Razorwire

You also get a 500 error if you try and purchase a Supporter pack when you already have a Founder pack. Scout, you have a founder pack, and can't buy a Supporter pack without making a second account for it. The two accounts can't be merged, either. Express your disappointment here - I'm an Iron Founder looking to upgrade too, for what it's worth.

I'm happy to buy the extra pack and have it applied to this account. It just won't let me. have spoken to support, they say it can't be done.

I want to upgrade. I don't want to have to make a new account to do so and have seperate rewards on seperate accounts. I don't need a discount (though it would be nice). So some kind of upgrade path or a way of merging accounts would be fantastic.

That link or quote is hidden. Is it from a Restricted forum area? Nope. Been talking to Support; the only way you can buy a supporter pack when you already own any founder pack is to make a seperate second account. The two accounts would be totally seperate, with each getting it's own rewards. Upgrades and merging accounts are not possible. I'm starting to get a little frustrated with it all, tbh. I wanted Ruby, but they closed upgrades before I could save the cash. Now I want Patron, but I lose what I currently have and have to make a new forum account if I buy Patron now.

Then just stick a label on it, as in your two examples there. If I want to play 20 hours straight on a Saturday because I can't get on in the week due to work, why should I be punished? I shouldn't, is the answer. A warning on the initial load screen is enough. If an informed adult hurts themselves, that's on them; don't restrict my service because they might ignore the warning.

That's why I didn't write "I will be surprised when...", I wrote "I'll be very surprised if...", which to me does not even imply a little hope. Just to be... exact: - I think there will be no life-subs available in the new packs. - I think there will be no pre-alpha access available in the new packs. - I'm truly disappointed that I didn't have the money back when I could have upgraded to Ruby for the life-sub. - I can afford Ruby twice-over now, which just makes it feel worse that I missed my only chance, just because my car blew up.

I know, Lethys. I keep forgetting that these forums seem incapable of processing anything less than exact terms. Sadly, my normal mode of speech rarely uses absolutes. "Those kinds of offers are expensive for the devs over time; they effectively remove a player from the funding stream once their package cost is exceeded by whatever the subs would have cost to that point. They are a reward for very early backers with deep pockets who take a chance on an early concept. Once early backing is done, the life-sub offers always vanish, and never return. " - Me, on life-subs, late last year.

I'm in the same situation; I wanted ruby for the life subscription but could only afford Iron at the time. I could buy Ruby now. Sadly, the new supporter packs will almost certainly be very weak compared to the kickstarter pledges, second-round crowd-funding always is. There might not even be any alpha-access, and I'll be very surprised if there are any life subs.

Love the idea It's have to be done in such a way that I couldn't claim an entire huge starship, or the mats to build one, by just tripping over some ex-player's stuff though. Would be pretty cool if it could be made into a long-ish project of refinishing, refurbishing and recommissioning a construct though.

JC did kinda hint at some material-properties-based soft limits when asked about space-elevators, so we could still see *some* limits...

We can hope for both. Variants of baseline elements with the mods baked into the blueprint, all of which can be further 'rigged by those with the skills on an individual construct basis. My favourite kind of PVP is where I know what I'm doing but am undergeared vs a clueless but gucci snob

Fair enough. I'd still like to see some baked-in variety of elements though. If a T2 small thruster is a straight upgrade over the T1, you'd pretty much always choose the T2, right? The only reason not to would be if you were building a power-constrained construct or had material/skill/blueprint shortages preventing you from building the T2. If you have multiple standard variants of the T1 instead, at the design stage you'd get to choose between lightweight-but-fragile, economic-but-low-output, heavy-but-high-output, etc. You're not increasing the number of elements in a construct, and you're not having to store a whole bunch of customisation numbers from jury-rigging, but you are making the design process more fun, the construct market more diverse, and the game richer as a result. Downside is of course more artwork and bigger game files. As an added benefit, though, it would make it easier to tweak my own copy of the Twerkmotorworks (TM) Super-Death-Interceptor Mkii (c) by swapping out the ridiculously thirsty T1D Performance thruster elements for some T1B Lightweight thrusters

