Cornflakes

im not sure with (at least basic) weapons crafting needing any extra tools but the nanoformer... "A nano-assembling cannon capable of absorbing, carrying, and reconfiguring the molecular structure of raw materials and of then forming, by freeing them in calibrated streams, most basic objects for which you have acquired the skills. I know I can manufacture weapons, simple shapes, objects whose schemes I remember, little things for the moment, but very useful." (fixed the typo) https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/08/20/dual-universe-part-4/ you may not build a laser with it, but a modern day mechanical assault rifle should be possible from that description.

what thoger said. if you know exactly what to do and have the materials to do so available creating things should be easy and fast. when you have copper and tin making bronze is trivial, but finding out that a 3:1 mixture of copper and tin makes a pretty good metal should be the hard thing. the whole research mechanic could encompass a field of materials science where you mess around with different processes and base materials to get different end results.

im with the OP on the "wait months to arrive" thing. yes, getting to other star systems shouldnt be an easy thing, but it shouldnt simply be limited by the amount of time someone is willing to wait while watching a distance meter to tick down. building a stargate, calibrating it that it works at all, determining the billion and one parameters for it to work, determining the billion and one other parameters it needs to connect to the system in question should be the things you have to do to get to a system where you have no arrival gate, not waiting for a timer to tick down... have the player work during that months it takes to "arrive" at another star system. especially in the beginning times where nobody has experience in building stargates, how to efficiently calibrate and run them, how to get the data needed to get a ship to where you want it to be. waiting for a timer to tick down is boring and lazy game design. implement the same time delay with actual gameplay, with the player able to influence it.

You can theoretically scale antimatter warheads from firecracker to planetcracker, though. nothing fundamental prevents you from making AM hand grenades.

Source?

Wat? Decon for astronauts because of space bacteria? i want the stuff you smoke man. Theres nothing up there we didnt bring up ourselves, and anything we dragged up there has way too subcritical concentrations that a decon because of any microorganisms an astronaut collects would be necessary. Taking tardigrades and bacteria through the solar system, that happens often, they actually started to decon mars probes before launch not to contaminate mars with earthly life. But decon from anything you gathered in space? That claim needs some serious backing to be believable

Source? Because im pretty sure that they are pretty much banned and that they count as war crimes to be used.

Point C is pretty much common place for cannons that are big enough in RL. or would at least be no change in the guns themseld but only in the ammunition stores and ammo distribution. From what i can tell from the graphics i can find "classic" iowa class battleship turrets have no magazine per se, only successive buffer rings which are supplied constantly

@halo381 i spent waaay to much time reading up on such things. lol i dont expect too much in the explosives department on foot tbh... but it would be really nice to have "adaptive" charges which you can program with specific explosion cones for different effects. a basic "blast everything" sphere. a more specific "frak this area in particular" claymore-like tunnel/door/hallway denial mine a pretty closely defined cutting charge to cut through structural girders and similar (cutting charges) and a very fine line (ideally with 1 block diameter) "i need a hole exactly there" charge. (like HEAT warheads) maybe reprogrammable on the fly (for enter commandos) or defined at design/build time. if we go really fancy LUA programmable with multiple possible cones per explosion (would be more of a bomb pumped laser warhead, lol)

