SinBad

I always have my crew block as the base block in the centre of the ship. When ive waited for 600ish crew to level up, they seem like the thing i would least like to loose. I build cubes, so the next layer is the dense blocks, dampers, gyros, generators, hyperspace, shield and batteries. Then the less dense, computers, cargo, integrity (to keep them close to the armour) and some frame work to fill out the shape in the corners. Next is engines and thrusters and hangers. Then a few spaced layers of armour, one large face filling plate on top of another(for rails) topped in a thicker layer (for collisions).

why build a ship? just slip this in your back pocket, take a deep breath and hop out an airlock. ;)

I just own the cube. They are less about cosmetics and more about performance through component balance and placement. you can pack a heck of a lot of stuff into a cube because a lower percentage of your volume is given over to armour. i pretty mine up a bit with a few cosmetic holographic designs on the outside as well. so my advise is, own the cube and make the best cube you can (a cube will generally out perform cosmetic builds anyway)

Well it seems that the list of threads i mentioned in the last post does get the 'new' tag when new posts get made.

Dont forget that a warship shaped like a rifle tends to look more agressive. Dont believe me? Play halo.

ok, so if you go to profile/account settings/notifications, you can see a list of what you have subscribed to. it doesnt indicate if there are new posts on the threads, but its better than trying to remember a dozen threads and missing that one relevant message posted to a thread thats been inactive for two weeks. only email... wow. at least the post entry box is nice.

Every forum ive signed up for has an internal notification system. You log in, and somewhere (generaly near where forum supported private message notifications are displayed) there is a visual indication of new notifications that when clicked on, will display a navigatable list of notifications. Email notices are just one more thing to clog your inbox, especially on active threads, or if you follow a dozen at once.

well, if other folks have them working, where to go in the forum to see your notifications? i turned off the email ones as i dont need mail about a forum i check daily...

go back to the smugglers base and retake the first mission. step through the missions again until the guy asks you to collect the parts. when you talk to him gain, dont say 'hello' as it will just give you the part collecting mission again. instead select 'here are the parts' and he will then give you the thing you need to go get the thing you are looking for.

i took the time to salvage a whole field of these (unowned, of course) and found nothing but the materials they were made of. maybe an incomplete feature?

i would like to see the computer blocks contribute to hyperspace calculation times. even if its only a little bit. i would also like to see hyperspace energy use tied to the distance jumped. i understand that ripping a hole in space big enough for a ship to fall through probably takes up most of the energy, but a 1 sector jump shouldnt fully drain the hyperspace energy of a ship thats capable of 20 sectors unaided. i do like the idea that it has to be fully charged to initiate a jump, but shorter jumps shouldnt use the full bar if you can do longer ones.

it doesnt matter where you place them, they will produce the same force from anywhere. that said, they are dense, heavy blocks. i try to cluster them close to centre of mass in an attempt to keep my rotational inertia to a minimum.

I dont want to post a rude "git gud" reply here, so if it seems i have, sorry. 1. dont go fast toward asteroids or stations. -or- dont go directly at asteroids or stations if you are going fast. aim to one side a little bit so if you overshoot you dont hit it. 2. Have better lateral thrust. a few taps on lateral thrust can nudge your vector by the few degrees you need to turn a collision into a miss. 3. Use Integrity fields. these increase a blocks HP ten fold. so a 10 hp tiny block will have 100hp instead. 4. dont use tiny blocks. a block is destroyed when it runs out of hp. hp is based on block volume as well as base stats, so a 0.1x0.1x0.1 block of trinium armor is far easier to destroy than a 10x10x1 girder frame block. detail looks good, but see if you can merge some blocks together, or extend them deeper inside your ship to get more hp per block, making them harder to destroy. i use a combination of these. i have 100m/s/s lateral thrust to the sides as well as up/down. i routinely traverse asteroid fields at 1km/s speeds, using lateral thrust to dodge (the optional prograde marker is extremely usefull in this situation). my forward most block is a 33x33x1.5 block of trinium armour thats backed up by integrity fields. ive bounced off asteroids at 500m/s in fights without blocks being destroyed. half of the solution is changing your piloting habits, the other half is engineering your ship to support manoeuvrability and the possibility of occasionally tanking a hit.