But fuel compression *is* crazy unless you invoke superscience. Technically you *can* compress liquids, but in practice you need huge pressures for very little compression. It's the basis of hydraulic systems that liquids are incompressible for practical purposes, after all. Are you saying the ships *can't* fly sub-sonic..? Hovering, and flying slowly, on thrusters/jets uses insane amounts of fuel as you can't leverage aerodynamic lift, is all I meant. I read the AI ban, but there's a big range between manual, through automated and autonomous, on up to AI. I'm not in game, so I don't know exactly what's script-able, but from what I've read, I'm not getting decent auto turrets on an avatar-following drone, for example, even if I'm aiming the hand-held targeting laser personally. Really? That's a shame. I was hoping for actual variety in parts and being forced to make design choices rather than just always fitting best-in-slot. I'd much rather have to chose between A is lighter but weaker, B is extra strong but really heavy, C is a middle ground, D has extra thrust but is less fuel efficient, etc. Much better than "always fit T3 because it outperforms T2 and T1 in every way". Cheers for that, I'll have a read over lunch. .

500 years is huge at this point in time. You can't look back for pointers either, since technological progress is not linear, it's exponential. Citing the crossbow is a bit disingenuous, as it's pretty good at doing what it does. Better to think about something we can only just do, and see how that worked 500 years ago, like getting me to listen to your favourite band/composer's latest piece in seconds from my car compared to going out and finding a performance and waiting weeks or months to both physically attend it. On top of that, we've not got a huge drive for survival and space technologies right now, not like a "cataclysm threatening the entire Earth" kind of drive anyway. It is most likely that thrusters, ship systems and life support all got a huge boost in both scientific interest and funding in the run up to the evacuation. I disagree that the DU tech is grounded; millennia-long cryo-sleep, ships that fly sub-sonic and hover in atmosphere and gravity using only thrusters with (relatively) tiny fuel tanks, nano-tech, ultra-miniaturization and re-expansion, plus we've got FTL and jump-gates on the horizon... At the same time, you've got little automation, manually controlled turrets, restricted telepresence etc. In short, we have a whole bunch of stuff we can't see a way to get to from here, and a lack of a bunch of stuff we can do right now. Not my definition of grounded, but, and this is the important bit, it doesn't have to be in order to be fun. As for EM drives in DU, yeah, they could work as expensive stealth engines, or as alternatives to other types to keep your fuel requirements down at the cost of seriously reduced thrust, or low thrust for low weight, or... Balance it how you like, plenty of niches it could fill. Writing this I realise that I actually only care that we have a choice between variants of parts, and reasons to make those choices. Do I want to keep the fuel cost down, or keep high acceleration? Frankly it doesn't matter to me at that point whether I'm choosing between conventional or EM drives, or whether the choice is between H2O2 or Hydrazine propellants, or even between Variant-A and Variant-B. As long as the choice is there and I'm not just stuck with Small, Medium and Large versions of the same engine.

I was more saying "NASA wouldn't spend huge money testing something that has zero chances of working", which is more like "I was mugged, called the police, thus the criminals have a non-zero chance of getting caught". I'll try and be clearer As I understand it (I have an engineering background rather than a scientific one, forgive me) the EMdrive engine appears to work but produces only µN thrusts for kW inputs, it has a large uncertainty about it's test results and may not work after all, and it has operating principles based on physics that are not perfectly understood. I'll happily scratch the last if I'm wrong, but if this thing does work, it appears to violate Conservation of Momentum (and probably one or two other Laws), which would argue strongly that there is some improperly understood physics in there somewhere. My point was really that we're poking around with this stuff currently, therefore we could conceivably have useful reaction-less drives existing in a fictional technological epoch that includes wrist-mounted blackhole storage, nano-assemblers and resurrection machines.