Space Engineers
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
I'm sure his first attempts were just as lowly as yours, Dave. And even the second, and the third.
...but the fourth one STAYED UP!
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Tutorial 3 - Building a ship
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But I knew about G because I watched another guy's tutorial
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Actually the first time I played it was the "Asteroids" survival level, which is kinda brutal as it just drops you in a damaged ship near a couple asteroids, with maybe 5 minutes of fuel left. There was an accidental collision that detached my ship's gravity generator, which then floated around in the cabin, and I couldn't figure out how to reattach it (didn't know about grinding returning 100% of materials or that there was no way to reattach detached objects other than grinding and rebuilding them), so I started over.
But I knew about G because I watched another guy's tutorial
My only addendum to Gasbandit's ship building video: ALWAYS make sure that you have a 5-7 block clearance from the end of you thruster to the next block. If you don't, you will melt off ship parts.
GasBandit
Staff member
Goddamned miner ship came apart today and I have no idea why. It's worked fine for weeks before this.
I'm pissed off. Fortunately I managed to quickly grind down and rebuild the surviving reactor and a gyroscope on the thruster assembly (since it had the cockpit surviving on it), then ground down enough of the remaining wreckage to build a grinder on the nose of the remnant craft, finish grinding down the rest of the drills and then hi-tail it back to base before one of the other factions stumbled across my crippled ass. Grr...
I'm pissed off. Fortunately I managed to quickly grind down and rebuild the surviving reactor and a gyroscope on the thruster assembly (since it had the cockpit surviving on it), then ground down enough of the remaining wreckage to build a grinder on the nose of the remnant craft, finish grinding down the rest of the drills and then hi-tail it back to base before one of the other factions stumbled across my crippled ass. Grr...
Was the conveyor the structural piece connecting the two halves? That may be the issue.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yes and no, there was a conveyor on the front large cargo bay (which disappeared), but there were drills attached adjacent all over, and even though they would transfer cargo only through the conveyor, they were attached to the cargo bay as well. The thing is the cargo bay just vanished, and that broke the ship in two.
It's an easy enough fix at least. Merge block, rewire the conveyors, and you're in business.
If you don't want to do the broken ship stuff, just do Lone Survivor. You start with the basics already built on a platform, but only 30 minutes of fuel so you need to hustle.
GasBandit
Staff member
So the other thing that kinda pissed me off today is that the base I captured, and the Bizarre Adventure, got taken sometime in the night. Also my microminer and welding ship. All gone. A rival pirate faction claimed responsibility, painstakingly sniping all our turrets one by one from 1km away, then merging up the ships and station and flying them away en masse. They didn't want to spend the time hacking all the systems on the Bizarre adventure, so they ground her down for parts.
I don't feel like I'm getting much support by running with the pirates I am now... they mostly seem to want to play Robocraft and FTL, I guess they're discouraged by all the bugs we've run into recently. I soldier on. Even if I am on my own, at least I've got a good hidden space base and the means with which to rebuild and return to pillaging. Matter of fact, I have an idea for my next ship...
I don't feel like I'm getting much support by running with the pirates I am now... they mostly seem to want to play Robocraft and FTL, I guess they're discouraged by all the bugs we've run into recently. I soldier on. Even if I am on my own, at least I've got a good hidden space base and the means with which to rebuild and return to pillaging. Matter of fact, I have an idea for my next ship...
If they aren't interested in supporting you, you can probably drum up the support you need here. All you'll need to do is get us to where you are set up and we'll start crafting/expanding as best as we can.
GasBandit
Staff member
I'm going to see if I can parlay their relative absence into getting promoted to leader and subsequently inviting any here who want to sign on so that we can get some manpower going. The main reason I lost my ship and that base is that the rival pirates had 3 guys working together, and against an unmanned base that's just a very short matter of time to win.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, you might wanna practice a bit first. When you think you got the hang of building and piloting, turn on Cargo ships in your saved world (you can change the settings in them without starting over, from the load screen), and try practicing pirating some NPC ships. Last I checked there was a bug that actually made them not shoot back, but oh well, can't have everything.[DOUBLEPOST=1406427693,1406427495][/DOUBLEPOST]LOL just saw this on the Space Engineers subreddit, titled "Make sure to test your engineers to make sure they will be good pilots."