ok, almost 1/4 of one face done... problem is, that's over 6k blocks and the game is getting... unhappy with me. maybe save this level of detail for small borders or highlights. but the point stands. cubes are only as ugly as you are willing to let them be. maybe keep it simple though, like this

thanks, i think. yeah, its hard to find the right colours on the palette when they all end up glowing pastel versions. im working on a celtic design using 0.1x0.1 blue lines on a 33x33 black cube at the moment. trying not to have more than 0.3 worth of black space around any blue 'pixel'. it will be fiddly and intricate, but monochrome for ease of painting. i found some great 400x400 pixel art images that i would like to try out for my next cube, but im not sure where the forum draws the line between art and porn, so i might pick something else. it would be a great distraction in pvp though.

the only argument i have seen against cubes is how they look. so: we are only bound by our creativity. hologram blocks ftw.

i have factory made naonite lasers (thanks for the range fix!) that are pretty good damage at just under 2k for about the energy const of a car battery. but those are paired with a set of 4 rng exotic titanium bolters that burst fire for huge alpha damage. i still havent found anything that has better alpha at their range, and im checking xanion level turret factories right now. i have no idea how i got 4 matched turrets without building them, i have a feeling they were either a set drop from swoks (i like hunting swoks) or i lucked out in a massive way. maybe there is a duplication bug when a turret gets shot off? i did collect these before i figured out that volume=hitpoints, so i had to pick up my own turrets often.

(this was a thread starter, but then i found this thread, so i moved it here) this is my personal reasons for building cube ships. i realise that there are a lot of folks out there who dislike cube ships because they are perceived as lacking artistic creativity. i agree with that. they are cubes. cubes are cubes and cubes are dull. but you can dress up your cube with funky holographic graffiti to give it some individual flavour. for those who say they exploit the game mechanics and are cheaty: well, its math. math and physics. if you have a game that models physics where mass force and volume are considerations, you get spheres and cubes. the only way around that is to make the the game physics cheaty. so into the mess of my complicated love affair with an aesthetically boring shape... first off, the cube:square ratio. this basically means that in a sphere the volume of the shape increases with the cube of its radius, but the surface area increases with the square of its radius. for example, a sphere with a radius of 10units has a volume of 4188.79units, and a surface area of 1256.64 a sphere with a radius of 20units (twice as big) has a volume of 33510.32units, and a surface area of 5026.55 in other words, making a sphere with twice the radius increases the volume by 8 times, whereas the surface area only increases 4 times. that means that by using a sphere you can have more functional blocks, like generators, engines and thrusters protected by the smallest mass of armour possible. unfortunatly, armour HP is calculated from the blocks volume, not the thickness taken at the angle of hit penetration. which is understandable considering the number of hits that need to be calculated in the average fight. armouring a sphere (or pseudo-sphere) requires the use of lots of small volume blocks which individually have low HP, and so are easily destroyed. so the most advantageous shape for armour is large homogeneous slabs in order to maximise the hp of each block. cubes lend themselves well to this type of armour as they only require 6 slabs of armour for full coverage. cubes work out a the same in the cube square ratio though again, take a side length of ten which gives a volume of 1000units and a surface area of 600 units (10*10*6sides) then double it to 20 units for a volume of 8000 and a surface area of 2400. doubling the side length increases the volume by 8 times, but the surface area only increases 4 times. that means by making a cube twice as big, you can fit 8 times the functional volume behind only 4 times the armour. this tends to why bigger cubes are exponentially more powerful than smaller cubes. less of your volume is taken up by armour, which means your ship not only has less mass, but also has more space for other things inside it. on to manoeuvrability. this involves three aspects, mass, distance from centre of mass, and the average distance the mass is from the centre of mass. ill address the last one first: put the heavy stuff in the middle. this helps to reduce the rotational inertia of the cube. think of a gyroscope, its thin in the middle and fat around the rim. this is done to ensure that most of the mass is as far as possible from the centre of mass in order to increase its rotational inertia. this helps them to spin a long long time for very little energy input. it also makes it harder to start them spinning, some can take up to half an hour to get up to rotational speeds. i aim for the opposite effect. by concentrating the densest blocks as close to the centre as possible, it reduces the rotational inertia. this means it takes less force to start and stop a rotation, which means we can use smaller thrusters than if we concentrated the mass on the outside. so if im using a mix of material tiers, ill try to put the heaviest stuff in the middle (inertial dampers and gyros), and have the less dense, lighter material blocks toward the outside like cargo bays and crew quarters. the next thing is your overall mass. you will have a lot of it, which means big thrusters and big engines. something worth noting is that engines don't need to be at the back of the cube. you can maintain even mass distribution simply by copy pasting each side to the other 5. lastly is the distance of a thruster from the centre of mass. we all know that the further away from the COM the thruster is, the more effective it is. the corners of a cube are the furthest away you can get. all other mass in closer to COM than the thrusters. and you can make big, big thrusters. that leaves the wide open faces perfect for segmented panels of directional thrusters. its fairly easy to build a cube that can accelerate at 100m/s/s in any direction. having a tiny thruster on a long stick will give you more force, but if you want to keep that stick, you need to armour it, which negates the mass savings of using a smaller thruster. with all of that, the final layer is a simple slab of armour over each face. i prefer to have the front panel over lap the sides, then each side overlaps the back panel and one other side. then the rear panel fits snugly into the cavity left by the side panels. that way there are no low volume corner or edge blocks with low hp. adjust the thickness of the panels until you get a hp and manoeuvrability you are happy with. as my cubes have gotten larger, ive found that i can dedicate more and more volume to manoeuvring. making for nimble cubes that can weave through wreckage and asteroids easily. it should also be noted that a cube is more volumetrically efficient than other shapes because its dimensionally smaller for the same volume. meaning a million tons of cube fits into a smaller box than a million tons of fancy space jet fighter does. cubes are not a bad thing. they are efficient. space demands efficiency, as does combat. we don't have to worry about systems that require large surface areas or large safety distances in this game like heat sinks, solar arrays, and radiation spewing drive systems. there is no reason to value having large surface area to volume ratios over smaller surface area to volume ratios. in fact, bump proof armouring your vital systems encourages less surface area protecting as much volume as possible. thus the cube. now, to be clear: im not saying that everyone should stop building fancy fantasy star ships, those are cool and add variety to the game. im just suggesting that cube ships have a bad rep for no reason other than the fact that so few people try to make them look good. so, post pics of your holographicaly painted psychedelic cubes of tightly packed performance. (ill get some of mine up in the next few hours) or if you prefer, tell me im a boring cheating cube-meta promoting enemy of artistic expression. either way, discourse moves us forward :)

