ColdSpiral

These designs are amazing. Your detail work is particularly striking - fine without being fiddly, bold enough to be distinct. I also really like the way you've built around negative space, especially in the Corvid, instead of it being a solid mass. It helps tie the ships together, too; they visibly have different roles but they still seem to share something.

So I've just had a save go from great to bad to worse in the space of two minutes, explicitly due to the Escort Me behaviour. It turns out that Escort AI will turn aggressive toward any ship that fires a weapon in the direction of the ship being escorted. This includes player-owned ships, such as a harmless salvage craft that was dismantling a wreck nearby. It was destroyed by my wingman before I could command it to go passive. I was still collecting the turrets and systems from the wreck when a faction invasion occurred. I got caught in the crossfire, and though my shields held up I suddenly found that I had declared1 for the invading side. That same wingman had turned on the defenders for firing in my direction. I have spent hours dragging my rep with that faction up from Bad to Friendly, and now we're sworn enemies. 1Also those dialog popups - and the ones during bandit ambushes - are incredibly annoying, wrenching control away when steering, especially in the heat of battle. Can't they appear in the chat log instead?

I can't find a mention of it on the forum, but I assume this is a bug - AI freighters don't respect player docked status at stations. It's happened a few times now that if I'm docked for some time - so usually at a research station - I'll suddenly have an AI freighter ram me into the station as it attempts to park at the dock I'm using... This damages my ship, destroys the dock (I now have to go searching for a new research station because when it happened just now the station only had one dock left :-\), and lowers my rep. The jerks.

Thanks! I wish I could. With the current fighter system its hangars can handle a cadre of 4-6 mining fighters (due to their size), but I've not found any that are efficient enough to be worthwhile - you get a tiny percentage of the asteroid's resources, half as much as a quality mining laser. And I'm not in a position to squander resources for speed and convenience. :-\ Looking forward to future versions where it's planned that a) we can design our own fighters somehow, and b) we can dock two ships together. At that point, I'll definitely be making miniature Harvesters that detach from an expanded Stargazer to chew up asteroids and wrecks for me. :D

No worries! Glad to help.

These are fantastic. I'm a fan of the modularity and the consistency of components; it really ties your ships together as an identifiable fleet. The detail work - numbers, antennae, etc. - is amazing. And in those details I'm inspired particularly by your subtle use of asymmetry - it's really effective. Your lore is making for an interesting read so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this themed fleet takes it. :D

Hi Maxavian, If you open the block menu in build mode, you can paste your groups in the bottom section with the default prefabs and they'll stay there between ships. Just select an empty slot and paste as usual.

Thanks MrVorgra, I was wondering where those gifs came from, and was here to write a post about linking images. Glad to see you beat me to it. To add, there's a way of making the thumbnail a click-through to the full image, so my 2nd picture is typed as: [#url=http://imgur.com/Nm0XErN][#img]http://i.imgur.com/Nm0XErNl.jpg[/img][/url] (ignore the #hashes) My addition - Turrets! For my first handful of screens I tried desperately to find a part of the screen to put my cursor so that my turrets would be on a good angle and you could see more than just the back of them. Okay if you want an action shot, but not great for display. By accident I discovered that if you target the ship itself the turrets will return to their default positions. Nice and tidy.

I love your glass™ story. Thank you both! ;D I'm enjoying putting the lore together; though if CSF Industries is beginning to look somewhat dysfunctional I confess to more than a little channelling of my mentor, good ol' Cave Johnson. Hi ceeagedee, and anyone else interested, I've taken Trecares' advice and created material-tier versions of the latest CSF Stargazer incarnation. Also edited the glows & paintjob to material-appropriate colours. I've made sure the materials & colours have applied and that they don't crash the game, but haven't test-driven them for balance. Could be terrible. For the Naonite and Titanium versions I've just quickly switched the hangars for cargo bays. Might want to stick a thruster or angle blocks on there. For the Titanium version I've also replaced any shield blocks with integrity fields, so hopefully it's a little less fragile. You can find them zipped up and attached! :) CSF_Stargazer_Tiers.zip

