How cargo just happened.

[MossyStone48]

Getting up to speed.
As you know we can no longer buy something without being near a shop. With gate based FTL upon us this makes transporting raw material and produced goods to and from funded markets a challenge. Inexpensive transport vessels are now a better idea than ever. You can still keep huge volumes of raw material and production blocks in your personal inventory or a plexbox. But you can't store a completed turret or vessel. You'd have to either fly it home or dock it for transit. You can always slap down a shop mod on your base and buy ships there but then you have to deal with setting permissions and all that fun. Otherwise people will see your shop full of money and devoid of material as the perfect dumping ground for all their grey hull, tetra'd, penta'd, wedge'd, corner'd and hardened. Even then you might run low on funds for a ship and have to go far a field to find credits. FTL helps, certainly, but travel still happens and there is always the possibility of attack.


My solution (not for everyone)
On servers I don't admin on I have gotten into the habit of carrying a shopmod and 1mil plus enough creds for a small ship... just in case. Calling a shop into existance get expensive quick. To help keep costs down I've built a BP for a resupply ship. It has everything needed to refit my ship including drones, shuttle, fighter, turrets and the dockable cannon. The resupply ship itself can be easily broken down and used to patch up a ship left near derelict. It's a lot less wasteful and expensive than buying a whole new ship. If attacked the turrets are docked to legit turret docks so I can slap those online. I can even grapple my way to the fighter and engage them myself. Even if the core is destroyed the turrets are self powered and will continue to harass the attacker.

Near infinite storage is coming to an end soon. Even then plexboxes mass might start taking contents into consideration. How are you going to deal with it and stay safe?

 

[Vakna]

Personally, I'm going to be investing a huge amount of time constructing a galactic scale sprawling network of gates. At the center will be a hub of sorts, with dozens of gates leading into distant parts of deep space. I'll be hauling around mined materials in "Deuterium Tankers", with a refinery in the hub that contains a huge system of interconnected factories for producing everything my ships need.

Around each of the exit gates (ones located away from the hub) there will be some pretty heavy defensive weaponry, to deter pirates or would be scavengers from making use of my network, I intend to have the hub as one gigantic connected station, so it all benefits from the same power source and shield strength (should changes be made to homebase immunity in the future), the defensive systems around the exit gates will also be connected to each other and the gate in some manner, so they are much stronger than if they were separate entities. I'll be initially constructing the network using "seed ships", hyperdrive fitted vessels that are extremely well defended, who's sole purpose is to explore the galaxy and set up exit gates in lucrative sectors.

I intend to make my transwarp network so vast and accessible that reinforcements are literally seconds away no matter how far out my miners/haulers are from the home sector, this holds true also for transporting bigger goods that you can't store in plex containers. I also tend to build things fairly extravagantly... and big, so it's safe to assume I'll be safe from most of the pesky small pirate waves even in my haulers. If I do happen to get destroyed by some organised military fleet of a competing faction, and they also manage to destroy that sector's exit gate, I'll make sure to carry enough materials with me to build a small jump-shuttle.

 

[Zeno9141]

Isn't the possibility of attack, trade, cargo, and piracy actually exciting? I mean, if you are afraid you are going to be attacked, get an escort to defend you. Or become a pirate and set ambushes around gates to make use of the vast amounts of stuff coming through.

 

[Mikisew01]

Pirate? No such thing.....don't know what you are talking about.....never heard of them..............(walks away quietly.......)

 

[NeonSturm]

Combat:

I am looking forward to power+shield supply which does not transfer excess and then build a modular ship which splits apart when attacked.

That saves mass which otherwise is used for hangars and splits the escape-part from pure-combat parts​

Capacitors are in areas which likely get damaged and power+re-chargers in other areas to keep recharge after capacity got destroyed.

I dock a few armour plates at back which can be thrown away to distract enemy turrets and cause collision damage on somebody following me.
Probably just cores with many useless rocks around them in a diamond shape and 1 stopper beam computer + 2-3 barrels

I will always have one or two stopper/interceptor-drones with me which hinder hunters following me.​

Gates:

They will be very small and cheap.
Scout and small-cargo traders will have their core in a small area at front (will turn my back to attackers) to fit their nose through gates and jump even though they don't fit as a whole.​

Self-destruction:

Cheap drones are made to avoid most incoming attacks and to destruct themselves after they lose shield and front armour.

Everything that can't survive should at least destroy itself so that pirates won't get anything from me.​

Backup:

I will always have a few planets with hidden logic-protected chests somewhere in the big universe.
These will contain 1 reactor, 3 thrusters, salvager and -dependent on efficiency- jump modules. and enough resources for a macro assembly+core or something else (as long as you can still spawn cores and build on them)

Hidden ships are called "Planet Segment 23423462", "NullPointerException Null" or some random name which newly spawned ships get preceded by "core".

