Traceur

My signature has a bilological ship I made in a different game (dont get too excited, the ship cant fly or do anything, just sit there and look pretty). But the biological aspect is that the hull of the ship was made from an alien carapace of unfathomable strength, but there is nothing living about the ship outside of the AI that helps to run it.
 
I think from this standpoint, we will easily be able to make biological ships in Dual, and create our own back story for them.

*chuckles* Just noticed the signature there, Tracuer. Well done.
 
To add to the list...
Satellite Dishes
Antennas
Drills (several sizes)
Ore Detector
Helicopter Blades
Aircraft-like Wings

My wish list:
 
Rails (Otherwise known as the piston without limits)
Handles (Something that allows you to grab onto a struct and move it around or be moved by it)
Tethers (When the thing your grabbing onto is trying to fly away)
Sensors (Environmental variables accessible in LUA)
Rotors (Spinning wheels of doom are fun for everyone)
Welders (Or some way to automate the construction of blueprints)
Space whales (Or some way to poke fun at Hello Games)

Unfortunately what Traceur says is all true. Uncapped speed limits are not something really feasible. About the closest we could hope for in that regards would be something along the lines of how Elite Dangerous does it, where you transition between speed "levels" of normal, sublight and FTL travel. Something like that is more doable than actual uncapped speeds.

If you mean an uncapped speed in terms of distance using some sort of FTL jump/warp/hyper drive, or any other medium of travel where you aren't likely to meet anyone on the way or make any turns, then yes, it could be uncapped, or capped only by energy usage and other game mechanics. But If we are talking about traveling within normal space, where things on the way need to load on the screen, where you can change the direction and completely ruin any server side prediction on what's likely to need loading, and where you could very well have the unfortunate incident of your spaceship deciding to cuddle with someone else's, then unfortunately - even if they don't hard code a cap themselves - it will have the very hard cap of hardware limits. In that scenario not having some sort of hard cap would also have gameplay balance ramifications for an MMO, such as natural speed limits changing depending on your internet provider.

I think it's a great idea to bring up this discussion now. One of the greatest struggles the Space Engineers team is dealing with currently is that their custom VRAGE engine was not originally designed to cope with "multi-entity" moving part machines. This has led to a lot of limitations when dealing with rotors and pistons- arbitrary speed limits and intense physics bugs among other things. 
 
I think Dual Universe has the chance to succeed where Keen SWH had failed: in anticipating the popularity of mechanical contraptions and moving parts early in development and accommodating for it accordingly. Something like relative physics reference frames for "anchored" voxel grid entities (ala KSP) would be absolutely awesome. Admittedly I'm not a programmer and have no idea how hard something like that would be to implement in Uniengine 2, but I feel like the ability to design and build working, stable mechanical contraptions might make it worth it at least considering.

Interesting. Currently the creator of VoxelFarm (otherwise known as the EverQuest:Next engine), is trying to tackle this very problem:

 
Given that in Dual every struct is it's own clipmap, I'd imagine they have already built the game to tackle this difficulty, and since they are using procedural world generation, having the location as a function of time should be possible.
 
The other part of the question is... Do they want this, and to what extent. In Kerbal Space Program even something as a randevu with a space station in orbit is an art, and for the average player most trips in the star system are only plausible because of the ability to accelerate time (I don't know about you but if they needed supplies my Kerbels would have died long ago...More then they usually do). Now, this is an MMO, so making piloting difficult isn't necessarily bad, it just means most of us will be reliant on someone else doing it. Perhaps f=m*a can work in the game favor as a balancing mechanism, making piloting smaller ships easier but larger heavier ships would naturally become more dependent on circular momentum to stay in orbit and reach their destinations, depending on how thrust and different engine types and their energy consumption would scale. Another way of doing it is cost-effectiveness: You could have anti-gravity for those playing without, but the energy consumption relatively to the mass it cancels out could scale exponentially. This would also help explain why the arkships have big empty propellant tanks for you to roam: Those beasts were thrusting with good ol' fashioned rocketry. 

This is from very early on in development (earlier than the date shown) https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/39-props-generating-interaction-between-constructs-idea-from-estevan/:
 
 
I definitely recommend reading the devblogs to get a good idea of what they are doing with this game.  However on the building side, here's a very brief overview.
 
Voxel-based Elements (voxels for short) are basically shapes made of some material.
Mesh-based Elements (elements for short) are pre-designed, functional components.
Constructs are player-made designs made up of voxels and/or elements.
Distributed Processing Units (DPU's) are LUA programs that define what elements can do.  They are almost all pre-written, except...
Control Units are elements with a modifiable DPU.  You can write LUA functions to respond to other elements broadcasting events and then call functions from other elements.  As the name suggests, you can design a control system for your constructs.
 
We're not sure yet how the "anchors" mentioned in the quote will work, or even if they are still planned.  I imagine that something like that is still in the works but there's no info on it as far as I know.  I would be very surprised if there was no way to connect player constructs.

It has been brought up about making ATAT walkers and Mechs, utilizing mechanical components. They have defiantly been suggested so we can make our own doors, hangars, rails, or whatever. 
 
There was an old post I cam across that talked about these, I tried searching for it real quick but no luck.  And some designs were linked on a docking clamp that could operate as a hinge were linked. It wasnt its purpose but could be used for such. I would expect they will give us some basic mechanical components, especially since so many of us request them. 
 
They are still early in development, so it may be something we wont see until Beta or release. 

Hi and Welcome to the Forums
 
Lua will be a thing to script your constructs, we don't know the limitations of Lua yet, but we know you can script in DU .
Hinges and rotors we don't know 100% yet, but we know that there will be countless elements that you can put onto your constructs. Constructs being anything you create in voxels, base stations or capital ships or little fighters. Everything is a construct and built in the same process as all constructs will be
 
nora,