#QOL ship flipping

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

meager flicker
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Ship flipping is very profitable, but also has a lot of annoying little things that make it drag or be inconvinient to the point I just quit after flipping 2-3 ships.

Issues and suggestion:

  1. Locating your wreck.
    It's fine when your wreck is close by, but it is going to drift, and it's going to drift far. I have to do multiple trips to kleg and other wrecks while 'flipping' and it quickly becomes annoying to spend progressively more time looking for your wreck.

Suggestions:
a. List your owned vehicles under PDA somewhere, with an estimated position. When you leave your wreck behind, you know the wrecks' vector, it shouldn't be this hard to estimate (and remember) where it's going to be.
b. Temporary beacon/marker. Leaving a battery, antennae and a transponder aboard helps a bit, but when you are 'flipping', you are not certain where transponder is going to end up at and placing is prematurely is punished by the game. So a temporary, battery powered beacon to avoid that would be nice (may be with a guest if you leave it running for too long).
c. Perhaps a way to gently stabilize a wreck without having a towing brace and wrecking your own ship in the process?

  1. Running out of power.
    While flipping a relatively small ship I spent almost 3 shifts doing that and had to return to KLEG 4 times just to recharge batteries. Switches help there, as do signal boxes, but should it really be this manual with you having to remember to flip those?

Suggestions:
a. Automate power conservation to some extent. You are docked? Propulsion enters 'suspended' mode (a switch on the nav console that permits automatic suspending?)
b. A way to drain batteries into your ship. Flipping N2 cans is way simpler than doing the same with batteries.
c. A 'refueling' service. Like with the tug service request, you can request for you batteries fuel and O2 to be refilled at a huge markup.

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  1. Missing parts
    I'm often in a situation where I'm one device short, partially because I change plans on the go, but often it's 'I totally forgot that I needed a bulkhead bin there'.

Suggestions:
a. Checklist. Reuse the shop's UI to add items and Notes UI to keep track of what you need aboard the vessel and of parts that you are missing.
b. Inventory in PDA for your remote property.

  1. Price estimations
    Room rules are a bit nebulous (if you aren't digging in game's files) and I sometimes have to save, PASS to KLEG to check that things were properly registered, then load from the save

Suggestions:
a. Ship rating and value estimation in PDA
b. 'Insert name of a corporation here' Room Standards listed in PDA.

  1. Some rooms are still fairly abusable.
    Examples:
    a. You can make a ship that consists out of a closed bridge alone (an RCS outside) and it will be extremely profitable to sell (don't permit docking port in the closed bridge?)
    b. Airlock isn't size limited, so you can make a large ship out of pumps and cans to game the price (I think airlock should require a door, airlock should be size limited, there should be bigger types of an airlock with a reduced bonus)
    c. Wellness, Toilet, Luxury quarters feel a fair bit abusable. Why do they permit batteries (fire hazard near fabric!) and intakes? Why don't they have a size limit?

  2. Rooms lack variety.
    Being confined to a narrow selection of rooms means that you can't be properly creative about your ship. For maximum profit you have to game the rules, not build a cozy residential area or a compact bunk room.

wintry jacinth
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On locating the ship: If you have purchased it, you should be able to PASS over to it.

meager flicker
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How do PASS know where my derelict is when I don't?

wooden carbon
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You can also just thrust gently while docking

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Spend a minute or so at <0.1 g and its gonna fly where you need it to

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But i like the transponder idea

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And the rcs distributors and batteries take precedence when determining room type (if wiki is to be trusted)

meager flicker
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But even if I have the console there, ship can be 800+km away from kleg, at that point it's hard to tell your precise position without other reference points.

Spend a minute or so at <0.1 g and its gonna fly where you need it to
Last time I tried that at minimum thrust setting I got a breach.

wooden carbon
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I did hat a few times successfully, but maybe more like at 0.01g lol
Definitely did "deorbit" a few unneeded derelicts too

meager flicker
wintry jacinth
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PASS is magic

wooden carbon
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And the nav station is before them in the order, yeah

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Although apparently in this case something is indeed weird

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Should be open bridge, huh

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i'll try placing a battery in my luxury quarters

meager flicker
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There were also two 'gas tug' husks at some point, one was 90K, another one was 500K, (bought the first one) difference was essentially in a single hole. So one was roomless, another one was basically a big airlock. Not sure why the difference was so huge, it should have been only 1.5 times. But there is a trend...

meager flicker
wintry jacinth
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RNG plays havoc with the derelict shop; it's pure speculation. My first ever flip was a lian bai gen ii (party barge) that i bought for 97K and sold for several million. It was in rough shape, but more or less in one piece when i bought it

trim garden
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This is crazy, for example.

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meager flicker
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Not a nice mechanics. You would think ships would be assigned a fixed seed

meager flicker
wintry jacinth
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Yeah, it gets an RNG damage pass applied at the moment of docking. I suppose the idea was to make sure they're all unique in their own ways.

meager flicker
trim garden
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Registry number is already a quasi unique identifier, could be used as the seed

meager flicker
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And now I have to wait ~12h for the list of ships to refresh because the cheapest thing in kiosk is a 80K shipping container, next one is 200K and it's basically a single line of walls with a couple tiles. Empty husk of a tug is at 2mil...

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Out of a dozen options in the shop only the container looks appealing...

vast schooner
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One thing that helps me is doing nested power switches - bank 1 might have 4 full sized batteries while bank 2 might have 3. One switch flips both off, and each bank has it's own switch. You can repeat this to infinite if you aren't running a fusion power plant yet.

trim garden
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And then I build the ship from scratch

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Literally tear it down to the airlock

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80k is a steal

vast schooner
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I do agree with the arbitary price decisions - but they seem more like a loan shark than a ship dealer.

trim garden
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It just feels like they used to have more relation to the quality/ condition of the ship in prior patches

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I could be imagining that

meager flicker
# trim garden Literally tear it down to the airlock

Yeah, that's why the container is appealing, the least to rebuild, the most profit. But I do enjoy doing things 'pimp my ride' style and tearing everything down isn't that. And sadly 'super fast forward' does not finish construction.

kind dock
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I'll be honest I dislike most of these ideas except the refueling/recharging service, and maybe the tweaking of room definitions.

Most of these problems already have in-game mechanics and systems to deal with them, whether it's the Notes app on the PDA, or the Business Admin skill, PASS, or using any of those things together. These are challenges, not problems at all, actually.

The QoL factor is clearly already an intentional part of the games somewhat tedious design. If the game just tracked every little thing for you and gave you price estimates, why even have the Note App, or Business Admin skill?

meager flicker
# kind dock I'll be honest I dislike most of these ideas except the refueling/recharging ser...

Note App isn't that easy to use and gets spammed at the moment, may be once it's actually functioning... but even then looks like it will have to be filled by hand instead of some kind of 'populate from orders' or a 'shop UI' for fast addition of items into the notes.
What does Business Admin do?
Using save load to locate your ship does not feel like an intended behavior, it feels like a hack.
Switching switches for preserving power is just needlessly repetitive. Having to set up an energy preservation system is fine, having to constantly flip it isn't.

These are challenges, not problems at all
Some of these are challenges once or twice per ship, after that they are irritants.

trim garden
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Wait, business admin actually does something?

trim garden
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how exactly is this helpful?

image.png
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if i could write on it myself, that would be helpful

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or context click on things and 'add to to-do list'