Building a ship 101......

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

Seriously, this ship building, cool idea, but wow are the controls for it.....weird?

How do I simply alter a single brick once its placed, without deleting it? It certainly isnt giving me back 100% resources for it, so, sitting here going through 14 different bricks isnt cutting it

How do I WASD hack around my ship for easier viewing? The current system doesnt help much, would be nice to be able to zoom right in on a given section

How do I turn off the horrid green glow from Thrusters, its hard to place the things since they are emanating a huge green aura of blinding light.

I now need to alter my ship and increase the crew quarters, but how the heck do I get to it without deleting everything covering it?

How do I rotate the engine side of the brick? I had it where no matter which way I rotated the brick, the engine was intent on staying on the one section and wouldnt move.....no, the engine coming out of the right side of my ship isnt cutting it.

[Lord_Greyscale]

Originally posted by LordKnightFandragon:

Lol, well, that sucks. Then whats the copy paste feature to make ship properly? It was a real damn shame to spend the like 4 hours I did figuring out how to get the general shape I was going for only to get to the engine section and find out....lol, wrong direction....so much french and frustration only to be hit by that roadblock...that was annoying.

I'll be assuming you're using a Windows based PC/laptop.
Select the parts you want. (since you want the whole ship, drag-select the whole ship)
hit CTRL (control) + C. This copies the selection of blocks.
Open the block-selection menu, mouse over the group of green pre-fabs on the bottom, select an empty slot, and press CTRL + V. That will "save" the selection to be re-used later.

Then, assuming you're still in creative to get it built, or have no crew hired yet, delete the ship.

Spawn a new ship, and verify "correct" orientation by putting a tiny little nothing of an engine onto the new ship.

Next, open the block selection and pick the pre-fab.
Then, paste it onto the new ship after rotating it to the correct orientation.

(I've actually forgotten the keys to rotate it, but you can use the red/green/blue circles to rotate the part.)

Then, once you're happy with how it's aiming, delete the "extra" bits you pasted onto. (as they aren't needed if you've built your ship correctly)

Originally posted by LordKnightFandragon:

THis is the first ship building game like this that ive played.....though for sure, I see a hand ful of things that could be implemented to make ship building far easier and more intuitive....

1: Letting us WASD hack around the ship, the fixed camera, not allowing us close up, proper views of some sections, making placing things in certain areas on ships harder then it needs to be
2: letting us pick where we grab the blocks from, so that we dont get to a certain point and it just phases out into space, so making minute adjustments and placements arent impossible.....
3: adding a slide feature, so that we can simply slide pieces into and out of areas, like when you are adding a new crew cabin or something, into your already build ship, you can easily place it in and slide it in, basically like a pizza into an oven.
4: Let us unselect bricks, if we can, IDK how...but that is annoying, clicking a section of my ship and then having to esc, then reenter, and repan the camera, reselect the piece I wanted....its just excessive step and time wise....feels real clunky.

Fun game, I like the ship building, but it feels very much like an early access, half finished beta game for sure.

Last thing first, it is a half-finished early access game.

Now, the rest in order:

1: I think we can, just not WASD, I think it was the arrow keys.
You can zoom in and out by using the scrollwheel on your mouse.
You can change what block your view is centered on by using the "focus" button to focus the camera on the middle of the selected block(s).

2: There's a slider to increase how "fine" the placement grid is, and it can go all the way down to .05 it begins at .5
Probably the most important though is the checkbox that restricts you to "middle of block" placement. That checkbox overrides the grid. (and can be usefull sometimes)

3: I'm uncertain if the dev even wants (to think about coding) that functionality.
Yes, we the players do, and it would be a nice quality-of-play improvement, but it comes with a nightmare of collision checking to prevent players from simply "stuffing" all the important parts of the ship inside a single armor block. (and inside all the other components too)

It is a matter of gameplay balance, because as block-size increases, so too does block HP, so a ship-sized armor block has far, far, far more HP than a collection of armor blocks slapped onto a ship.
(if you can stuff blocks inside other blocks with ease, half the gameplay difficulty goes out the window.)

4: You can actually un-select all blocks. click away from the ship.
There's not currnently a way to de-select individual blocks. (one out of a group), but it is usually not that hard to re-select everything.

That said, I do wish we could simply right-click to de-select whatever block we're pointing at.
That's be a good quality of play improvement.

[FoeFeller]

Granted the building system has a bit of learning "Wall", but if you want something powerful its going to take some time to learn how to use that power effectively. Avorion has one of the most powerful, customizable, and fast ship building systems I have seen so far.

Mirror building with delete
Cut and past (making templates out of cuts for later use)
limitless undo and redo
Transform any block to any block
Scale and rotate any object (including the whole ship)
multiple block scaling and snap grid size scaling settings
Multiple block to grid snap options
Block visibility options
movable pallet and block windows
lots of keyboard shortcuts
****make big stuff with little to no lag and if there is lag you can merge blocks to cut down on block count.