This hiddenn value kills itself if other players try to claim it.
These planets may also have a faction module somewhere on another segment built deep into ground (dependent on cost and planet location) which prevents players from going into build mode.​

 

[Saber]

This is actually something I had thought was necessary back when I first started. Not knowing that I didn't need to be near a shop, I constructed a ship specifically for hauling turrets back to my station. Then out of boredom I created an even larger vessel designed for hauling 20+ variously sized ships/turrets at a time. Needless to say it's finally become something which I'll need if I'm on a server which I'm not an admin on. It seems that the time for fleet's, or at least several escorts has finally arrived.

I think a lot of people don't notice all the ways even small changes to the game affect gameplay. Everyone is currently asking "when is FTL?" over and over, and while I'm excited for it too, I say take the time to adapt to how the game is currently changing your play, not just what's coming next. Schema is hard at work, but the game is constantly evolving, adding more and more ways for players to work together, and actually making it more necessary.

The dev team is doing a great job, and while a lot of people are impatient, I want you all to know that you're much appreciated. Keep up the good work guys!

 

[max stripe]

Combat:
Self-destruction:

Cheap drones are made to avoid most incoming attacks and to destruct themselves after they lose shield and front armour.​

most of my small ships do this
its a good idea incase sheilds drop and shots get nere the core
have the inner guts of the ship as disintagrators and the hole ship can just be exploded if it gets core spiked

 

[SkylordLuke]

oh,its going to be awesome
..anyone here played star wolves 2? if yes,you know how awesome its going to be :D

 

[Reilly Reese]

You do know you don't need a shop around you in order to spawn a ship right?

 

[max stripe]

You do know you don't need a shop around you in order to spawn a ship right?

you do in this update

 

[Reilly Reese]

Oh bout time they fixed that then.

 

[MossyStone48]

On NASS we run the DS/TS:SMDaemon so we've had a bit of time to play with FTL like situations. As it is now I plan to use my Daemon jump nodes in favor of the new FTL. Because even if the gates are not your cup of tea there are other options. I have my main base and two outlying bases both over 10 sectors away. Getting supplies from HQ and back again is easier with the nodes active. I imagine some server lag will be reduced once the gates become a regular part of game play. So I'm set. But everyone will starmade differently.

 

[Byamarro]

I would wish to let make clusters of storages. If You will connect many storages u will be able to contain many items in them but You need to click only one to access whole inventory.
If It would be ablle to attach salvages to them...

 

[MossyStone48]

The idea is already out there to have salvaged items go into storage. My hope is someday to build mining AI to clear out asteroid and debris fields. They are excellent marks for would be player pirates too. They could get away with some loot without having to attack someone specifically. We'd avoid some drama if all that got blown up were drones.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I have the feeling we will be seeing more cargo ships once the stack size gets limited.

 

[Megacrafter127]

I have the feeling we will be seeing more cargo ships once the stack size gets limited.

I already have a (currently ridiculously OP) cargo ship. I just say +20K plex storages per docked container :D

 

[ToyotaSupra]

I think this is a great idea.

In celebration of my 500 likes, have one yourself!

 

[Saber]

I have the feeling we will be seeing more cargo ships once the stack size gets limited.

I definitely agree, I have a cargo ship which actually hauls "palettes" of plexstorage, which is inaccessible from anywhere but within the ship. Players could easily build entire stations based around the idea of storing or delivering cargo. For example if a player wanted to run a shop, and they had a couple friends who wanted to gather resources, their friends could be out in the galaxy salvaging and buying blocks from shops they find then storing them in a warehouse station somewhere. I don't know if astronauts can go through warp gates or not, but the shop owner could check the "back room" for stuff by going through a warp gate, which puts them in that warehouse station.

There's all kinds of crazy things that can come from this if players want it to. It doesn't just have to be "oh now I have to go to a shop any time I need to buy something. As the game evolves, our game play needs to evolve with it.

 

[MossyStone48]

How about a warp-elevator or wrap-car? just a small vehicle to get through a small gate to go grab supplies at the warehouse/depot.

 

[Byamarro]

The idea is already out there to have salvaged items go into storage. My hope is someday to build mining AI to clear out asteroid and debris fields. They are excellent marks for would be player pirates too. They could get away with some loot without having to attack someone specifically. We'd avoid some drama if all that got blown up were drones.

I was already thinking about mining drones before too... So epic...