Personal Build Challenges you give yourself?

[StormWing0]

Name some of the challenges you give yourselves on occasion when building ships, stations, turrets, etc.

What are the details of the challenge and what name would you give it if it needed one?



Here's one of mine:

Name: One Ship, A Million Parts
This is a challenge and research into docked gear like armor, weapons, and other handy things for the most part. The idea is to make a ship that can make use of a variety of dockable gear and the core ship is still flight and combat worthy as is if needed.

The Core ship mass can be: 25%, 50%, or 75% of the total mass.
The Combine mass of the docked parts can be: 25%, 50%, or 75% of the total mass.

Bonus Challenge: the docked parts can be undocked and used as drones.
Hard Mode Challenge: Build a micro shipyard that contains most of your many parts that can be docked to your ship to let you quickly change out parts as needed for different situations. To make this harder still design it to work with many different ship cores and their parts. Even harder is making the parts compatible with as many ship-types as possible.

OK now what are your people's Personal Challenges.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Personal Challenge:
Make it look pretty

 

[HorribleHedgehog]

What ^ said

 

[Master_Artificer]

What ^ said

I am not a carrot

 

[HorribleHedgehog]

shush now carrots don't talk

 

[Kingofanime]

To make the ultimate ship interior. I have a 9 deck giant chunk of interior. I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to building a ship around it.

 

[Lukwan]

I built my fleet carrier on a 45 degree angle to explore what design elements would be made possible. This allowed mounting turrets on the 'slope' faces of the ship and design details that were impossible with a 'normal' orientation.

Lukwan's_Fleet_Submission_1

Call it a 45 degree challenge. Very tricky build-mode view and no symmetry short-cuts.

 

[Master_Artificer]

shush now carrots don't talk

 

[jayman38]

Star Trek-like ship with a hanger big enough for at least one Isanth and enough stairwells for multiple floors: The Theatrical
A ship that looks very much like what Arthur C. Clarke described, with heat radiators and a reactor-looking block element in the aft of the ship: The Clarke Explorer
A really fun-to-fly little "Snark Speedster", complete with rotating VTOL thrusters, straight out of Space Quest: The Aluminum Mallard
A Star Wars ship with plenty of fun RP spaces, and two matching telescoping ramps compressed into relatively small mirrored airlock areas: The YT1930 Light Freighter (J Series)

 

[AtraUnam]

Personal build challenge, actually build something.

 

[Edymnion]

Trying to start playing again after several months of hiatus (I've been naughty, playing Skyrim again), coming up with new general themes (actually returning to my old favorite evil overlord theme, black/red/lava power), and fighting the installation to get everything back up and running properly.

Going to look around for a new server, see about setting up shop again somewhere. Start building a fleet again, focused on looking awesome.

 

[The_Owl]

Make it have something using rails that is for aesthetics.

 

[Edymnion]

Although frankly right now I'm just proud of myself for having a fully automated drone miner. Right down to it automatically de-activating the auto-pull on the main ship cargo on docking so that the base auto-pull can take over and empty it out, then having the ship auto-pull re-engage as soon as it undocks.

I guess besides making stuff look cool, my challenge to myself is to automate as much of the game as I can.

 

[Calhoun]

Make something that doesn't suck.

 

[Zekester81]

I told myself I was going to build a shipyard/production colony. I got stuck. I haven't tried after some of the recent updates but it took 20 some minutes to save the structure the last time, I thought it had just locked up. 12 million blocks, large amounts of docking, and at only half done might be asking too much at the moment. It's still sitting waiting to be finished, taunting me. I'm afraid I may have to radically alter the design to make it small enough to be saved and not game-crashingly huge. I was in the middle of making the cargo control system to support the already completed factory and shipyards. I want all of it as automated as I can get but still require real workers in (very) small numbers.

Automation is always a requirement if I build big enough to support it. Automating things in this game fascinates me endlessly.

 

[Tamren Shade]

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to make turrets that have enough firepower to be effective, are compact enough to mount a large number on the ship I'm working on, AND look good.

In more general terms, I was rewatching Raiben's "We all have to start somewhere" , and I want to go from being a solid Tier 3 Builder and push my next ship to Tier 4 Quality.

 

[Edymnion]

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to make turrets that have enough firepower to be effective, are compact enough to mount a large number on the ship I'm working on, AND look good.

My suggestion for that is Missile/Cannon/Overdrive. Just be sure your main ship has lots of power generation, because they're going to drink it down like water when they all start firing, but damn are they going to punch above their weight class.

 

[KiloZulu]

Creation of a logic system to automate production of everything. I managed to get most of the system completed once, but a server reset wiped it out. That system had an activation button for each item in game, so I had rows of buttons. For stuff like hull I was able to save room by combining the buttons - so there wasn't an individual button for every color and shape. Rather, you had a set of buttons for color, another set for hull type, and a third set for hull shape. All of the raw materials were pulled from a central storage location.

With so many options, the logic connections were complex and sprawling. It was a great way to quickly produce all of the materials needed for a particular ship build, however. My friends and I could just go down the list of needed items for a ship, flipping switches to start production, and go off to work on other projects for a while. I also set up banks of factory enhancers that you could quickly add to a particular factory so you could adjust output for an item fairly painlessly.

The system pays off in convenience once it's setup, but actually getting to the point of it being useful is rather tedious.

I'd also like to create an easily exportable landing system for shuttles and fighters. I'm not sure if that's a personal challenge or personally challenging, but I'd love to have an elegant system wherein drones would approach a shuttle bay and be routed to the nearest open landing pad. I'm not sure how much of the problem is created by me, and what is caused by the lack of AI, but I get drones trying to stack up on the same pad and stuff that just throws every system I build into chaos.

I can't think of any other personal challenges I have for myself in the game, but rather things I find personally challenging.