Greetings engineers and welcome to another progress report from my corner of the universe! Keen still has us (mostly) in a bug squash phase so no planets to speak of yet. They did however do something special, you see this week was the 100th update to the game and they didn't want 100 to just be some bug post. So they gave us something... special.
Drones and Drone Bases. These bases liter the game now, randomly spawning much like Exploration ships/bases. They have a 20km aggression range and will give chase up to 20km from their base. There are two varieties of Base and multiple variations on the Drones. The bases have large stashes of valuable resources and await those capable of dealing with the bases defenses. And this is especially challenging in that once a Base becomes aware of you it will continually work to spit out combat drones and send them in your direction.
Intimidating to new players but Keen patched the patch yesterday and made afew changes a, preventing drone bases/ships from spawning within 20km of a new saves starting point and b, the drones give up chasing you at that 20km range.
I logged in to my single player to find a drone base/ship sitting 24km away, whew! Time to build up a defense. While mining nearby asteroids I've spotted two more bases in the area. I've also noticed that attacking npc ships (being a pirate), the ships broadcast emergency help requests. Not sure what this does, I think it may just stir up nearby drone nests or something. Haven't actually seen anything come to the defense of the mining barges I've collected today (my favorite, extremely easy to capture and very profitable).
So on all the above considered, congratulations to Keen! You got me finally doing what I never thought I would do. Weaponize my carrier (2.0c currently).
I've decided to start with putting purpose to that big large shiny windowed neck on 2.0c. Exterior and Interior photos of step one above.
Now at some point I decided I didn't like the idea of those conveyors always being visible to enemy fire... which they would be since you cant build in the 3x3 area directly around a turret. So I moved the conveyor line back one, in to the actual neck.
Started sealing it all up, bud then decided I could do better.
Got ride of the 3 wide block of black running the length of the turret assemble. Kept the middle row and used platform's to add a visual 'seal' to the weapons array.
Finished product on the exterior. Turrets just barely sit beyond the surface of the neck, gives them a good wide large targeting range.
Interior. Pondering what to do here. I kind of like the 'utility' feel of her neck with pipework running it, may just leave it like this.
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And that's it for broadside defenses. I may add a turret to each 'wing', not sure. Still need to build in nose forward facing defenses and something for this birds backside. I'm warm to the idea of defending my carrier but I'm not a fan of the "slap 150 turrets across every surface and call it a day" mindset. Cheapens the end product. I'll keep it realistic.
