Space engineer

[FlowerChild]

Actually here's a couple from my most developed world. Was from a previous release (still haven't tried the latest yet), so things might be a bit funky in relation to how things work now, and I don't have any welders in it:

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Ship up top is my grinder. Small ship in the foreground is my miner which lost its drill due to a booby trap when I used it in a boarding action. Don't much need mining once you start pirating ships anyways though.

Big ship attached to my station at the bottom left is a captured one awaiting the grinder. Long arm sticking out of station on left with landing gear is to attach captured ships that may not have one. Grinding ships is a lot easier when they're attached to a station as you don't have to worry about them spinning off if you take out their gyros.

Second screenshot from a different angle to better show to collector funnels:

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It's worth noting that heavy armor is useful for funnels (and landing pads) since it isn't damaged by ship thrusters.

Like I said: strictly utilitarian. I tend not to go for aesthetics on games that are in such heavy dev as anything created will likely be lost.

[Taleric]

Very robust grinder :D, and the funnel is a great addition to ease collector use. ( I love that the miner appears to swing in an perch on the edge unloading with little alignment work ).

What would you recommend as the most balanced/rewarding start? I tried the platform and rescue pod, are they all relatively equal?

Lastly do you have the asteroid hazard on?

[E.B. Farnham]

To throw my own few pics in the mix. Warning big pictures.

My miner. It started with only four drills and expanded from there.

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I don't to much mining anymore though as refining is a bottleneck at the moment. I've far more rocks than I can grind currently.

This is my refinery/ factory ship. It has 5 refineries and 4 assemblers. I started building it at the very beginning of my game and built it from the collector at the front back. It not built to be pretty but it works.

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And this is my just built welder ship. Which I'm currently using to put the outer skin on my ship.

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I haven't moved into piracy much yet. I pirated one of the large hauler ships but it was back before they could shoot at you and the parts from that have me stocked. Though I did recently build a small combat ship, which turned out to not be terribly effective, had a go at a mil escort and died. I have a new design in mind involving a shotgun decoy launcher attached to a combat ship to see if I can confuse the targeting AI and see if that helps.

And lastly my in-construction mega grinder. Lots of work to do on it but it does work. Also the capital ship I built in creative back around Christmas when I first got the game. It got too big to finish the inside sadly. It already causes my computer to run at 10 FPS but I'm quite proud of it none the less.

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Similarly I don't build for aesthetics in my survival game. Mostly because it requires more resources to do so and I'm stingy with my resources. Plus I tend to think that building for function makes sense in an engineering game, call it industrial aesthetic. Though when I get round to making a proper pirate vessel I will probably go for a more rule of cool design.

I do like Space Engineers though I must admit I was running out of things to do that hooked me until they made the ai ships defend themselves. Now I need to build an ammo factory, I've found that making enough bullets will require a bit of an arms facility and a quality warship that can survive a fight with an escort.

[Gunnerman21]

Here's my base, I just started it about 3 days ago because of the turret changes. I have 2 refineries with a large cargo container, and everything is connected which i fiercely like. In back is the structure of a dust catcher i plan on using in tandem with my miner. A large funnel and gravity generator to hopefully pull the rock debris out of the hole collecting it as well as the main rock in the miner.
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[Taleric]

With dedicated servers out please list the name if you happen to make one, I would love to hangout with any BTW crowd on this.

I am going to talk to some people back state side to see if I can get a server set there, connectivity over DSL is just too crap here.

[devak]

Actually here's a couple from my most developed world. Was from a previous release (still haven't tried the latest yet), so things might be a bit funky in relation to how things work now, and I don't have any welders in it:

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Ship up top is my grinder. Small ship in the foreground is my miner which lost its drill due to a booby trap when I used it in a boarding action. Don't much need mining once you start pirating ships anyways though.

Big ship attached to my station at the bottom left is a captured one awaiting the grinder. Long arm sticking out of station on left with landing gear is to attach captured ships that may not have one. Grinding ships is a lot easier when they're attached to a station as you don't have to worry about them spinning off if you take out their gyros.

Second screenshot from a different angle to better show to collector funnels:

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It's worth noting that heavy armor is useful for funnels (and landing pads) since it isn't damaged by ship thrusters.

Like I said: strictly utilitarian. I tend not to go for aesthetics on games that are in such heavy dev as anything created will likely be lost.

