The new patch... v1.030....

It rebalanced weapon damage across the board.  ALL of the ballistics data I've collected has therefore been invalidated, and I have to start from scratch....

*sigh*

For those of you interested, the Spreadsheet I use to record these results is located here, so you can check my progress while you wait for the armor report. 

Back to the drawing board...

Welcome to the Avernus Cove Testing Facility

As part of my future research objectives, I built a facility to perform all my necessary ballistics tests and the like.  Of course, being who I am, I felt compelled to expand upon this simple idea and build an entire functional asteroid base: the Avernus Cove Testing Facility, a.k.a. the Lighthouse.  While not all areas of the facility are complete (interior lights have not yet been installed), and some have not yet been constructed (namely the lack of a central control room or an armory storage) I think it's time to provide a basic tour of the facilities.  I found an asteroid with a good number of tunnels which were well concealed and began sealing them up.  Where needed I excavated new rooms. 

The Lighthouse

The base's nickname comes from this tower, which holds the facility's Nav Beacon.  As you can see, the beacon is mounted on a rotor and has two solar panels to provide it with an independent power source from the base. The Lighthouse itself also contains the base's emergency back-up reactor which is connected via conveyor to the rest of the base through a tunnel which was excavated down to the main caverns.

The Cove

The facility earns its official name from the "C" shaped asteroid it is built on.  The open space in the middle is the cove, and provides docking for large ships as seen by the Rescue Ship pictured here.  A control console inside the arm operates the docking clamp (landing gear), and this corridor provides airlocked access to the rest of the facility.  Once inside, the stairs lead up to Medical and the main corridor extends to the rest of the facility.

Manufacturing Center

 The first major room reached upon entering the facility is the Manufacturing Center.  Excavated with the use of a single large warhead and some selective drilling, this cavern contains six refineries, six assemblers, and two large cargo containers for storage of finished materials.  The conveyor system seen in this picture connects throughout the facility to all other critical systems.

Propulsion Lab

Continuing through the asteroid, the Propulsion Lab can be reached.  This room permits the testing of small and large ship thrusters in a controlled environment.  Again the lab was excavated with the use of a single large warhead, after which a tunnel was excavated out the back of the room via drilling ship to reach the exterior of the asteroid where a live fire testing range could be constructed.

The Mine

However... during excavation, a vein of uranium was encountered.  To remove the radiation risk to staff it was deemed necessary to excavate the deposit before completing the tunnel. This proved problematic, and some 400,000 kg of uranium ore later the tunnel was sealed and a mining facility constructed inside the asteroid with the drilling ship inside.  A wealth of uranium remains to be extracted.  The mine possesses its own refinery, which has a convenient drop-off location for the driller. 

Live-Fire Ballistics Range

This brings us to the Ballistics Range, where all armor and weapons experiments will be conducted.  As the image shows, the range has two firing assemblies used to mount small and large ship weapons for testing.  Each weapons platform has six firing lanes to allow for rapid testing.  As shown in this picture, I am able to test the effects of weapons on light and heavy armor in 1, 2, or 3 layers simultaneously.  The targets themselves are mounted on Target Ships, which can be copy/pasted quickly or piloted and swapped out for different tests.

Resupply Platform

 Back to the asteroid's exterior, a small landing pad atop the rock holds a collector which delivers supplies directly into the facility's store room, a corridor containing three large storage containers.  This allows for quick resupply of the base without any security risks like allowing unauthorized personnel aboard the station.  Additionally, the platform holds one of the base's two radio antennas.

Back to the cove, opposite the Docking Arm is the Hangar Bay which provides landing and maintenance areas for small ships.  The Hangar was constructed from a naturally-occurring cavern, with only minor modifications such as leveling the floor.  It is constructed entirely out of heavy armor to reduce wear and tear from small ship thrusters.  Directly inside the bay doors to the right is the Flight Control Tower.  Whether or not the hangar will have a door has yet to be decided, but should one be added it would be controlled from here. 

That concludes the tour for now, though I will likely upload a video of the full installation to Youtube at a later date.  With the semester almost over, I should be able to put this facility to good use soon and begin proper testing on armor designs within a few weeks. 

Reconstructing Space: Above & Beyond's ISSCV

unusualsuspex on DeviantArt

For those of who recall the short-lived 90's science fiction series Space: Above & Beyond, one of its most memorable features will have been its spectacular ship design as seen in craft like the the SA-43 Hammerhead Endo/Exo-Atmospheric Attack Jet and their InterStellar Space Cargo Vehicle which doubled as a an APC.  The ISSCV's most notable feature was that of an independent detachable cargo container, and it is this feature which held the most appeal to me to reproduce!

For Project Volundr's first effort, I chose to build an ISSCV-inspired small ship and detachable cargo containers.  I referred to unusualsuspex's ISSAPC ortho and Kelso323's side view which emphasized the cargo container.

Design Objectives:

1. Reproduce a reasonable facsimile of the S:A&B ISSCV in Space Engineers
2. Construct a transport ship and detachable cargo container which is functional in-game

Challenges:

1.  Small ships cannot have interiors nor can they use Door blocks.  A key component of the ISSCV's cargo container is its interior corridor which connects to the cockpit of the transport ship.  
2. Building it as a large ship would restrict the level of detail attainable. 
3. Ships in Space Engineers cannot have the rotating engine mounts featured on this vessel's wings.  

