Building Your First Ship

Introductory guide to building ships in Kinetic Void

all content subject to change throughout the course of development

Starting Out

After starting Kinetic Void and creating a galaxy you will be placed in the Shipyard. In the center of the screen is a white cube, this is the base block of your soon to be ship.
You can use left mouse button to pan the camera around, and right mouse button to rotate.
Scroll Wheel will zoom in and out, and Shift Scroll Wheel will zoom even faster for when you are working on large ships.

Further down are three tabs for statistics on your ship.
Primary, which displays classification, mass, thrust values, and power requirements.
Secondary, which shows sensors, damage resistances and other secondary statistics
Crew, here is a display of your ship’s crew requirements, these are not fully functional at this time.

On the lower right hand corner of the screen is the build filters. All modules (ship parts) are divided between 5 types, and 5 sizes. From here you can also switch to subsystems which are the components that go into your ships modules that give them functionality, more on these later.
Above this menu is the part list, this will display modules and subsystems depending on your filters

Placing your first Module

We will start out building a simple, small fighter craft.

On the part filter menu select the “Size 1” button, then select “Hull”

Now in the part list you can select any part you wish to start with. Left clicking on the part will add it to the mouse cursor. At this point the part is ready to be placed. All modules must be placed on another module, because this is the first module selected you have to place it on the root block in the center of the screen

Note: The arrows on the floor in the background point towards the exit of the shipyard, build your ship facing this direction.

Depending on the part you can cycle through which connection node you are using while placing the part. This is done using the ‘R’ key. The part may also be rotated using ‘Q’ and ‘E’.
Once you have decided on an orientation for the part left click where you wish to place it.

Now let’s get this thing moving!

Now that we have a base hull of a ship we can add more. On the part filter select Engine (Size 1 should still be selected) Now choose an engine module from the list. Engines in the shipyard mist be facing the rear of the ship in order to be placed, if while trying to place the engine module it is showing as an orange color try rotating and changing the connection node until the engine exhaust if facing away from the direction of the ground arrows.

Our small ship now has a single Hull and Engine module we now need to add a Command & Control module, select C&C in the part filter, then in the part list select a cockpit. Rotate, change the connection nodes and place the

It’s Just a shell

The basic parts of the ship are now in place, a Hull, Engine, and C&C but they are just containers which hold Subsystems.

Lets start with our power systems. In the part filter select Subsystem, then select Size 1, and Hull.
In the list you should now see all subsystems that can fit into a hull.

On your ship, right click on the Hull, and select Subsystems, a small inventory window will open. This is where you place subsystems. The larger the module the more subsystem slots it will have.
Subsystems have a slot requirement as well, and a size 1 reactor has a volume of 3. We are going to place one in the hull now. You will also notice some other stats on the reactors;

• Mass is added to your ships total
  
• Compatibility is the module that it can go into
  
• Size is the size category it belongs to
  
• Volume is how much subsystem space it takes
  
• Durability is how much damage that subsystem can take before it goes offline
  
• Cost is the credit value of the item (not fully implemented yet)
  
• att_power is how much power the reactor provides
  
• att_pRange is how many conduit hops the power will flow.

Conduit hops are an important concept, in our design the hull that the reactor is in the center and there is an engine on one side and a C&C on the other, each of these is only 1 conduit hop away. The engine however is 2 conduit hops away from the C&C. All subsystems need power in order to function, take this into account when designing your ships.

Place the reactor in the hull subsystem window and click close. You will see the ship status on the left update with the total power your ship has, and its additional mass.

Now lets add a sensor to the C&C module so that you can detect things on radar. Set the filter to Size 1, C&C, Subsystem, right click on the C&C and select Subsystems and place a sensor in it from the list, not that a sensor booster is not the same.

And the final step for now the engines themselves. Set the filter to Size 1, Engine, Subsystem. Right click on the ships engine and open its subsystem window, select an engine from the list and place it in the subsystem inventory.

Engines stats are a little different, all movement in Kinetic Void is based off of thrust, these values represent how much thrust is being applied in that direction

• Forward
  
• Rear
  
• Size
  
• Pitch / Yaw
  
• Roll

You now know the basics to building a ship, you are not limited to the number of modules or subsystems you can use. Though remember everything has mass, and every subsystem has a power requirement.

[ThiccDaddy117]

how do u get workshop ships in game

[commandert5]

how do you become friends with a faction?

[Kaypix]

Also, I should point out we have an in-game guide available when you go into the shipyard, which breaks down all the components of the ship for you before you build. You can retrieve the guide at any time by just pressing escape and then clicking the Guide option.

[Kaypix]

Korg:
We do have a formal tutorial, It's called Shipbuilding 101, here's the link:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=213936166

Also, I made a thread of tutorials:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/227160/discussions/0/648816742470378833/

This includes video tutorials as well as text based tutorials that I and other community members have put together.

[Muse]

Im betting you did this just to get the steamworks developer achievement...But yeah, its fairly lame this game has no real tutorial.

[IceWazard]

this would make more sense in video form since i can't find a recent video about this game and i really need help

[Kaypix]

Thank you all for your feedback, it has been heard and we'll work on keeping an updated guide conveniently placed.

[reagansleepy1]

were is the subsystem display i might just be silly but i see all the displays talked about above but subsystems

[W0LFs_REIGN]

Why oh why does the white cube want to move so much? Has anyone else experienced the drifting that occurs in the shipyard?

[FatRefrigerator]

This game could be extremely good, with some major UI changes and instructions in-game