As an engineer, i find it beautiful in it's simplicity and functionality.

[Ulfengaard]

Ok. I don't post here much, but I've got no one in this house who understands just how flipping cool the new merge block is. I have to share my excitement with you guys. The dream of modular ships is now a reality, in a much easier and cooler sense. The ability to properly dock ships is also just too awesome. Here is the vid link, in case you haven't seen the latest update:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEqRgWWzrZA

[Gunnerman21]

I haven't tried multiplayer yet but their fix for it looks great. Also, expect a hotfix soon because a fair amount of people are seeing giant white lines near where they spawn in. Also, the button to turn space stations into ships is kinda funny, seeing the starting green station lift off and fly around :)
I'm not a big fan of module ships even though they have great potential, but large grinder ships being able to dock and transfer everything in one go is positively amazing.

And yesterday I used the target-stuff-over-3mps feature of turrets to my advantage to snag 4 cargo ships. Very exciting :)

[FlowerChild]

I'm not a big fan of module ships even though they have great potential, but large grinder ships being able to dock and transfer everything in one go is positively amazing.

I guess. Building collection points was pretty fun though.

Not sure it's really easier to use this way either, as if I'm visualizing this right, you'll need to use the menu to manually transfer stuff between containers if you dock them this way, whereas by spewing stuff into a collector you can push one menu button to dump your load.

If I'm understanding the merge block from the video though, should be possible to setup one of these things so that the merged ship winds up hooked up to an ejector on the other one which then spews stuff into a collector on the same ship. Not sure if that would be worthwhile though as at that point you may as well just hover above and spew into the collector without merging :)

[Gunnerman21]

I think the spewing part is still relevant because small ships still can't dock with stations, so your mining ships and other small ships still have to dump loads normally.

Edit: ..instead of docking conveyor tubes together.

[FlowerChild]

I think the spewing part is still relevant because small ships still can't dock with stations, so your mining ships and other small ships still have to dump loads normally.

Edit: ..instead of docking conveyor tubes together.

Not necessarily. I already have a plan in mind for a small "ship" (no control, power, or anything like that) permanently attached over a large collector with landing gear that you'd be able to dock a small ship with using small merge blocks.

[DaveYanakov]

Not to mention it just became a hell of a lot easier to line up your ejectors with the collectors on the station. I'm also seeing a design that can carry multiple sheets of replacement armor to swap out between asteroid storms or pirate attacks

[Psion]

I have yet to be attacked by one of these mythical pirates. Asteroids though, can eat a #$!@ lol. I tried to see if a gun turret would be enough to protect the initial station from them, but nope. it couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, and spent like 2 magazines per strike to boot. And is there even any armor that can block an astroid strike without being turned into swiss cheese? light armor certainly doesnt, and i didn't notice my heavy armor faring any better when i was slowly upgrading it.

[FlowerChild]

I have yet to be attacked by one of these mythical pirates

I think you misunderstood what Dave was saying. We're the pirates :)

[Psion]

Oh, gotcha. lol

[devak]

If I'm understanding the merge block from the video though, should be possible to setup one of these things so that the merged ship winds up hooked up to an ejector on the other one which then spews stuff into a collector on the same ship. Not sure if that would be worthwhile though as at that point you may as well just hover above and spew into the collector without merging :)

easier goody transfer FTW.

i must say that the repair aspect is most appealing to me. Too often have i had to rebuild chunks of my ship because i cut it in half by accident. (or cut off a major part).



EDIT: ok i tried to pirate a ship. After looking up what kind of ship actually meant what, i went and took over a Private Sail. ok, that was easy. what baffles me is that even the smallest ship is still a "big" ship meaning that i can get a TON of resources for free, with little effort. So yea. I was already working on a boarding ship equipped with thick armor and powerful engines to give chase, but now that seems overkill. I know other ships ARE armed, but a completely resistance-free ship is just too easy. even the armor and solar panels are worth quite a bit of refinery and assembly time.