Keep material-based tech unlocks: From reading this post by koonschi about introducing hangar blocks as early as Titanium tier: I understand this, but I'd like to beg you to reconsider, due to my experience so far with the game. When I had an Iron ship, I was chafing at the limits of my solar panels until I scrounged enough Titanium to build a generator. When I had a Titanium ship, I started encountering shielded Xsotan, and I started going out of my depth to gather Naonite for my own shield. When I had a Naonite ship, I'd entered a warzone and began to see AIs using carriers in sector invasions. This motivated me to go out of my way to gather Trinium so I could build my own hangar. Now that I've got a Trinium ship... there's nothing like that to look forward to. Just material upgrades. Sure, they'll be better, but they won't be new. My suggestion is that, rather than rolling all these tech blocks down to be almost immediately available, introduce a new tech with its own gameplay elements in each material tier. Just like the way the weapon variety increases. It's an excellent extra initiative to drive the player forward. This was the impression I got reading KS update 9. Perhaps Xanion can unlock cloaking or coolant1 blocks, Ogonite adds spinal weapon mount blocks2 or internal factories (maybe for fighter replenishment?), and Avorion introduces some otherworldly and bizarre feature you've wanted to include but couldn't justify. 1Coolant blocks: I think I've seen it requested here before, but a block similar to the turret lock block which slows overheat / boosts cooldown of a turret built on it, at the cost of energy (So I can fire that cannon more than once per battle :D). 2Spinal / Broadside weapons: Spinal-mounted weapons have definitely been a common request, but I think I've worked out an interesting implementation of them. Simply put, a spinal-mount block is a block with a single active face (rotatable) and a minimum effective size, into which a player mounts a turret (still counting toward ship limits). The back and side of the spinal-mount block are low-durability, encouraging the player to build the ship around it. The front requires clearance to work, similar to a hangar. The weapon is immobile but certain stats (damage, range, energy/cooldown requirements!) are amped up considerably by the scale of the block, turning the turret into a massive, slow-firing, long-range cannon. Broadside blocks exist in my mind because I really enjoyed the combat in Rebel Galaxy. They work in a similar manner to spinal-mount blocks, with a little more complexity behind the scenes. Instead of a single barrel, a broadside block's active face is divided by surface area into a row of barrels along its longest axis, much like a thruster. Some slight mobility along one axis could be possible, allowing the broadside to aim higher or lower, for example. A turret inserted into a broadside block will still have its stats boosted by the block's volume, but then also divided across the number of barrels (a far more aesthetic suggestion would be to link the turret to x barrel blocks, so they could be embellished with gun emplacements, like the sweet 40K ships made by Shieldmate and Zajc, but that would require some sort of wiring/linking system like that in Starbound or Gunpoint and I appreciate the complexity involved there). This can function as a devastating cannon for that classic spaceboat feel, a defensive measure - mount an auto-fire chaingun in there and you've got a Battlestar-style wall of flak, or something else entirely - like a vertical-firing broadside mounted with seeker rockets for a missile swarm... In-use colour palette: I've recently discovered that I can drag colour swatches into the hotbar. This is a handy feature, but it's not perfect, particularly as it resets between sessions. When I'm building, I'm using the hotbar for blocks or prefabs, so I'd rather not clutter it with colours. I also copy/paste a lot - need a light green wedge? There's one - copy, scale, place. So when I need to colour a new part... I have no idea what I've been using. What I'd really like is a little window that has swatches for the different colours currently in use on the ship (advanced feature: drag one colour -e.g. Eternal Salmon - onto one in the palette - Infinity Cyan - to repaint all Infinity Cyan blocks with Eternal Salmon.) Material-based hangar lighting The blue of the hangar looks nice on my blue-white Trinium ship, but it clashes a little with other colour schemes. Would it be possible to change the colour of the field depending on the material of the hangar? Repost: Ship-to-ship docking mechanics: I posted this in the Design Fighters suggestion thread; it was relevant to koonschi's response but not much to the direction of the thread, so I'll move it here for tidiness. There are a bunch of concepts that I'm looking forward to trying out when ship-to-ship docking is introduced - modular ships, detachable salvage pods, hyperspace frames... But I've got some questions regarding what it will allow: Will docked ships remain "on" - potentially linking turret / engine / thruster control, power, shield coverage, cargo space, etc. of docked ships? This allows for modular ship components - undocking a cargo pod and connecting an industrial-sized self-powered shield generator in its place, without having to delete/rebuild modules when needed. Will the docking feature utilise the existing dock block / a new single-surface block to set a dock point, requiring contact between a corresponding block on each ship, or just lock the docking ships together when in range? If it's the former, I'd like to suggest... Being able to set orientation when docked - maybe have a polarised docking block - the top of the texture always connects to the top of its pair. Short-range tractor to dock neatly with an uncaptained ship - e.g. pressing F at 0.02km aligns and pulls the two docks together, rather than just locking them in place "near enough" Commanding an AI follower to connect to a specific dock Thanks for reading. ;D