i didnt see that one, thanks. ill copy my thread post there and remove the new thread. tidy forums are nice forums ;)

and thats just one reason why cubes make more sense. i smell a new thread...

I don't see how that makes cubes less attractive. A dumbell that covers all 3 axis IS a cube. The only thing you have shown is that the closer to com the thruster is, the less effective it is. Thats a known effect. Its because the farther from com a thruster is, the longer of lever arm its force has to induce rotation. Distance from com=force multiplied by lever length. In my cubes, I put as much of the high density stuff in the centre as possible, and the last layer before the armour is thrusters, as far from com as possible. The armour is then a thin single plate per face, as armour hp is 100% dependant on block volume, so a single plate can be only 0.5 thick if its 30x30. I've not had any problems with manouverability yet.

good experiment, but its a little flawed as each test article has a different mass. run the numbers again, but this time remove mass differences from the equation by adding/removing mass from the stone stick after thruster placement so that each test article (stick+thruster) has the same mass. your centre of mass will move as well, but thinning/thickening the stone stick instead of shortening/lengthening it would help to combat this. otherwise using a very long stick would make the changes in COM position much smaller.

This seems a little wonky to me. I think it would make more sense if the stats were tied more tightly to material. For example: Xmin-Xmax possible damage range Split this into the seven material teirs to get a range of possible damage for that teir Then within each teir split it again into rarity teirs. Maybe reserve legendary as a special case that will always pull from the next mateiral teir (make a ghost teir above avorion) That way an uncommon turret will always have better damage than a common for the same material, how much will vary, but it will never be less. Similarly, a trinium exotic will have much better stats than a naonite exotic. But a naonite legendary might just come out on par. Do the same for all the stats.

What inspires my ships? Math. For me its all about the numbers. Big numbers that look good together. I've made some horrificly ugly monstrosities in every game I play. But when you look at their stat screens they suddenly seem beautifull.

is this in the build menu? there are two repair buttons, one is a plain wrench that will do block repairs the other is a wrench (with a gear? i think) that will repair all.