroids since Demeter dropped is that res nodes aren't reliable. My pre-Demeter practice was to mine till I heard shooting, res back to my ship (which has a L shield so is still OK at that point) and take off. Unless I was outnumbered 10 to 1, I usually got away before my shield failed.. But if I have to dig 300m back to my ship, it will already be destroyed by the time I get there. I may get back out there when they fix res nodes. Unless the prices keep crashing.

Probably true, but at some point they have to design a game and then make it work. Otherwise... no game.

I like it. We definitely need valid reasons to go small. As it stands going small just means you stay out of PVP or die. Shields should light you up like a Christmas tree too.

Have you tried to land at D6 Market - on the actual landing pad - since docking was updated? You can't do it. All those dynamic "container" cores under the landing pad will push you the (expletive) off because you're not allowed to (expletive) dock with them. I have solutions: 1. Let people put their containers on a static core by making an exception to the static core rules in market hexes - 1 per player, not blocking the pad or market. I think the reason those cores are clustered right under the market is that their owners VR to the market and linked container range in VR is very short (250m? iirc) so... 2. Make linked container range an exception to loss of talents in VR. 3. Require a control unit on a dynamic construct for docking features. Most of those things are some containers and maybe a VR pad - no control unit... so there would be no "you can't dock here (expletive)." I like solution 2. The reason I was doing something as idiotic as trying to land on the D6 M platform is that my customer is planning to VR to the market and load the ship from his market container. If we didn't have to deal with (expletive) VR linked range restrictions, I would have parked on the outermost ring of pads. (All the inner pads there are cluttered with ships owned by players who have long since quit the game in disgust. I actually know where I am on those pads by which ships are permanently parked near me.)

I like SL and I like building space ships in SL. It's easier to build space ships in DU and flight model is better. I'm perfectly happy with DU as SL in space. JC did say once that it's not SL in space, because SL doesn't really have any game play loops... but I guess DU meets that test pretty well now, lol. To be SL in space, DU would need to add tools for players to make game play loops. SL has some pretty amazing player-made game loops.

Hauling a load of ammo, I noticed that it's gone back to being weightless... well nearly massless. Specifically, DU ammo specific gravity is 0.11 (water's specific gravity is 1.0). Sorry couldn't resist that once I started the sentence with "specifically". That translates to 0.11 kg/L, making it about the lightest thing in DU. NQ, have you ever held a bullet - or a box of bullets - in your hand? Ammo is heavy. The lightest smokeless powders come in at about the density of water - 1 kg/L. The rest of the round is made of lead, steel, and copper. I bet you know the densities of steel and copper since they're in game an you got them about right. Steel is 8 kg/L. I don't remember copper, but it's denser than steel iirc. You can't take a bunch of stuff heavier than water and put it together so it's lighter than water. (That's the Theorem of the Mean for those of you who didn't pay attention in math class.) There's a good reason that ammo is heavy... a slug of metal does a lot more damage when it hits than does, say, water. That's why we let kids shoot water guns at each other. And these bullets are 1/9 the mass of the same volume of water. You probably wouldn't notice getting hit by this. I hope this was an accident and not another concession to whiny PVP carebears. Please make the ammo a little more realistic.

The MU minigame isn't much fun. (sarcasm) Fortunately it's gated by timed what ever they're called points. (/sarcasm). I'd rather be mining.

We need a terrain reversion tool. Terrain reversion tool definition: a tool that would remove any terraforming changes in the area covered by the brush. It seems like this would be easy to do since terraforming is extra data applied over the proc gen. It would be useful to the players, since it would allow undoing a mistake. Also useful if you take over a territory and don't like what a previous occupant did there. AND... beneficial to NQ/DU since every undone terraforming change is less lag at render time. When we were digging thousands of tunnels, this would have been less beneficial, i.e., no one is going to spend an hour undigging a tunnel that's mostly underground. But now, this might help the game a little.

Where's the fun? More of a slog than the old mining simulator.

I have to say Demeter pretty much sucks so far. After spending eight hours scanning I found one hex that only sucks badly and a bunch of hexes that suck horribly. I grabbed the one that sucks badly, cause I don't have any reason to think I'll find anything better. If the ore market doesn't collapse it might pay it's own taxes. Fun on a scale of 1 to 10: -5 (that's minus 5). The calibration minigame isn't as much fun as hand mining... by a long shot. My friend found a hex that could produce 60kl coal per week... under optimal conditions... and said "not bad". (That does suck less than anything I found). He used to mine 600kl in a couple of hours. Slow production 100 fold and what happens? Economic collapse. Not optimistic.

In addition to NQ's stated reasons, I suspect if you stacked the lag of physics calculations onto the lag of industry, it would kill performance. There's probably a workaround for that (like not running the industry while the ship is moving), but not worth it given the game design reasons for avoiding it.

Sounds like you want a WWII dogfighting game. There are plenty of them.

Combat was more fun before shields. First, let me say when I want to avoid combat, shields are great. Most of the time the shield gives me time to escape without taking any damage. But with shields, what is the meta? Solo L core or dual-boxed dual seat L core for more weapons. The meta sacrifices shield-down survivability in exchange for single player piloting/gunning and better acceleration. What did we have before shields? You had to have armor which put a limit on both acceleration and minimizing cross section. You also had to have repair crew on board, so even if you're using a single pilot/gunner, combat was still multi-crew. Whether piloting, gunning, or running around trying to keep the ship from blowing up, the team play was just more fun than what we have now. I suppose fleet play is also team play, but so far, I don't feel it the same way. I don't particularly want shield removed from the game because most of the time I want to avoid combat, but I do want combat to be fun when I do want to do it. Thoughts?

I would do a vertical tail sitter landing on Ion. Yeah, that planet is a PITA.

They said in the vlog that it would be several days between maintenance on mining units. They may have the period shortened for testing in the PTS.

As long as every tile produces enough to pay the tax, I don't think there's a long term problem although it will kill PVP if no one can afford to field a combat ship. It will certainly kill territory combat if only players with the best tiles can afford to field combat units. Combat will be reduced to strong players bullying weak players for no gain... oh wait... that's what it is now lol. My short term worry is this: Will I have enough left after paying tile taxes to buy mining units after several weeks of waiting for mining units to make it to the market?

Good piloting will solve your brake problem. You actually only need airbrakes because we don't have wheels. Even so, you only need brakes to kill the last few kph and even that can be done by cutting the hovers in a pinch. Practice! You don't have to be that extreme. I've been building with plenty of braking with the brakes on the outside and unobstructed since alpha. Sure, I can't parachute from the edge of space, but I have braking that can only be described as easy mode on most of my ships. I will miss the Khonsu (prototype) someone bought for me a long time ago which will no longer have any braking at all in atmo. But it will make a nice ramp decoration.

Of course this is a move to slow players down which has a number of benefits for NQ. They're mixed benefits for us too. That said, I completely agree with the OP. NQ, don't slow us down so much that it stops being fun!

Why do you think this? I think people will warp to a planet, scan, set up a base with a mining unit and either recover the ore by warp or put up missions for haulers to move the ore to where they need it. Most people will stay out of the PVP zone except for the pro-haulers and whatever you call the players who attack unarmed ships (they're certainly not PVPers).

There is one there, but I don't know if it's public. I expect there will be a public one when construction is complete. I did find out that not all the cores are deployed yet, but most are. Actual building lags behind core deployment of course, but it's pretty big already.