The Youtube networks are kind of shit anyway, unless you are a huge, mega hit (in which case you really don't need them).
GasBandit
Staff member
So last night I decided the cure for the post-lost-my-ship blues was to get right back on that horse and go cause trouble. I borrowed Crow's lightest ship, the Tiny Dancer, and went looking for marks.
Tiny Dancer is as basic as a pirate ship can get - the minimum required, one cockpit, one gyro, one small reactor, one beacon (ships in multiplayer require a renamed beacon to not be deleted during daily maintenance/trash cleanup), six thrusters... that all makes the basic ship.. but then you tack on a medium cargo bay, connector, a grinder and a gatling gun, and you go from cute to worrisome.
So as I patrol the asteroids, I spot something in the distance - the barest discolored glint at the top of this asteroid -
So I get closer, and find a helpless base, ready to be pillaged! Not a bad start to the evening.
Thanks to having a nose-mounted grinder, I barely even have to get out of the ship to reduce it to components and tuck it away in the hold. I do get out to "hack" the reactor so I can get the uranium out of it before it is destroyed, but there's not a whole lot there. Ah well. Then as I pull away, I use chat to notify the faction to whom it belonged that their asteroid base is no longer there.
So I continue along my patrol, and at the fringes of the asteroid belt, I find this -
A giant chunk of somebody's (DOG faction is the somebody, apparently they named this the Doge) large 49-drill drillship holding stationary in space. I say "chunk" because the back end of it shows obvious signs of damage and there's no cockpit, forward, or reverse thrusters. I'm guessing that it just "came apart" in flight like some of my ships did yesterday. So I fire up Tiny Dancer's grinder and get to work.
But the tiny ship's hold fills up before the job is done... so bursting at the seams I fly her back to base, intent to come back with a larger ship and finish the job. It only occurs to me 3/4ths of the way home that I had enough parts right there on hand to simply add another cargo bay to Tiny Dancer. DOH.
So anyway, I go and get my new raiding ship that I just built, the Hammertime. It's not the bruiser or base that Bizarre Adventure was, it doesn't have a medlab or refinery or assembler, but it's slightly more agile and has its own mounted grinder.
There are a LOT of reactors on this drill ship.. so I make sure to hack them one by one to get the uranium out. Turns out to be very worthwhile, there was about 25 uranium ingots in each reactor!
It only occurs to me now, as I look at the screenshot, that it looks like a very bad idea to take an angle grinder to the access door of an operating nuclear reactor. Oh well.
So I finish up grinding and packing away the Doge into my cargo hold, and on the way home, I happen across somebody's base! Two jackpots in one night.
Incidentally, Major Twitch is one of the faction who took over the base I captured and stole Bizarre Adventure. The text in the above screenshot is him complementing me on my layered hull design - apparently it prevented all damage to the internal parts of the ship as they rocket-sniped off the turrets to be able to approach her. Wunderbar. Also pictured above, you can see I built on two more grinders to make the grinding of the Doge driller go faster.
But at any rate, I approach the base, jump out, disable the medbay so I don't get any unexpected guests that way, and start grinding away the base.
I hack the cargo bays instead, and find a huge stock of supplies. A hundred thousand steel plates! 400 missiles (which is good, because I was running low)! 32,000 construction components! Various other ingots and parts. There's so much, the 3 cargo bays I brought (which were half full already from the doge) quickly fill up, and I'm forced to build TWELVE MORE cargo bays (and 3 more grinders for good measure) on the outside hull of the Hammertime, just to get it all in.
