Space Engineers, pt2

Ok, so picking up where we left off. Project Bertha. I decided that my small ship class miners were all good and well but I wanted something bigger. I started building a ship on the newly assembled hangar deck opposite the main building in our base and had this mental image of something like that elite ship the humans had at the end of babylon five that was manned by the bald people but captained by sherridan. Horrible on names, don't mind me. But anyways, I built the head and the neck and then decided I was abit out of my depth for a ship of that 'size' plus if I built the whole thing while in the asteroid I'd never get it out of the damn asteroid.

Bertha was designed to be an all in one industrial ship. Refinery and assembly all built within and afew cargo containers to store everything extra. Got her up and running, put everything together using everything I had learned about conveyor systems, took her out for a spin and did some digging. Good news? Bertha dug damn well. Bad news?

The armor got the crap beat out of it heh. The drills simply didn't cover a wide enough area to protect everything behind them. So this lead to a natural conclusion.

 Moar drills! From 7 to 21 drills. Also, the original flight I had slapped engines on anywhere I could to just get it out there and make sure this wasn't one big stupid idea. With the addition of all the extra drills I took some time and put effort in to placing the engines a bit better this time. This worked much better, inside I added two more gyroscopes so that I could spin her on a whim. This lead to some fun drilling, I would forward thrust and spin her on her axis, made perfectly smooth circle caves and prevented 'most' damage to anything aside from armor plating which seemed unavoidable.

Bertha served well but over time occasional damage, armor plating and engines, lost a drill or two to careless use, etc, etc. She was eventually retired. Time to move on, farewell Bertha.

Next I decided to expirement with ship sized welders. Think of it like this, I can only carry 4km3 worth of components and when building big things... like anything on bertha required 8 + trips at times for single pieces of equipment. Now, imagine a small class frigate with a welder fitted and a small cargo container as well. Combined that would be over 90km3 cargo space, add a conveyor line from cargo to welder and BAM! awesomesause ensued. The above was my first attempt at a welder frigate, made some mistakes, things didn't work well but it DID weld and thats a win.

Introducing the SCV mk1. Welder in one Arm, Grinder in the other. This ship can build and it can tear down bigger things. This ship was also my first successful use of the connector you see on its backside. I can dock it up to the station (first photo) and when docked I can access the entire base from the frigate, or the frigate from anywhere in the base. REALLY useful, dock up, move components, un dock, go complete construction on something big. This ship was named by the little sister who is a star craft nut btw.

I actually almost lost this ship five or so times due to a really nasty bug introduced in a thursday update that took almost a full week to fix. Landing gear would randomly explode. Literally. BOOM. Lights too. So yea, That little SCV up there exploded quite afew times before I got pissed, tired of repair work, tired of losing everything in the arms if one was lost in the gear/light explosion and I removed my landing gear. From everything. From this point forward you won't see landing gear on any ship I build, even though apparently the bug has been fixed. I just don't risk it. I did eventually re introduce lights though.

Around this time the little sister got busy and decided to fresh from scratch build her first ship. I logged in one morning to find this staring at me :

A great big yellow borg cube. Eventually completed, I don't have alot of good photos this was a tragic ship that spent most of its time in dock. First time she took it out for a spin she lost connection and came back to a meteor crater hole in one side. Re docked it, repaired it and... well it just sat there. Eventually she offered it to me, I added one block of size in each direction, added guns, added more engines to the whole thing in all directions, gutted the entire interior, turned it from a single deck to a three level inside, added a custom blast door to the back for entrance, buttons everywhere for weapon controls and whatnot. Took it out in combat with an npc, npc combat is REALLY buggy in the game right now. One gun exploded, two others stopped responding, third worked throughout. Brought it home, presented it to her, she was happy. She took it out for a spin later that day, got disconnected (she is about 20 minutes from where that 6.1 earthquake hit california recently, her internet is real flakey since then), came back to a large crater hole in the cube's forehead and then retired the girl to my SCV's grinder. Farewell, Bumbleborg (her name, not mine!).

"Bumbleborg" 2.0 after I got finished with her, before she was retired. Farewell, Bumbleborg 2.0.

Next ship project for me, The Pill Bug/Vader Face/The Angry Bird depending on who you asked it has alot of names.

The Pill Bug as I like to call it is my first attempt at a large class combat ship. I've tried multiple small ship class combat ships to varying levels of success. NPC's are bugged in multiple ways. Right now their ships aren't damaged with hand grinders. Gun turrets don't seem very effective either and missile launchers are REALLY flakey. If you are even slightly barely moving, the missile will usually touch the launcher when fired and blow up the launcher. Fustrating. But I wanted a combat boat so the Pill Bug came about. The above is version 1.0. Two launchers, two engines each direction, beacon incase I got killed from a launcher explosion, I lost two pill bugs to death and inability to find the damn ship because of no beacon. Beacon's broadcast the Bug's location across the asteroid belt so good on that front.

At this time there was alot of debate regarding what was causing the explosions and after losing 2 bugs entirely and blowing up/recovering the third bug three times I took to a redesign. One of the theories was that engines next to launchers equaled explosion. Thus was born 2.0.

Also was born the moniker "Vader Face" by one co-worker and "Angry Bird" by another. Engines were pushed away from the launchers, which also shielded the beacon more, a definite plus because one time in 1.0 the explosion took out the beacon and I barely found the wreck to bring it home.

This of course didn't fix the exploding issue.

Infact it made it worse. Now both launchers were exploding. I've parked her for the time being until this npc combat bug is fixed. And it is a npc issue because I could fire missiles at the little sisters bumbleborg cube's heavy armor all day long no problems. could blow holes in asteroids, no problem. But if I aimed a launcher and hit the fire button at a npc, I explode. Ahh well. Little sister actually had two hangars for a time at the base, one for the borg cube and one for her original bumblebee ship. I used bertha to drill a large hole on the base asteroid wall for her original ship and connected it via walk way. Since the little sister forged her own home in another asteroid, the second hangar is home to The Pill Bug. The main dock where the borg cube sat is where I work on mining frigates lately, also has a nice collector catch for dumping dirt in to the conveyor system.

In the next blog entry, Project 1.0 (still no name), project 2.0, the little brother encounter, skybox fun and then we're up to date.

o7