More serious ship construction?

[tawdry harbor]

I've thought about it for some time - even for how much this game is a sandbox, it does treat some matters rather seriously. One notable thing it doesn't treat seriously though, is ship construction. You can start with a flying container and, through expenditure of time, just manually weld bits and pieces on until it's a luxury yacht, megafreighter, space cruiser, whatever.

That doesn't quite seem... serious enough. Also shipbreaking is nominally a focus of the game, but ships are nothing but thin metal shells with components bolted on.

My proposed change is fundamental, but simple. Each ship model out there, gets a unique construction layer that the player can't easily modify or repair. A "structure" layer, essentially, with two types of tiles. The "frame", and the "hull". The frame is the fundamental base of the ship, that keeps the entire rest of the ship together and determines its shape. Certain things can only be built on or adjacent to the frame of the ship, things like airlocks, reactors, thrusters, anything with high mass or exerting large forces on the ship. Some things can't be built on frame tiles - things like storage bays built into floors, the center reactor tile that houses the torch drive (meaning the reactor needs very specific placement). The hull of the ship, is the "floor" of the structure. It defines the actual build area of the ship, and actually holds pressure. A ship with intact frame and hull but no floor tiles will have atmosphere, but no walkable surfaces. Hull can be built adjacent to, for patching purposes. However, patches are not hull - large enough holes in the hull can't be patched with just floor tiles.

Ships with hull damage can be theoretically repaired by hand. Repairing the hull is difficult and time-consuming, but possible. Damage to the frame is basically permanent, unless some manner of shipyard exists. Thus the boneyard around Ganymed, where ships too damaged for easy repairs are gathered.

Expanding and modifying ships is still possible, but what ship you take as a base would matter far more, and not just any random junk shuttle off the scrapyard can now be turned back into a pristine ship. So you have to choose whether it's worth it to try and rebuild, or just scrap everything and leave.

[potent walrus]

I agree that at least larger ships are too easy to rebuild or repair.

Unlimited edition of ships is fun to a degree, but it does not encourage trying new things or variance (Wayward Terran Frontier made ships limited by hull and it made them very fun to refine). It's more fun to have to 'fix up' ships in a somewhat limited ruleset where you can't just add a room to the side and make it a reactor room - reactor should touch something load-bearing to not tear the ship apart.

And the bigger the ship, the better the support should be. Mounting couple thrusters onto a small container? Sure, why not? But making a house sized container will just cause it to collapse during acceleration.

P.S. Been suggested couple times. Like having a 'ribcage' and load-bearing walls.

[lucid dagger]

this could be easy/advanced mode setting

[strong eagle]

Could we have the AI when grabing parts that stack grab enough stackable parts to reduce trip back and forth?

[potent walrus]

Or be constrained to larger ships and be fairly permissive otherwise (just not allow doubling/tripling size of smaller ships e t c without some significant effort). The truth of the games like this is that people like too fix things up. Having too little limits just results in 'boxes' and 'cubes'. Having at least some light limits makes people go creative to overcome them to get the desired result.

[patent sentinel]

Maybe a kind of structural integrity.

[mortal spindle]

I just want 100% walls, floor rather than 40% at max.

[tawdry harbor]

I'd be fine with some light limits. Ultimately the goal is the exact thing you mentioned, some more restriction in how far things can be taken. The 'framework layer' is just the way I figure this would fit most easily into the current build process.

It's possible to compress the concept into just the 'frame' components, removing the hull part. Frame components would be a series of 'background' components, with the airlock in its current form also being one. They vary in size and mass, and can be built on to other frame components. Each 'frame', airlock included, provides essentially a 'build area' around it, different components providing different areas, the larger the component the larger the area extension.

In this concept, an airlock by itself would provide enough area to build a ship the size of the 'flying container' or perhaps even the smaller of the regular salvage pods. To build bigger, the player would have to invest considerable effort and resources to build more structure onto the base provided by the airlock. Or just find a bigger ship to build from.

Essentially I'd like a system that's fundamentally inobtrusive, but does add some level of constraint to the otherwise wide open sandbox of ship construction, and can integrate with other important game elements like ship-to-ship combat damage, and evaluating salvage potential (i.e. a ship with a broken spine would be prohibitively expensive to repair).

[drowsy bronze]

You could implement this easily by creating new wall tiles that are not installable or uninstallable and only set via ship creation. Give them indestructible status and let players build around them.

One cool trade off is that they'd also be safe from micrometeorites.

Adding new tiles like this would be impossible, but maybe a future update could allow alteration in one of the dedicated shipyards, up to certain sizes!