But Deerslayer, the owner of the base, comes back from his own raiding just as I finish up grinding away the base platform, so I don't get a chance to get to grinding the drillship parked nearby. I kick Hammertime into high gear for a quick getaway, because I don't know the combat capabilities of the ship Deerslayer's flying, and would rather not test an unknown with 900,000 liters of booty stuffed into and strapped onto the outside of Hammertime, which has fairly minimal armaments for a large class ship - two missile turrets and a missile launcher. As I thrust away, I kick the turrets back on, and they start slinging rockets aftward to discourage pursuit... and I escape into the big empty, free and clear to make the long haul back to my own base and offload my ill-gotten gains.
It was a roller-coaster of a day... started off pretty bad, but was looking up by the end.
Tiny Dancer is as basic as a pirate ship can get - the minimum required, one cockpit, one gyro, one small reactor, one beacon (ships in multiplayer require a renamed beacon to not be deleted during daily maintenance/trash cleanup), six thrusters... that all makes the basic ship.. but then you tack on a medium cargo bay, connector, a grinder and a gatling gun, and you go from cute to worrisome.
So as I patrol the asteroids, I spot something in the distance - the barest discolored glint at the top of this asteroid -
So I get closer, and find a helpless base, ready to be pillaged! Not a bad start to the evening.
Thanks to having a nose-mounted grinder, I barely even have to get out of the ship to reduce it to components and tuck it away in the hold. I do get out to "hack" the reactor so I can get the uranium out of it before it is destroyed, but there's not a whole lot there. Ah well. Then as I pull away, I use chat to notify the faction to whom it belonged that their asteroid base is no longer there.
So I continue along my patrol, and at the fringes of the asteroid belt, I find this -
A giant chunk of somebody's (DOG faction is the somebody, apparently they named this the Doge) large 49-drill drillship holding stationary in space. I say "chunk" because the back end of it shows obvious signs of damage and there's no cockpit, forward, or reverse thrusters. I'm guessing that it just "came apart" in flight like some of my ships did yesterday. So I fire up Tiny Dancer's grinder and get to work.
But the tiny ship's hold fills up before the job is done... so bursting at the seams I fly her back to base, intent to come back with a larger ship and finish the job. It only occurs to me 3/4ths of the way home that I had enough parts right there on hand to simply add another cargo bay to Tiny Dancer. DOH.
So anyway, I go and get my new raiding ship that I just built, the Hammertime. It's not the bruiser or base that Bizarre Adventure was, it doesn't have a medlab or refinery or assembler, but it's slightly more agile and has its own mounted grinder.
There are a LOT of reactors on this drill ship.. so I make sure to hack them one by one to get the uranium out. Turns out to be very worthwhile, there was about 25 uranium ingots in each reactor!
It only occurs to me now, as I look at the screenshot, that it looks like a very bad idea to take an angle grinder to the access door of an operating nuclear reactor. Oh well.
So I finish up grinding and packing away the Doge into my cargo hold, and on the way home, I happen across somebody's base! Two jackpots in one night.
Incidentally, Major Twitch is one of the faction who took over the base I captured and stole Bizarre Adventure. The text in the above screenshot is him complementing me on my layered hull design - apparently it prevented all damage to the internal parts of the ship as they rocket-sniped off the turrets to be able to approach her. Wunderbar. Also pictured above, you can see I built on two more grinders to make the grinding of the Doge driller go faster.
But at any rate, I approach the base, jump out, disable the medbay so I don't get any unexpected guests that way, and start grinding away the base.
I hack the cargo bays instead, and find a huge stock of supplies. A hundred thousand steel plates! 400 missiles (which is good, because I was running low)! 32,000 construction components! Various other ingots and parts. There's so much, the 3 cargo bays I brought (which were half full already from the doge) quickly fill up, and I'm forced to build TWELVE MORE cargo bays (and 3 more grinders for good measure) on the outside hull of the Hammertime, just to get it all in.
