Novastar

The problem is: the clearance is not even the boxes. I tried to build a station with some nice docking ports, but only one of them was recognized. Why? The white box was free of every other block, not even near them. I'm still not exactly sure what blocked it, but spacing my docking ports much more did work.

For me, in most cases it's already too late to do something when torpedos are in range of your point defense - either they intercept them or the torpedo intercepts your ship. 😄

Adding collecting loot to the patrol command sounds pretty good and even slightly fitting. Also doesn't raise the amount of already implemented commands, so no additional button space needed.

You can already move them into the research slots by right clicking them. Maybe try to change the sorting setting, sometimes it's a bit buggy. It's still annoying to convert something like 2000 object when you have a full inventory. Always moving the mouse to the research button, back to the turrets / systems, and then you have to adjust the mouse position because the autosort did activate and the objects move around. My suggestion: pressing space, enter or whatever automatically researches the current selection. Would make researching so much faster. 🙂

"Wow, a railgun with 33k damage, so good! ... wait, why does it only do 7.6k damage?! The tooltip says much more! Well, in that case the weapon is pretty bad." That should not happen. Not even the ingame encyclopedia explains this mechanic, it only says a bit about penetrating hull and not being as effective against armor - which is only true if the railgun can penetrate multiple different hull blocks. Shooting at one massive hull block does the same damage as shooting against armor or shields. The (at maximum) 25% more damage when hitting many blocks in a line is nice, but not really worth losing 75% damage to shields, single blocks and armor. The Hull Penetration stat value is also pretty meaningless. Doesn't really matter if it's 4, 8 or even 200. To be honest, I don't know how to fix that. Sadly I can't think of any easy change that would correct this problem. Maybe make railguns always do at least 70% ship damage with no armor, even when only hitting a single hull block / shields. Each additionally penetrated block raises the damage by 10% (additive) up to the Hull penetration value. High hull penetration value and many hull blocks in a line = big damage. Armor blocks stop the penetration and receive less damage, for example 50%. This would result in much closer damage values, and not doing 4 times as much, but it would also buff railguns much. Nerfing the base damage of railguns would be needed, for example 60% of current values. Even if mechanically nothing is changed, at least write in the encyclopedia how railguns work. Currently there's no way of finding this out without extensive testing - and hoping there's no other weird mechanic which screws the damage values for some other special cases.