[tawdry harbor]

I figure making framework linked to actual "load bearing walls" might be disruptive to the build process. And the whole idea is adding this semi-seamlessly onto the existing content, so that all the existing ship models and designs remain the same, they'd just get an extra layer added. Any suggestion that involves redoing all the existing ship (and station) designs to incorporate special wall or floor grades, especially for such a controversial purpose, would probably be a non-starter.

[drowsy bronze]

Not necessarily, reworking the hull system would be far more effort.

Adding super hull parts works with existing systems, existing ships don't need to be altered especially as most as small tugs, and even those that would be modified just need to replace existing walls with the new tiles.

[carmine forge]

With the testudo dream, a school case when you remove all equipments and seat and all, you see how the ship is supposed to be assemble and the layout of equipment by the tile used when you see bolted rivet for extensions, it is just aesthetics but it is appreciable, and tells you what was the thought process behind the design.

But dont be fooled by this 2d/3d representation of a ship

You only see a slice of it that has no real top or bottom, nor bow nor stern, I think

I think the main problem about ship being too "easy" to refit into spacehulk, is not that is too easy but rather is player tend to be able to plan too big and then it is a pain gameplay wise to gather the materials and designing something that is calculated to look good and be functional when you work on large chunks and rooms

I think easy in this case would mean letting your solo character doing slow jobs at x8 & x16 all day long with drowsy penalities at the end of the day till the refit is done in one go

[tawdry harbor]

It's definitely part of the issue, hence the need for restrictions. In the current system, you can just put together a pile of walls and floors, and just go hog wild with building out, regardless of what you started out with. Putting some hard or semi-hard limits on how far you can expand your ship, would add meaning to there being larger ships to salvage, on top of just forcing the player to put some forethought into things.

It's far from the initial idea I had, but even that little extra level of complexity would be good.
||(The engineer in me weeps for the lack of developer will to demand that the thruster arrangement on the ships make any kind of sense. T-T)||

[hearty hemlock]

I fully expect that last bit to be changed by 1.0, Sean.

[carmine forge]

It is very hard to balance positive incentivizing gamedesign, without scrapping the sandbox/creation liberty aspect.
I think the devs want to make some sort of emergent/organic gameplay that will merge to this positive conjuncture with all what seems to be planned, but can't rebalance the agency with part that are not here to be interwoven yet.
I think for exemple of crafting and housing, it will require more place for new processing equipments and new storages. Is that will incentivize players to build even larger ships or investing in multiples specialized one, using less time-consuming or cheaper/expansive alternatives with npc paid services, new station's estates specialized for manufacturing accessible by ship with airlock docks?
And as a advocate for npcs crew which I think I really grasp the potential of Ostranauts being in fact a solid squad based sandbox RPG, even if it looks like barebone atm. There is ways around that too. With 3 crew you can literally more than double or triple the effective cargo capacity of most starter ships because they can drag the biggest objects on them as a temporary and timed solution.

There are kind of subliminal didactic details put by the devs to incentivize player to lecture some solutions, for example the sleeping roll bag, that you can install/uninstall when you need for space management, or certain ships that need their console to be removed in order to access and repair a battery behind otherwise inaccessible.
Also I try to pay attention of the tiles used on the ship designs, they tell some thoughts about how vanilla are engineered and aestitically codified, it should help player design theses codified patterns as modular guide to ease and improve players modifications that would make more sens in this universe

[potent walrus]

Personally I find it to be too easy to just add an entire room, and suddenly your coffin is twice as large, repeat again and you are already bigger than a tug, repeat once more and you have a reactor room.
Adding a room takes an in-game hour or two to build and roughly same amount of time to salvage needed walls/floors, as long as you have spare batteries for tools. Then once you are done, you sell your monstrosity for 10 times it's initial price and buy a new ship and repeat the process again, in exactly the same way, because that's the way that works and there is no reason to experiment. Assuming you even need to sell&buy a new ship, since you can earn money in another way and can easily upgrade your coffin to a luxury mega-liner under couple days.

[timber ivy]

i really agree, it would also be nice to see hulls be stronger to denote their purpose— right now a micrometeorite can punch through your hull, you, and everything you hold dear unless you invest heavily in whipple shields

but with more serious ship construction it would also be nice to see things like proper robotic arms, prefabricated modules, et cetera. to make the process less tedious than "drag wall -> install wall" ad nauseum

[mortal spindle]

The only Star Trek you'll find here is a realization that this is the Mirror Universe.

[timber ivy]

huh

[mortal spindle]

The bleak grim capitalistic setting of the game.

[potent walrus]

Even without considering limits, this game's hull constructions loses to Space Station 13/14. Wrecks in SS14 looks like actual wrecks with exposed framework below the floors