i didnt start it, i just rolled with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@halo381 there are no materials known to me that have thermal expansion coefficients large enough to matter at a few cm sizes and in temperature ranges where the materials dont melt. glass for example expands by 1.7mm for a 10cm lens when you heat it by 2000 degrees celsius. which is the melting point for quartz glass. it'd be soft, malleable and useless long before that. true, it'd be less effective at focusing with a fixed array, but with known thermal expansion coefficients and known temperature you can do a lot with a dynamic focusing array. which you'd already need for maximum effectivity for a weaponised laser. as you have to focus it always to the correct distance anyway. and i have no idea how much power you need to power a magic antigravity space compressing rock cutter, but considering that you throw around literal tons of rock... you need waaaaaaaay more power and energy than solar panels which fit casually over your shoulders can supply. theoretically available solar power on earth is ~1kW/m². using my ebook reader (tolino shine) as rough measure of how large a solar panel on my shoulder could be (175x116mm) you could get roughly 40 watts total for solar panels on your shoulders. thats way below anything throwing arounds tons of rock would need. so solar power is out of the game for the nanoformer under any circumstances. and that thing can probably be comfortably powered by your suit for a while at least. and dont make me talk about what acceerating and decelerating the tons of rock in the kadpacks would take in terms of power when you casually walk in circles. just from basic kinetic energy thinking laser weaponry is comfortably within the range of the suits power supply. space is a horrible cooling medium, in an atmosphere / on a planet you can shed heat by conduction and convection in space you only have the really slow radiative way open, which needs large vulnerable radiator panels for example the ISS has 156m² of radiator area (which cant be folded up in any way) for 70kw radiation rate whereas the cooler pictured on this page (i took the numbers from the smallest 2 fan unit) can shed more than three times of that with a really really inefficient 35°C "hot" water input http://pdf.directindustry.com/pdf/frigomeccanica-industriale-spa/torri/72786-409229.html#open theres a reason why thermos flasks are "filled" with vacuum between their inner and outer walls tldr: cooling in space is hard. linky to read on that http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/basicdesign.php#id--Heat_Radiators

obnoxious font, wrongly written LASER. im close to start to dislike you :V and any expansion would be thermal, its all thermally limited. and all im saying is that hand held laser weaponry isnt exactly "faster equipment degradation" only. from the calculations there a "light" pulsed laser weapon would be able to penetrate about 2.5cm of steel or 30 cm of flesh. thats not exactly harmless. and faaar away from the energy budget one has when he casually carries around antigravity generators and space compression devices as we do according to the Dual Space lore. in addition to that casual availablility of the required energies due to the casual nature of the power source it seems that the heat problem would also be pretty secondary.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers Nuff said

@captaintwerkmotor Why would it be a strain on the power core? If its a significant strain after your caps are done charging your caps are crap and or about to fail. You charge them before you need them that you dont have to expend the energy and time to charge them when you actually want to fire. regardless of gun safety, You dont put the magazine in your rifle /after/ putting your eye on the sights

@Velenka I'd like to say i think it wouldnt be tooo large of a strain on the system (using small amounts of raycasts wpithout reflections where you only have to include blocks along a single line and can make generalisations with large amounts of identical blocks, summing them up to one block of thickness x instead of x blocks with thickness 1) But you are probably right. I also have boatloads more of that with diagrams, fake sources for flares and disguises and math and gameplay around angular resolution, which i'd post here as well if someone would be interested.

You and your weird ass weapon controls. Why should i charge the caps only after lock on? Charge them all the time and fire when i have a locked firing solution. Not the other way around. Yeah, coilguns can support a lower current, but then they can be switched way more efficiently than railguns, very likely approaching the >95% electrical-to-mechanical efficiency of modern electrical motors (because they are the same thing). And its much much easier to build a coilgun that lasts for more than one shot than a railgun that does. Aka a gun with military level reliability. Tldr: Coilguns are power limited. Railguns are efficiency and reliability limited

derped up with posting, fixed it now. behold the wall of text!