[Gunnerman21]

Holy f*** I love utility ships. Thank you FC for convincing me to build them :) I built myself a large ship with 25 grinders using another smaller ship with welders :) And gods is it fast to build... Taking apart that Minelayer was awesome, and the few parts that broke off finally gave me a use for my small tug ship.
Will edit in pictures of my progress soon.
Edit: Alright here's my stuff :)
Large grinder ship
Darth Maul style utility ship
Tug ship
Connection between station and grinder ship
Real gyroscope cause I like them :)

[lostone1993]

those merge blocks are cool :)
I think they could be a fit for something I am working. A station ship type of thing.
I might use it to connect my solar arrays

does anyone use solar for anything other then decoration, I have found them rather near useless so far for power gen

[Gunnerman21]

does anyone use solar for anything other then decoration, I have found them rather near useless so far for power gen

Solar power works only if the panels are in very large quantities, other than that yes its decoration. Don't even think about powering engines with them :)
it's also nice if somehow you lose power in all your reactors, you can just aim one of them at the sun to get enough energy to hand-mine again. But I have no idea when that strategy could be used.

Maybe if someone wanted to "roleplay" and make a base really far away from the asteroids that could be some sort of use. Or possibly 2 or more players against each other, making their bases far apart to prevent quick attacks. They couldn't just go mine willy-nilly they'd have to be very cautious about it and rely mostly on pirating cargo ships passing too close.

I would guess some kind of battery would have to be included to make them more effective, charging in the sun for a while then using the charge for a short period of activity.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, solar is nigh useless. That station I posted screenshots of earlier used to have solar panels attached and I eventually just salvaged them for parts as there was no way I could see myself building a sufficient number of them to have a useful power output in survival mode.

I have the sneaking suspicion they may become more useful in the future though, given the relation between the direction asteroids come from and where they need to be pointed. I think they may just be waiting on investing some more work into asteroids before that happens.

Could be entirely wrong mind you as I seem to keep seeing cool gameplay mechanisms that then get trashed with this game :)

[lostone1993]

my idea was to have enough solar to power a refinery so that if I ran out of fuel there is enough to jump start everything

on a side note though 6 solars can power an assembler if you don't mind the powering on and off sounds

[Gunnerman21]

i've been refining only uranium for the past hours in my game, just now finishing the last couple thousand ore. I have over 500kg of uranium in the large reactor, with 4.98% power usage it will last 5 days. And even after the ore is finished, i can still pirate ships for their power as well :)

I expanded my dock just now to hold 3 to 4 ships depending on size. Which all depends on my ability to snag ships... 25mps is too hard to let a cargo ship hit you :) just saying...

[devak]

my idea was to have enough solar to power a refinery so that if I ran out of fuel there is enough to jump start everything

on a side note though 6 solars can power an assembler if you don't mind the powering on and off sounds

yea this happened to me the other day. I discovered my refinery ran out of fuel. luckily it has solar panels so i just needed to dump some Ore into the refinery to start everything up again. Similarly, i use it to power a beacon so i never lose my way. Cause one game, i was out pirating when the refinery failed (sensing a trend here?) and the beacon was gone.

so yes, solar has SOME uses.

[lostone1993]

yea this happened to me the other day. I discovered my refinery ran out of fuel. luckily it has solar panels so i just needed to dump some Ore into the refinery to start everything up again. Similarly, i use it to power a beacon so i never lose my way. Cause one game, i was out pirating when the refinery failed (sensing a trend here?) and the beacon was gone.

so yes, solar has SOME uses.

How many solars do you have ? I have been trying to wing it, if its a lot I might change my plan and create a station for this purpose

[devak]

yea this happened to me the other day. I discovered my refinery ran out of fuel. luckily it has solar panels so i just needed to dump some Ore into the refinery to start everything up again. Similarly, i use it to power a beacon so i never lose my way. Cause one game, i was out pirating when the refinery failed (sensing a trend here?) and the beacon was gone.

so yes, solar has SOME uses.

How many solars do you have ? I have been trying to wing it, if its a lot I might change my plan and create a station for this purpose

I don't know the specifics of an underpowered ship, but everything appeared a little too effective for receiving only a percent or so of the required power. the consumption at the time was about 25% of a small reactor (before the brownout), and i had about 4 solar panels functioning at the time.

The power supply will show up as "overload" but it doesn't seem to do much, so i'd urge people to be very cautious; a single update might completely break it as it appears to be in a highly buggy state.



note: at 6KW per panel, you'd need 94 or so to run a refinery. (560Kw vs 6kw per panel) so building a proper-powered solar refinery is madness. well maybe if you just get too many solar panels from raiding ships you can do it, but building it (and that requires platinium - a pain in the ass) is going to take forever