nDervish

This is a known issue with out of sector mining (and salvaging). I strongly suspect that the underlying cause is that activity in non-player-occupied sectors doesn't update as frequently (to save on processing time), but mining/salvage yields aren't increased to compensate. For example, with totally made-up numbers, your uber-miner may be collecting 1000 minerals each time it fires its lasers, but it fires them 10 times a second (for 10k minerals/sec) when you're in the sector and only once every 5 seconds (for an average of 200 minerals/sec) when you're not there personally. The way to fix this would be for the out-of-sector processing code to figure out "if a player was here, the lasers would have fired 50 times in the 5 seconds that have passed, so calculate mineral gain from 50 shots instead of from one shot", but that doesn't appear to be in place yet.

Pretty sure he means when your ship's health is low. Normally, you get the yellow warning about your ship having lost blocks, which goes to red when it's lost a lot of blocks. If you use integrity fields, though, then it's possible for your ship to explode without having lost any blocks at all, so you don't get any top-of-screen warning icons before dying.

Would also be nice if all HUD arrows/reticles/etc. could be made thicker. A single-pixel-wide line gets lost in the noise pretty easily, even if it's brightly-colored.

I'm not a fan of that kind of difficulty scaling in general. If everything is always "your level" no matter where you go, then you can't choose to go somewhere harder to get greater risks and rewards or somewhere easier if you want to just do some casual comp-stomping. If difficulties are fixed, then you can find a place which is as difficult or as easy as you like. Strong scaling also tends to make player progression meaningless. If everything else gets stronger whenever you get stronger, then you're not really making any headway. In the specific case of this game, what happens if someone in a Xanion ship with 15k Omicron and someone in an Iron ship with 14 Omicron are traveling together? Which of them should it scale to match? Much simpler if the galaxy just is what it is. None of which is meant as an argument against raising the cap for the high end of the difficulty spectrum. That probably would be a good thing, just do it statically instead of making the end boss weaker if the player is weak and stronger if the player is strong.

Source? http://steamcommunity.com/app/445220/discussions/2/135509472111054063/ User Itharus: "I just noticed there's a keyboard mode... in it, you can treat your throttle as a slider and set your desired velocity. THAT IS FRIGGIN HUGE. Please implement a way to do that for mouse-steering mode as well!!!!" Response from dev cepheni: "We will not do that, as we think the easier the default controls are the better. However we do want to have a "keep your current velocity" option for that control mode, where your thrusters would not slow your ship as soon as you let go of W." Devs did not reply further to people asking why a settable throttle is "easy" in keyboard control mode, but not in mouse control mode, or suggesting that it could be available as a non-default option, thus leaving the default controls as they are while still providing a settable throttle in mouse mode for those who choose to enable it. I also seem to remember another thread on the Steam forums at about that same time in which the devs more strongly stated that they consider this decision to be final, but I can't find it at the moment, so I could be mistaken.

No, you probably can't have option 3. People have repeatedly asked for this and the developer has basically responded that he's already made a decision that there will never be a "set throttle" option in mouse control mode and that this decision will not be reconsidered.

You get an icon at top center screen (the same place as the "insufficient crew" notification icons) when there are blocks missing from your ship and, in build mode, you can select the "repair block" tool and the locations of destroyed blocks will be highlighted in red.

What exactly are you looking for that would constitute a "VLS missile" to you? There's no fixed up or down in space, so all directions are "vertical"... and all directions are not. My understanding of the purpose of VLS systems in the real world is to take advantage of ships/tanks/etc. tending to have thinner armor on their upper surface, but, again, that doesn't really apply in space. A starship may have one or more lesser-armored facings, but, depending on how your craft are oriented relative to each other, the weak armor could just as easily be on the left side as the top. And there's less incentive to have a weak facing in the first place when you're operating in an environment where threats are equally likely to approach from any direction. The only thing I can think of that you could be looking for is just that you think it looks cool for missiles to launch in one direction, then turn 90 degrees to pursue their target, and that's already possible in Avorion: Get a launcher with the "guided missiles" feature, then mount it on the side or top of your ship instead of the front. Add a turret lock if you really want to force it to fire sideways instead of trying to launch directly towards its target.

That does seem to be their intention, at least, but they tend to stay fixated on the same target even when that target goes out of range - put some mining turrets on auto-target while flying through an asteroid field to see this in action. They'll lock on to the first mineral-rich asteroid you fly past, then aim at it over the back of your ship for the next 20km, even if you stop and park right next to another mineral-rich target.. However, even though they stay locked when the target goes out of range, they do respect firing arcs, so doing a barrel roll will usually get them to reset and choose a new target which actually is in range.

Mount them on your ship, then assign them to a numbered group. Return to the main "flying" mode and any weapon groups which contain auto-targeting weapons will have an icon beside them indicating their current targeting mode. Click that icon to change modes (manual, independent, fire on locked target, or "automatic" which is supposed to be like "independent" except that it reverts to "manual" when you start firing weapons manually, but, honestly, it seems to me like it just doesn't work most of the time).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your suggestion, but, if crew members just magically appear and disappear on your ship as needed, then doesn't that effectively turn into a plain "ship upkeep cost" system? And, if so, then why not just charge upkeep on ships directly and skip over the middle step of tracking crew members?

Does the loot not currently time out when there are no players in the sector? I've been assuming that if I take an hour or two to return to the sector from halfway across the galaxy, all the loot would have disappeared before I get there.

I haven't played much since then, but I'm pretty sure it was still working for me. Did you reinstall the mod after updating? At this point, Avorion mods work by overwriting the vanilla files, so it's common for the files to revert to vanilla during updates.

I know that, when you're in system, AI salvaging ships will pick up modules/weapons if they pass close enough, but they don't seem to go out of their way to collect them. But I'm pretty sure they don't get modules/weapons when you're out of system. I've had two out-of-sector salvagers running for some hours and haven't noticed any pickups at times when I wasn't collecting debris myself, but it's at least theoretically possible that I might have just missed it.

...unless you increase the DPS of all weapons, including those on hostile ships. Rocket tag can be highly challenging, especially when you're outnumbered. (And that basically ties into why my interest in Avorion is waning. I've gotten up to The Barrier and everything now is so well-shielded that encounters are becoming "Lock on target. Hold down fire button for five minutes to chew through shields and kill it. Lock on next target. Hold down fire button for five minutes..." Simple HP inflation doesn't make a fight more challenging, it just makes it take longer.)