But Deerslayer, the owner of the base, comes back from his own raiding just as I finish up grinding away the base platform, so I don't get a chance to get to grinding the drillship parked nearby. I kick Hammertime into high gear for a quick getaway, because I don't know the combat capabilities of the ship Deerslayer's flying, and would rather not test an unknown with 900,000 liters of booty stuffed into and strapped onto the outside of Hammertime, which has fairly minimal armaments for a large class ship - two missile turrets and a missile launcher. As I thrust away, I kick the turrets back on, and they start slinging rockets aftward to discourage pursuit... and I escape into the big empty, free and clear to make the long haul back to my own base and offload my ill-gotten gains.
It was a roller-coaster of a day... started off pretty bad, but was looking up by the end.
Dave
Staff member
Couple questions.
1) Even when you use the drilling ship, stuff goes flying out into space. Like I was mining gold and even though I could see my cargo bay filling up, chunks were flying everywhere outside. Was I doing something wrong? No, I was not fast drilling.
2) How did you know where your base was? Is there a limit on your base on the HUD or are there always arrows no matter how far you are?
1) Even when you use the drilling ship, stuff goes flying out into space. Like I was mining gold and even though I could see my cargo bay filling up, chunks were flying everywhere outside. Was I doing something wrong? No, I was not fast drilling.
2) How did you know where your base was? Is there a limit on your base on the HUD or are there always arrows no matter how far you are?
If your cargo bay fills to max, then stuff will go flying no matter what. However, your drills have to actively touch the stuff coming out while drilling to grab it and sometimes stuff flys out at such an angle and speed that it isn't nabbed. Drills aren't perfect but they'll get like 95% of what you drilled out.
As for where his base is... if you look at edges of the screen, you see beacons set to XYZ. This gives you a rough coordinate to where you are on a server and if you know the cords of on location, you have a rough idea of how to get there from anywhere else.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, sometimes there will be a little bit of detritus left over or that gets away when you use a drilling ship. Usually it's not an amount worth fretting over though.. less than an armload per full cargo bay, in my experience.
And yes, most PVP server use X Y and Z Coordinate beacons because if you set up your own wide-range broadcast beacon to find your way home, OTHERS will find their way to your home, too... So you just write down coordinates for everything.
And yes, most PVP server use X Y and Z Coordinate beacons because if you set up your own wide-range broadcast beacon to find your way home, OTHERS will find their way to your home, too... So you just write down coordinates for everything.
GasBandit
Staff member
Using the loot I pillaged yesterday, I built a new suite of mobile factory (36 small cargo bays, 8 refineries, 2 assemblers), 49 drill rig, and combination grinder/welder ship that all fit together with merge blocks and can be moved as one.
I've parked it 15km out from an asteroid (twice visual range), and maybe later tonight or tomorrow. Oh, those other non-XYZ beacons... some dingus on the server'd been launching powered beacon probes into the void all afternoon, trying to lead people on wild goose chases.
I've parked it 15km out from an asteroid (twice visual range), and maybe later tonight or tomorrow. Oh, those other non-XYZ beacons... some dingus on the server'd been launching powered beacon probes into the void all afternoon, trying to lead people on wild goose chases.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, that didn't go so well. I went to go do a mining run, found noobs building a base on the asteroid I wanted... Flew the drill rig back to the mobile factory, suicided back to the main base, got Hammertime, flew out the 10 minutes to the asteroid, threatened them with destruction if they didn't bribe me, they insulted me and acted flippant, so I missiled them and their base into twisted scrap. Got 11,000 kg of iron ingots for my trouble. Eh, it's something, I guess. Flew Hammertime back to the mobile factory. For some reason HAMMERTIME'S MISSILE TURRETS LOCK ON TO MY OWN MOBILE FACTORY and go spraying missiles at it!
I quickly shut off the turrets, but a huge hole was blown diagonally through the bow-to-port of the mobile factory, and roughly a dozen cargo bays are either destroyed or damaged to non-functionality. I attempt to repair the damage with my combo welder/grinder ship, but find out I did VERY bad engine placement on the design, and the retro thruster on BigMacher does even further damage to the mobile factory. It's almost midnight. I give up. I mate everything back up with the merge blocks, fly Hammertime back to main spacebase, suicide back to the mobile factory, fly the joined package back to space base. I might could have left it there, done my mining run, and manufactured replacement parts on site in the still-mostly-functional mobile factory, but I want a real, non-burny welding ship to do the heavy lifting. Need to redesign bigmacher anyway, not sure if it's actually possible to make a compact combo welder/grinder in large ship size. Maybe I'll have to make something big and boxy at least 8x8x8 so I can have all the engines pointing inward instead of outward, to avoid damage.