So I began work on this with every intention of creating a fully faithful replica of the original vessel, but.... somewhere along the design process I stopped doing that and began free-forming it and creating something original.  Once the shift in design goals occurred, the ship stopped being an ISSCV and became something new: the MACPE (Modular Armored Carrier for Personnel and Equipment), or as I nicknamed it the Magpie.  I believe I can trace the exact time which this shift in priorities occurred to be when I realized the wing-mounted engines (which I had chosen to use Large Thrusters for) would under the current design be too close to the landing platforms and would deal damage on take-off. 

Early screenshot of the MACPE

To solve the thruster placement dilemma, I added an upward sweep to the wings so as to elevate them sufficiently.  It should also be noted that reproducing angles in Space Engineers ship designs which are not 90° or 45° can be problematic and don't always look right when implemented.  This was another reason for the divergence from simple replication.  A second engine placement problem came up in that the design from S:A&B does not have any apparent port/starboard engine placements, and any good design in Space Engineers needs thrust in all 6 directions.  Additionally, I had opted to leave the aft section of the transport ship off and shorten the overall design and make pickup easier as it didn't seem to serve any benefit in Space Engineers.  But this left me without a good location for the transport's landing gear.  I solved both of these problems by adding legs that doubled as thruster assemblies which use small thrusters to save space. 

Another pair of problems presented themselves in aligning the cockpit with the cargo container: the original design called for weapons to be underneath the cockpit, but the only place to put ammunition stores rested above the cockpit, and I felt it important that all fuel and ammo be refillable through the same access port.  This resulted in a conveyor system wrapping around the back of the cockpit and widening the front of the ship before extending over the ship's spine, and unnecessarily increased the ship's weight as it was up-armored to protect the conveyor system.  Additionally, the large thrusters place a heavy power demand, but fitting a large reactor into the ship (without blocking the cockpit access) did not seem feasible as it would be somewhat exposed and increase the ship's silhouette significantly.  Instead the spine of the vessel is lined with small reactors all linked to the conveyor system.  This poses serious energy efficiency problems for the design as well. 

Another screenshot from early in development

What about operational efficiency?  The MACPE manages to be proof-of-concept and is capable of carrying other light ships such as the cargo container designed for it, but demonstrates control issues as the weight of the second vessel is destabilizing and causes the ship to spin ventrally (exacerbated by extreme weight such as Large Ship blocks).  While it is capable of carrying other ships and performing pick-up/drop-off maneuvers, these flaws make it questionable as to the efficiency of such measures. 

One area which showed great promise was not in the MACPE itself, but in the cargo container.  When fitted with a Mass Block, the container was able to be dropped short distances to land safely on landing pads (without damaging either the pad or the container).  This opens the door for rapid deployment of wheeled attack vehicles or even for applications as a bomber.

Cargo Container Prototype

In summation, the MACPE is everything you'd expect in a prototype design: she demonstrates an effective proof-of-concept without actually performing the task effectively, and has a number of design flaws which should be correctable given some simple adjustments.  But, the ship looks great and when not weighted by cargo the design demonstrates excellent maneuverability for its weight.  The MACPE design, if perfected, could be very helpful.  To view the full video of the test flights, click here. 

Future applications of the detachable cargo pods would be that of mining ships.  Consider, constructing a mining vessel which uses the conveyor system to dump everything it mines directly into the detachable container.  Players could bring these containers back to base, set them to unload into their refinery, then take an empty container out and continue mining while their previous cargo is being emptied into a refinery. If this can be done using less weight and fewer resources than just bringing a refinery with you (which it should!) then this could be a viable build strategy for survival games. 

Special thanks go to Arron of Last Stand Gamers and SAGE, whose Youtube channels have been the inspiration for me to get into Space Engineers and start writing this stuff down.

Blogging because... REASONS!

Hello!  This blog has been set up as a place for me to record the process I go through when building ships for the game Space Engineers.  Ideally it will be a place I can go to and see what worked, what didn't, and what other people think will work more effectively.  The goal is to create a forum to debate design philosophy and see if any consensus can be reached on the variety of topics relating to ship design and combat in S.E. 

For example:

• Is heavy armor effective on small ships, and if so how much?
• Is there an ideal thrust-per-mass ratio in designing ships, and does it vary depending upon the size or role of the ship?
• What are the ideal armaments for fighters?  Should rockets be mainly used for striking heavier targets?
• What design concepts work and which don't but are worth it just for the sheer fun value of doing it?
  

Some of the initial questions this blog will answer, via methods which are as empirical and scientific as Mythbusters (experiments and explosions!), will be:

• Does armor between components significantly reduce damage to adjacent systems?
• Do different armor configurations have superior protective qualities?
• Can SAGE's gravity container technology be used (in conjunction with mass blocks) to hold torpedoes in their tubes (without touching the sides or producing premature detonation) prior to launch?  And used again as a firing mechanism to launch these weapons?  
• Can constructed weapon systems (i.e. inertial torpedoes or similar) overcome the effects of Gatling turrets to remain effective, and if so how many Gatling turrets are required to provide an adequate defensive screen against attack?  Can constructed weapon systems demonstrate a level of cost-efficacy which is competitive with current weapon systems?
• Can the conveyor system be combined with gravity propulsion to form an effective weapon?
  

For those of you wondering about the name, Avernus Laboratories is the fictional (copyrighted) villain of a table-top RPG source book which I am currently writing for use with the Savage Worlds RPG system.  They are an utterly amoral agency whose research and experimentation frequently pushes the boundaries of human scientific understanding and show no regard for proper ethical conduct in their quest for knowledge.  The ends justify the means, after all.  Of course, none of the research or prototyping done in Space Engineers will be of the deeply unethical kind (at least not the parts I tell you about!).


Now, let's get out there and build something!