The below ship I built in 6 hours while its only a Destroyer class ship (just got to Trinium, going to build my carrier next). This ship would have taken me days to build and get the look and performance right in say Empyrion. (I like to build in survial not creative) (not knocking Empyrion super crazy fun game.)

There are some good youtubes on building just do a search. Once you learn the editor its AWESOME.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=974446607

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=974446627

[Teralitha]

I tried a carrier, but once I started losing mass amounts of fighters... I decided to never use fighters again.

[Acheron]

Designing a good ship 101

Shape
-until you learn more, make a t the proportions don't overly matter , my current ship looks more like a fat stingray with tiny tail...it has excellent speed, maneuverability, roll, yaw, and surprisingly stopping power.

Learn the scale
- how big do you want it? Make your grid half of your scale step for correct and easy alignment of pieces.
-Set scale to like 2 and grid to 1, adjust your block as small as it goes.
Place block in exact center of the ship's core towards the front side, turn off safe mode and delete the big iron block. (Re-enable safe mode)

Building

-Now that you have the scale set, start on cargo, build it straight out from the front center and make a giant rectangle box out of your ship. We start with cargo, because size of that determines mechanics needed.
-you should have a cube of your material hull with a rectangular one of cargo...all you should have is an unshapened pencil looking thing.

After the stalk of the t is built, start on the wings, the idea of this shape is to get thrusters away from the COM (center of mass) from here out, I'd use the mirror axis. Make the wings out of your next priority, the inertial dampeners and gyro array. Make the dampener larger than you think you need, then make 2 of em. Stopping power is very important. The gyro array should be close to the COM, it could be like the core of your ship ideally.now you should have a cubic T, we need to add on the tip of the t.
- the tail this is needed to help the yaw of your ship as the wings assist in the rotation. This doesn't need to be too long, but not half as long as the front is a good rule of thumb. I make mine out of generators and batteries, some expensive stuff.

- attach engines along the back side of the wings, about as long as the wings but no thicker.

- add 2 directional thrusters to the 4 tips of your t, off the end or on top/below, your choice. Make them a third as wide as your ships main body (should be thin still at this point)

-add regular thrusters to the sides of your t, two sides to each leg there should be 8 thrusters and 8 directional thrusters.

Check time!
- Exit build mode and try spinning and rotating the ship see what blinks red, if there are any blinking icons top center, mouse over to see what is lacking. You should have one indicating a lack of crew and one saying your ship is lower tier than other ships in the area (maybe)

- fix any defects you see, add a plate onto the side of a block, select them both and merge them, it makes it less likely for a bit of it to get shot off

- now the way this is structured, you will need to cover your top and nose, as well as your ass end to prevent systems from being hit by fire and losing something important. Armor is heavy, very much so until you can get trinium (the only armor I use even endgame)

Use a thin plate to cover the entire top of your ship, thinner= lighter, thicker = more protection. Heavier ships require larger thrusters, dampeners, and engines to maneuver. Always over engineer the maneuvering/speed compared to the mass.

Cover the tip of the t in front and behind with thin armor, fill with hull minimally for decoration.


Now see what the crew requirement you have is, add on 2 miners or 2 gunners per turret you plan to attach. Even after the crew levels, it's best to have extra crew space.

-Underneath your long forward leg of the t before the thrusters and after the gyro and dampeners, add crew quarters, make it just thick enough to house a human, and adjust the length and width to barely surpass your crew req + gunners and miners.

-add on thickish strips of thrusters above and below your ship and go fully crew out the ship.

- with the 18-26 thrusters you have, 2 decently large engines, and some large dampeners, you should be able to reach 1000-2000 meters per second, hold Ctrl, and stop fully after 8-10 seconds. Then move straight up, over them down without moving forwards or back.

The only downside with this design is rear movement; however, you should be able to flip the ship quickly and start thrusting in the opposite direction.

Feel free to post your ships in build mode for a critique, I'm sure a couple other notable personalities would enjoy helping figure out how to optimize your ship!

Each ship is different but the principles are the same, I've had rings and spheres, H, T, Y, and spikey ball shaped ships, symmetrical and as odd as the ai shapes. I've downloaded, taken apart and rebuilt ships i've found online. There is no wrong answer in shape, just the engineering.

Take your time, watch a video, get comfortable with the ship editor, try making a house with a chimney with a tree in the yard.I use cad at work so this editor is quite fimiliar, Ican toss together a solid ship in 5 minutes, but also spend 35 hours in single player working on minute details to the aft starboard leg of the ship. Go into creative and make something you love, make something you enjoy, then work towards getting everything you need to make it in your actual game.


It's been quite the day and I'm in a hotel for the next 3 days for work. Plenty of time to chat, just can't actually play QQ hmu with any questions, comments, anything I missed?

