- Game version
- v0.202.108
I just came back to this game after not playing it since 2015-ish? This is the first ship I've made since being back. I went a bit overboard with rails, so if you like silly rail contraptions, I got you covered.
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Just because it's the final frontier doesn't mean you can't travel in style.
Tauren Interstellar makes its debut in the galactic market with its first ship, the TI Callisto. Just over a hundred meters in length, the Callisto is a luxury exploration vessel with ample interior space, ruggedized hardware, and refined styling that harkens back to spaceliners of old. The ship's 4.0 thrust-to-weight ratio makes it ideal for exploring planets, and its multi-mode landing gear and VTOL engines give it the ability to land almost anywhere.
The designers here at Tauren Interstellar think that big, obvious weaponry is a bit gauche, especially for a classy vessel like the Callisto. That doesn't mean the ship is defenseless, though - it features two large beam weapons, tastefully tucked underneath the hydrogen intakes, that are capable of destroying small fighters in one or two shots. For additional defensive power, the hatches under the bridge and over the rear starboard arm hide retractible turrets, which will automatically deploy if shields drop below 100%.
As we all know, it's hard to design detailed interiors with cubic-meter blocks. Here at Tauren Interstellar, we use advanced static rail techniques to circumvent these limitations. We also use rail doors in place of plexdoors, because we hate plexdoors. We might have gone a little overboard with the rails when we designed the Callisto - it features a total of 71 docked entities.
~ ~ ~
Just because it's the final frontier doesn't mean you can't travel in style.
Tauren Interstellar makes its debut in the galactic market with its first ship, the TI Callisto. Just over a hundred meters in length, the Callisto is a luxury exploration vessel with ample interior space, ruggedized hardware, and refined styling that harkens back to spaceliners of old. The ship's 4.0 thrust-to-weight ratio makes it ideal for exploring planets, and its multi-mode landing gear and VTOL engines give it the ability to land almost anywhere.
The designers here at Tauren Interstellar think that big, obvious weaponry is a bit gauche, especially for a classy vessel like the Callisto. That doesn't mean the ship is defenseless, though - it features two large beam weapons, tastefully tucked underneath the hydrogen intakes, that are capable of destroying small fighters in one or two shots. For additional defensive power, the hatches under the bridge and over the rear starboard arm hide retractible turrets, which will automatically deploy if shields drop below 100%.
As we all know, it's hard to design detailed interiors with cubic-meter blocks. Here at Tauren Interstellar, we use advanced static rail techniques to circumvent these limitations. We also use rail doors in place of plexdoors, because we hate plexdoors. We might have gone a little overboard with the rails when we designed the Callisto - it features a total of 71 docked entities.
Yeah, the cargo lift is easily a quarter of the logic in the ship, and it's definitely finicky. It does automatically match the landing gear height when it's in automatic mode - the reason I also included manual mode is because sometimes when you land on a planet, the terrain under the center of the ship is higher than the terrain under the landing legs, so if the lift extends fully it tries to push into the ground.
The only windows that I included blast shielding for were the bedrooms - those windows just seemed really exposed and vulnerable to me, and you probably don't always want all of space to be able to see into your bedroom. I could definitely add shields for the other windows, though! It might also make sense to wire the shield sensor to the blast shields, so all the blast shields automatically close if the shields take damage.
Thanks for pointing out those missing blocks! I hadn't noticed most of them. The glass screen in front of the navigator's seat is just an unfortunate consequence of the weird rail stuff - the buttons on the diagonal screens hanging from the ceiling are counted as full blocks, and on the navigator's side one of those buttons prevents a block being placed where that glass pane should be.
I noticed the whole "falling through the ship" problem early on in the build process, but I just assumed it would fix itself when I started adding blocks underneath it (I built the interior first). I'll see if I can find any way to fix that.
As for the half-offset blocks, that's a technique I just figured out!
1 - Dock a new entity to your ship, and rotate it 45° in any plane that contains the axis you want to offset. Let's say you want to build a thing that's offset in the z plane, so you can rotate your entity in the xz or yz planes.
- Now, if you build a diagonal line on the docked entity, it becomes a vertical line on the parent entity. In particular, if you build a rotator rail one block diagonally away from the rail docker, it has the same x and y coordinates (on the parent entity) as the rail docker, but a different z coordinate. Specifically, since the blocks are diagonally positioned, the distance between them in the z direction is the square root of two, or about 1.414m.
2 - Now, dock another entity to that rotator, and rotate it 45° again. Now, the second docked entity is perfectly parallel to your ship, and its x and y axes match those of your ship, but its z axis is offset by 1.414m. The first docked entity just serves as a diagonal bridge connecting the two. You can also increase the diagonal distance between the rail docker and rotator to offset by any multiple of 1.414.
Starmade is smart enough to figure out that the two entities can mesh in the xy direction, so you can do all the normal rail stuff, like putting two wedges face-to-face or putting blocks inside spaces. That's how I made half-block diagonals in the bridge, recessed some of the screens halfway into the walls, put the toilet paper rolls between two blocks, positioned the computer in the galley, offset the armrests on the chairs in the bridge, and squeezed all those clothes into the closets. It also seems like 0.414m steps created in this way are smoother to walk up than the 0.25m stairs you can make with slabs? I might be imagining that, but that could be a cool way to make working staircases without taking up tons of space with quarter slabs.
I'll try to make a tutorial at some point! I'm not sure I have a computer that can handle making videos, but I'll see if I can find a creative solution. Thanks again for stopping by!