-=CSF INTERNAL EYES ONLY CLASSIFICATION ZERO HARPY=- LAB 8 - Project #BFF Status: Testing Phase Gamma. Despite recent slowdowns in pirate activity, Harvester captains have been expressing concern about completing their salvage and mining tasks in "unsafe environments". An initiative to address this is underway, but without significant advances in AI this remains a distant option. Until such a time, R&D Lab 8 is proud to present the results of Project #BFF: The Bruiser Gunship. Despite its light frame, the Bruiser is equipped with hefty shield generators and ample power supply. Gratuitous thruster placement grants the Bruiser excellent agility in tight spots. Five weapon hardpoints - Three top-mounted, two underslung. This prototype is equipped with a combination of plasma, laser, rocket, and anti-fighter chaingun turrets, for flexibility in combat. We don't fully know what these glowy bits do, but the techs tell us they're essential. We're considering putting some glass™ over them. Bruiser Prototype full statistics. Initial testing... All is well. -=END DOCUMENT=- Bruiser.xml

Lego is a fine inspiration, though! I've always wanted to be a spaceship, so I spend a lot of time staring at art and concepts of them. :P I guess I've gotten a feel for the shapes. If it's any consolation, I'm terrible at basically everything else. ;D Thanks! Go on, throw some blocks on there. There's always an undo button! I had that bug too. Happens on & off with all my ships. Stargazer's undergoing a refit, so will update once she's in a presentable condition. But something else might be on the way...

Wow, that's really sleek. I dig the industrial look of the front bay; those hazard stripes are perfect.

Thanks! I have a feeling I've got a lot of mining to get through before I start building on a larger scale - we built Proteus in Creative mode simply so I could show my partner the ship editor without any other hassle; I enjoy working with the material limitations & interruptions of a playthrough. There's something in the character of a ship that's been expanded and upgraded over time that I just can't seem to replicate in a single build session. However, I do have some big plans for A-W / Stargazer and possibly even Harvester down the line... I didn't, so I took some for you! I've only got the most recent versions, though. Proteus: Stargazer: Harvester: Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying them! I'd love to see any modifications you make along the way.

ADDENDUM: CSF Industries is excited to announce that breakthroughs made during the development of the Harvester* have lead to the construction of an all-new, at-least-twice-as-shiny, high-tech bridge module for the Stargazer. This seemed too important to wait for the next newsletter. Further, weapon hardpoints have been added for tidiness' sake, and some of the subsystems have been rearranged into a more useful configuration. *we discovered glass. Revolutionary. Edit - new version uploaded with holos on the underside capped off properly... Stargazer2.7z