I am aware that there may be better ways to create ships, better ships in general, this is strictly meant to segment a ship into regions and help a newer creator to understand what does what, why and how. After someone successfully builds the generic t, some call it a giant flying phallic symbol...sees how the thrusters move the ship, dampeners slow the ship, and realizing where turrets should and can be placed, they can imagine up their dream destroyer or frigate armada.

[Acheron]

Also, the ship builder is very similar to most CAD software, it may be a bit more difficult to learn, but once you master it (like moving a character in any fps, it's second nature) you can very quickly do exactly what you want, this type of design allows for immense player control over what is being built

[FoeFeller]

Absolutely @Acheron I wish more building sandbox games would use more powerful editors. Its my big beef with Empyrion its sooooooo slow because its editing options are so limited, especially the fact that its mirror building mode doesn't mirror delete. I love Avorion for this

@Teralitha I mainly want to build the carrier as a mining ship for mining fighters. I currently have a cheep slow 2 turret drone saved ship that I spawn about four of in a system and turn them loose. (6 crew and a few hundred iron) but the game is slow with OOS mining. Doesn't mater how many mining ships you make or how many systems you put them in, more then 3 or 4 ships doesn't really make a difference. I had 9 drones going once and it was about the same speed OOS as 4. Now if you stay in system with them then it can be fast. But if I'm going to stay in system I might as well try the mining fighter thing.

Really its just an excusse to build a new ship.. the drone mining ship thing works pritty well take some time but its a constant income of resorces.

whats funy is while the drone cost like 150 ron and 5 of what ever material you need to mount turrets and like 400 credits those 6 crew cost 26000 credit in wages .. nuts that one months wages is 6 times the price of the ship.. lol

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=970359614

[Acheron]

I want to see a fleet of those carriers, make 6-7 exact copies of your ship with all the drones and set them to mine an oversized asteroid!

[FoeFeller]

I think Green Peace might blockade my fleet and chain themselves to the astroiod

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

Lol, so why will my mining gun not shoot?

I went and built another variant of my ship, this time, to closer resemble what it is, the TDS Leviathan from Fractured Space, and I put my mining laaser on it and suddenly it wont fire. The Chainguns fire fine, placed in basically the same spot, but the mining laser wont...and yes I made sure it was put on a number. My gun crew reads 6/2, so I assumed that is enough there...

[Lord_Greyscale]

Originally posted by LordKnightFandragon:

Lol, so why will my mining gun not shoot?
My gun crew reads 6/2, so I assumed that is enough there...

Do you have enough Miners?
Gunners only operate non-mining/non-salvaging "weapons".

If this is the case, don't feel bad, it confused me too for the first hour or so.

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

Originally posted by Lord_Greyscale:

Originally posted by LordKnightFandragon:

Lol, so why will my mining gun not shoot?
My gun crew reads 6/2, so I assumed that is enough there...

Do you have enough Miners?
Gunners only operate non-mining/non-salvaging "weapons".

If this is the case, don't feel bad, it confused me too for the first hour or so.

Yeah, I didnt have miners.....derp...

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

Interestng, so I begun paying attention to the numbers and how thrusters affect my ship and I notice, unless I build a Trump quality WALL, 50 feet high of thrusters on my ship, which just makes it look terrible, I get no YAW factor. Yaw, being the strafing left and right? Mine is currently like 0.9 rad/s.....

I notice when I go to strafe sideways from a dead standstill, my ship will not even move. Either I dont have enough yaw power, or you cant strafe from a standstill....it works once I put in any other imput though, then I can strafe around no issue, but still....seems like all my mulitdirectional thrusters with holes out all the sides should serve as my left and right pushing force, as well as the ones on the sides of my hull facing out.

The thrust is wierd for sure...

My latest machination handles alot better then my other ships. Its only like 75.7m3, less hten 400 blocks. It looks big, but I assume its actually quite small? I dont even have all the gear slots unlocked, need 111m3 lol...

[Teralitha]

Placement and size can be wonky at times. I was adding a thruster to one of my salvage ships and as I increased the size(It was on top/bottom for up/down pitch), the right/left yaw went down to almost nothing. Made no sense to me. So I made it a little smaller and then it was back. It was very strange. Might even be a bug.

[Acheron]

I was in a rush before work this morning, but I should have uploaded screenshots of six or seven of my ships with stats and while they were spinning in different directions to see the Thruster placement and Mass. Head to my profile and look in my screenshots under avorion. Only one of the ships there is an endgame ship everything else was between titanium and Xanion space.

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

Here is my latest aberration

2 general shots of it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1079157132
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1079157018

THis is a shot of the drone beside my bridge, to try and give an idea on size: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1079157108

Its inspired by the TDS Leviathan from Fractured Space.....I know I didnt even come close lol...