Well, anyway, that's something to work on tonight. First I'll have to do a mineral run though, and that 20 minute round trip commute to the asteroids from my hidden space base is gonna be a frustrating excercise.
I quickly shut off the turrets, but a huge hole was blown diagonally through the bow-to-port of the mobile factory, and roughly a dozen cargo bays are either destroyed or damaged to non-functionality. I attempt to repair the damage with my combo welder/grinder ship, but find out I did VERY bad engine placement on the design, and the retro thruster on BigMacher does even further damage to the mobile factory. It's almost midnight. I give up. I mate everything back up with the merge blocks, fly Hammertime back to main spacebase, suicide back to the mobile factory, fly the joined package back to space base. I might could have left it there, done my mining run, and manufactured replacement parts on site in the still-mostly-functional mobile factory, but I want a real, non-burny welding ship to do the heavy lifting. Need to redesign bigmacher anyway, not sure if it's actually possible to make a compact combo welder/grinder in large ship size. Maybe I'll have to make something big and boxy at least 8x8x8 so I can have all the engines pointing inward instead of outward, to avoid damage.
Well, anyway, that's something to work on tonight. First I'll have to do a mineral run though, and that 20 minute round trip commute to the asteroids from my hidden space base is gonna be a frustrating excercise.
I got around the "forward thrusters melting what I'm welding" thing by sticking solar panels to either side of the main welding face and putting the thrusters on the other ends of the panels. There's only 3 problems I've run into with that configuration. 1) It's unwieldy as all hell. 2) It's a small ship so I don't have to worry about how massive a large ship would be, and 3) it's unwieldy as all hell.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, I thought about that, but I need it to reasonably reach into corners as well. Also I often weld things wide enough to still get burned by thrusters on the ends of solar panels.
My advice? Build cargo containers out in the middle of nowhere, ether hidden inside empty asteroids or just floating out in the middle of nowhere. Attach a connector, cover it in heavy armor, and just leave it to float in space until you need it.
I kind of wish we could program beacons or something to seek "home" or "come to a stop when you reach THIS beacon" or something. If we could, I'd just suggest sending it home unmanned.
GasBandit
Staff member
My faction actually did have floating cargo bay bouys before... we called them "bootstrap boxes." It was very piratey. Space buried treasure. Unfortunately we put them too far out from center and they got deleted when the admin was monkeying with map size.[DOUBLEPOST=1406577924,1406577786][/DOUBLEPOST]
It's confined to the single linear blockspace of the engine. It doesn't burn things adjacently.
However, there are also some buildables (specifically turrets) whose occupying space is larger than their actual model (the turret takes up 2 blocks, but "occupies" a 3x3x3 grid space in which nothing else can be built) and if the rocket thrusts through that occupied-but-empty space it still destroys the turret. This is a source of constant irritation to me.
GasBandit
Staff member
Mkay, I'm pretty much ready to not play this game any more until they stabilize multiplayer. I lost a ship, a station, and at least 1,000,000 liters of stolen booty to lag combined with stupid broken glitches.
I might check in on it again once a week or so to see if they've done so. Sorry to everyone who got as excited as I was and ran out and bought the game based on my posts... but for anyone else reading, I recommend holding off buying the game. It's still too fucking alpha and the dev team's priorities right now is on introducing new content, and not bug squashing/playability issues.
I might check in on it again once a week or so to see if they've done so. Sorry to everyone who got as excited as I was and ran out and bought the game based on my posts... but for anyone else reading, I recommend holding off buying the game. It's still too fucking alpha and the dev team's priorities right now is on introducing new content, and not bug squashing/playability issues.