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[Graknorke]

Space ships are slow and ponderous.  This is most definitely intended.  Controlling your inertia is of dire importance.

Not just slow, unmoving. The engines were all firing (Which I could see due to the lack of any sort of blocks besides generators and power transmitters) and nothing was happening. At all. Nothing was moving, down the pixels on the screen. I gave up after about 5 minutes of trying to turn.

[Girlinhat]

Graknorke, did you build your ship on the side of an asteroid?  The game has "gravity wells" - normally asteroids.  Anything placed near them it attached to that object and applies to its weight and thrust.  To make your own ship, you either have to move the whole asteroid, or fly into empty space.  You'll know you're free of the asteroid because trying to place a block won't show a red line leading to the 'roid, and when the block is placed it will show as a new stellar object with a distance and weight display.

I'll be working a lot more on this when it gets multiplayer.

[Graknorke]

Well, it was showing a line to the asteroid actually. I thought the gravity only applied when you could see the little foot symbol in the corner. Because that's what the wiki says. Suddenly everything makes sense, and the wiki should probably be edited.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Well, it was showing a line to the asteroid actually. I thought the gravity only applied when you could see the little foot symbol in the corner. Because that's what the wiki says. Suddenly everything makes sense, and the wiki should probably be edited.

The foot symbol only means that you have landed/are gravitationally attached/whatever to the asteroid, meaning that if it moves, you'll move with it at the same speed. The gravitational well for asteroids is something completely different.

[Girlinhat]

If you have the foot, that means you're standing on, grabbing, or otherwise "close enough to be carried along" so that you don't slam into the back of your ship.  A single block can get a foot because it's not done by gravity, but rather "what you can grab onto the side of" except the glove movement is abstracted away.

[Facekillz058]

Haven't quite fired up my ship yet, but I have this nasty feeling that i'll need more/stronger engines.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Haven't quite fired up my ship yet, but I have this nasty feeling that i'll need more/stronger engines.

It depends. How heavy is it?

Weak thrusters definitively aren't going to cut it. You'll want more Medium thrusters for main propulsion and at least another weak engine for the turning thrusters. That's assuming that you want it to feel kinda zippy, of course. The way you have it set up it'll be a bit on the slow side, but still flyable.

[Facekillz058]

Well it flies pretty good, for a largish ship, it weighs 66 tons and accelerates at about a meter a second.
It turns pretty well, I would say. It has that large ship feel, you know?

[USEC_OFFICER]

Well it flies pretty good, for a largish ship, it weighs 66 tons and accelerates at about a meter a second.
It turns pretty well, I would say. It has that large ship feel, you know?

I'm assuming that it's made out of light iron blocks, since my Rocket Box^tm made using the heavy ones weights 40 tons for a 5x5x5 cube, most of which is empty space. Still, slap enough heavy thrusters on anything and it'll go off like... well... like a rocket.

[Graknorke]

accelerates at about a meter a second.

Uhm, I think you missed some time unit out here. No use telling us how much its speed changes by without saying how long it takes.

Also, Girlinhat, I tok your advice and strapped a bunch of large engines (after almost hollowing out the asteroid for ice. The hydrogen per block return of ice is obscenely low.) to the side and blasted it off into space. I misbalanced it so it ended up going in circles, but it's at least proof for me that I could do that. Hopefully better next time.

EDIT: Is there actually a reason to use heavy blocks instead of light ones at the moment? Without anything that damages the hull it seems a little pointless.

[Facekillz058]

accelerates at about a meter a second.

Uhm, I think you missed some time unit out here. No use telling us how much its speed changes by without saying how long it takes.

It gains a meter/second of speed every two seconds, my mistake.


Oh, and it's made out of mostly light and medium aluminum blocks.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Oh, and it's made out of mostly light and medium aluminum blocks.

That would explain it. I've never used aluminium as a building material, because when I need a space ship I generally don't have enough aluminum for a ship. And I don't really pay attention to aesthetics too much either, so I always use iron.

[Girlinhat]

I've been toying with an idea for asteroid-as-ship use.  The premise is fairly simple.  You only need 1x3x1 space for a thruster.  You can put blocks all around it and it'll still work.  Thus, to get an asteroid moving easily, you'd want to put the engines on the inside, where you can most easily put them relative to the center of mass.

Another option would be to build a ship and then throw dirt all over it...

I hope that we get blast doors of immense size, too, so that we can hide ships in hollow 'roids.  I'd also love to have gun ports, by putting guns behind blast doors and then opening the doors to fire and closing them to protect the gun from incoming fire, as well as hiding them from prying eyes.  I was saddened to discover that blast doors cannot be linked to console blocks.

[Graknorke]

I've been toying with an idea for asteroid-as-ship use.  The premise is fairly simple.  You only need 1x3x1 space for a thruster.  You can put blocks all around it and it'll still work.  Thus, to get an asteroid moving easily, you'd want to put the engines on the inside, where you can most easily put them relative to the center of mass.

Another option would be to build a ship and then throw dirt all over it...

I hope that we get blast doors of immense size, too, so that we can hide ships in hollow 'roids.  I'd also love to have gun ports, by putting guns behind blast doors and then opening the doors to fire and closing them to protect the gun from incoming fire, as well as hiding them from prying eyes.  I was saddened to discover that blast doors cannot be linked to console blocks.

Admittedly Homestuck was the thing that first made me think of flinging asteroids around space. The power connectors all being bright yellow didn't help with that either. Multiplayer could make it more faithful to what I (predictably, to a HS reader. I'm not going to elaborate in this thread because derails.) had in mind.

On the subject of asteroid-ships though, you really don't get much hydrogen per icy-rock. I mined out so much of the starting asteroid that it dropped about 200 t in total mass, and looked like a misshapen porous peanut by the end. Still only enough to cover a small corner of the asteroid. I can imagine capital ships requiring stripping a couple of asteroids clean until it goes faster than "puttering". Which also reminds me that it really bugged me having velocity reset to 0 whenever you stop pressing a key. That ain't cool yo. I want my obscene quantity of engines to accelerate me and leave me there, not be magically brought to a halt.

Another issue with asteroid-ships is those little purple ninjas. As far as I know, they spawn on natural materials and then eat them. Which may be a bad thing if the hull isn't very thick.

Though I did figure out what was up with my first ship. The initial blocks weren't in the aura of the asteroid, but as I built on them some crossed over into it.

[Girlinhat]

I think the little purples are made to spawn in asteroid auras on natural blocks.  That is to say, a ship's aura with natural blocks wouldn't spawn squids because it counts as a ship-type stellar object.

Also, here's hoping that high-end crafting has to be done labor-intensively.  As it stands, 6 blocks are enough to strip the galaxy - 3 for crafting, 1 engine, 1 power, 1 control.  If crafting is made to use large, heavy blocks as work stations, and crafting is done over time instead of on-click, then you very quickly end up with space stations as a natural creation.  When dealing with advanced crafting becomes too difficult to mount on a casual ship, then the solution is to put it onto a dedicated ship, and your space station becomes an ore processor.  After that's done, then it's only natural to add docking procedures to link one ship to another.

Not to mention, with stations comes territory, and that's exactly what multiplayer needs.