You argue with realistic physics, i argue with realistic physics, dont move the goal posts And its still not gyroscopic but interferometric. I'd personally scrap all the special case cloaking and stealthing and simplify it to three general characteristics of blocks: Emissivity: Every device and block that does /something/ emits radiation over a large spectrum from kilometer wave radio to nanometer gamma-/ x-rays. including everything inbetween of course not every device radiates with the same intensity at the same frequencies, but the possible radiation space encompasses pretty much the whole of EM radiation. with the exact resolution of that emissions being whatever is affordable computing wise. then theres absorption/transmission. this is again a spectrum graph that defines how much a block absorbs radiation of a given frequency. some blocks absorb radio waves, some absorb visible light, others absorb IR. with every block passed the emitted radiation gets dampened more and more. the last factor is reflection obviously, it defines how much of a given portion of radiation gets (for simplicity i'd say diffusely) reflected from the block. then you have one kind of sensor device passive sensors. they have certain spectral sensitivities. some sensors are good in RF, some good in UV, others good in X-ray. some can differentiate single eV differences between gamma rays but can only see gamma rays, others can monitor the whole spectrum at once but cant tell you anything about the kind of radiation they are detecting. same deal for all of them, just different numbers in their datasheet. you can create an active sensor by combining a passive sensor with some active sender. you send out radiation which gets reflected and influenced by objects and then received by passive sensor arrays again. this behaviour creates a lot of support possibilities out of the box, for example target painting and similar methods. now we have a few variable sets which are relatively easy to understand but can be used for intricate sensor gameplay. lets say you have an engine core thats emitting a lot of characteristic x-ray radiation. you dont want to broadcast your drive type, but due to the characteristic radiation spikes its pretty clear to anyone who has a sensor what kind of drive you are using. so you can encase your drive in a block type that happens to be good at absorbing x-rays. you now shielded your engine from prying passive sensors, enhancing your stealth capabilities. the same process can be applied to any kind of radiation and block. if you dont want your enemies analysing your armor plating, place some dampening material over your hull thats tuned to your enemies active scanners so they cant penetrate down to your actual armor layer to tell what kind of armor your ship is using. a very stealthy ship would then be one that has very good absorption ratings matched to the equipment it is using and to the sensors which are likely to be encountered. counter stealth would then be to find out against which frequencies a given ship is badly shielded and thus can be found with. say, ship has VHF dampening materials as hull and you use an x-ray scanner instead. lots of intelligence and counter intelligence and sensor gameplay without much being hardcoded in by the devs. encouraging players to design their ships in a smart way.

@captainTwerkmotor hence why i said "for limited amounts of time" and have you looked at those interferometers? they are kilometer large devices separated by thousands of kilometers. and thats because the basic physics dont work out otherwise. for detecting whats essentially cataclysmic events with masses that dwarf our whole solar system. i note my doubts that you could build gravity wave detectors small enough to fit into a spaceship and sensitive enough to detect one.

the thermodynamics for the normandy work out fine for the most part, though. they couldnt maneuver with any kind of thrust, but coasting with offline engines while actively refrigerating the hull of the craft and dumping the heat into an internal heat sink works for limited amounts of time. how long exactly depends on many factors, including heat capacity of the dump medium and the breakeven heat generation of the main power systems the less heat you produce internally and the larger the capacity of your dump the longer you can stay cold. you certainly cant fire antimatter engines while staying cold, but just drifting on on inertia would work for a while. and please, is that huge pink font really necessary? :V

Eh, the voxels arent not always there. Nobody of right mind fills empty space with explicit data. So you dont "simply change their color" But that doesnt change with or without delineated building zones. Unless voxel based destruction does /not/ make it into the game, then it would be (easier) possible to convert ships to fixed meshes out of building zones. But then, there are voxel planets to keep track of, and i suspect they'll already be an irreducible voxel load and ships wont be /that/ much worse

And where does "not make technology a timer or xp bar" exclude technological progress? give the player tools to create thrusters/reactors/whatever from varying materials using varying tools with every factor influencing if and how well the device works. Then technological progress is a direct function of players playing and understanding the processes of building better equipment. With some more intricate components only being buildable by well tuned assembly plants. So the playerbase as a whole has to go through the (resource intensive) process of designing and building infrastructure which enables higher tech devices to be built. "Teching up" the community as a whole instead of placing every new player back at the start of the whole process.

What would be gained by hard limiting new players to follow some predefined progression path? If the player is good in building what he wants, let him build it. If he finds a way to bootstrap himself to advanced tech, let him do it. Why limit players in that regard?

theres still no need to abandon politeness for that, that is what makes forums toxic and unbearable to read

Caaaalm down. no need to get toxic. All is fine. We are all on the aame team here.