Port Vandermier - progressive shipyard build

[DeepspaceMechanic]

Hmmm now that I think about it, 194M with docked versus 1M without docked doesn't seem right. There's a dot in there that I mistook as a comma.... here's the screenshot of the info...

Perhaps it means that the rail is an ADDITIONAL 194k? Not sure. Anyway, there's the current stats.

The computer gets laggy if I set up shadows to full, and block resolution to really high, and when I first spawn in while it loads, but when it's in and loaded it performs pretty much the same as it does without the station. I suspect that I'll need to prune some NPCs soon... or I'll just respawn the station into a new universe and start with base NPC ship counts again...

It also lags like hell when I'm pasting a huge chunk of the station, but I've counteracted that by turning off the block preview option under graphics and just carefully counting the paste-in point (plus a little bit of trial and error paste undo).

I'd just like to share a little info on this, there are situations in which it can be useful to be clear about those numbers.

- The first value in the stats window indicates the mass of the main structure only, the second is the block-count of also the main structure only, and the third is the total mass (of the main structure + the total mass of everything docked onto it at the moment).

- The fact that *sometimes* the mass value is given with 3 decimals of "accuracy" can be a source of confusion (or of annoyance for people with the kind of OCD that i have).

- The "total with rail" number is a good reference to know what value one has to achieve in the "Rail Mass Enhancer System" part of the Entity Structure Menu, otherwise we have to keep notes of the individual masses of our docked entities and their numbers (like i used to).

- The "mass" unit in starmade actually seems to be around 3 metric tons based on the only in-game material with an unambiguous universal density, the water block (which is 1 cubic meter and should be 1 metric ton, but instead it's 0.3 on the starmade mass scale, so everything has to be multiplied by about 3 to get a value in metric tons - this makes the player character about 300 kg, but who knows, let's blame it on an imaginary spacesuit)

- Also, the Navigation Menu (and i think the Blueprint Catalog too) makes a funny mistake with how mass is displayed - my best guess is that it takes the total BLOCK-COUNT of main structure + all docked entities (which is not displayed anywhere else, as far as i know), and converts it to a mass number which is usually higher than the actual total mass.


PS, sorry, i realize this was a little too lengthy for sort of an off-topic post, but the OCD kicked in again


EDIT: i got it wrong, i double-checked and the water block is actually 0.03 not 0.3, so everything just broke down into total chaos from the previous semi-believable state.

 

[Drybreeze]

Thankyou that's very helpful.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Okay, HOW have I NEVER seen this thread until now?

...

wow. Just, wow. The sheer amount of detail going into the shipyard, along with all the other assets, is astounding. I like the Messis engineering ship too.
The RP direction is also pretty neat, and really adds to the overall experience.

I wish you luck in continuing the project.

Because you don't pay attention to the Shipyard threads m8.

 

[Drybreeze]

Last night's effort was re-attaching all the turrets to the top of the Spine Modules, as well as a little bit of aesthetic work on the top surface of the same modules, and finally filled the Hanger Module's tower with further fluid cycling tanks which contain shield chargers, bringing the charge rate up to about 105 seconds to fully charge the 44.5M shields from zero. Remember that the shields will both have more charge and more capacity once the opposite side modules are installed. Also there is a lot of space in all modules which I intend to line in a more standard "just under the skin" method... so yeah she'll be a pretty tough old bird when she's built.

I still have a little greeble to do plus painting - each module will be numbered in a way that makes visual navigation (of fighters, etc) much easier.

Each Spine Module has 1x Sagitta Class LRC with total dome coverage, 2x Incise Class Puslar turrets with close to full dome coverage, and 16x Aegis Class MkII turrets with similar coverage to the Incise... giving the spine of this shipyard excellent coverage, even though the weapons themselves are comparatively weak compared to military vessels.

You can see here where Spine Module #2 has the Sagitta's fissionable munitions tank docked, while the other modules have a socket under the armour awning waiting for their munitions to be docked. These tanks are purely RP... they add nothing to any systems on the ship. I could fill them with power modules I suppose but Port Vandermier already has ridiculous power generation, so it would just be adding rain to a flood.

Shadow-side view of the top modules after all munitions tanks docked...

 

[JinM]

The spotlights are being mounted currently... the ones that are already mounted are active. They'll be toggled by wifi modules which I'll have to hook up on each pair - that makes a total of 60 manual wifi-connections for just these lights... sigh.

Hey attention good sir: If you respawn that station via blueprint the remote wifi connections might be resetted. I would strongly suggest you try that out. I don't know if this is still an issue.

 

[Drybreeze]

Thanks for the heads up... that could have been ... disappointing.
As it turns out, they all work fine... but again thanks so I could check before it became a disaster.

Here's a couple of pics of the aesthetic thingie I did with the Spine Modules - realised I didn't post up-to-date pics of it.

Used slabs to smooth out the curve on the wings...

There's a stack of grey shades in the toolbox which is nice, although I will be painting over a lot of it later towards the end of the build...

 

[JinM]

Try it out in a new world or even a server mate...

 

[Drybreeze]

Try it out in a new world or even a server mate...

I opened it up in a new world, and hit the normal "overall toggle" switch that I've got currently connected to all (I'll bury it in a control tower later in the build)... and sure enough...

One lousy panel doesn't work. That's easy enough to connect - I can even build in some display modules next to the wifi blocks that make it possible for a player spawning the station in for the first time to know what to connect to what to make it all function...

HOWEVER, this would become a very laborious task for all those spotlights in the Spine Modules... so I will abandon the idea of having them all wifi and simply face them all downwards, since the effect is very subtle anyway, and so not worth the hassle of having to manually connect 3 or 10 or whatever of them up if they spawn in scrambled....

Close up of wifi-enabled slightly angled lights.

Overview of wifi-enabled slightly angled lights.

Hard-wired solid downward facing spotlights (will require a logic line to be hidden in the orange and white arms of the docked diagonal spotlight modules you can see in the bottom right of the image, but that's easy enough to achieve).

Overview of the non-wifi-enabled hardwired downward-facing spotlights. Background spotlights are the wifi-enabled diagonal ones... there's little difference to justify the potentially huge effort involved in re-connecting wifi for a user spawning it in if the wifi scrambles.

At least with the side modules there's four at most per module to re-connect if they ALL go haywire, which I suspect is highly unlikely. Only 1 in 20 went wrong in the above example when I spawned it in.

So you've saved both me AND whoever chooses to download this station when it's released a metric butt-tonne of work! So thank you very much, JinM.... very useful information.

 

[JinM]

No hassle man. =) I had often simmilar issues, and am happy to help

I think this is an awesome station, so it would really hurt me if it had some unforeseeable construction downsides. (Seriously nice work, finish it fast :D )

Keep in mind, that every connected entity increases the load of your station as well: block collision and having a seperate chunk count loaded inside a stations entities chunk. And atm. we have this problem, that something can undock if an error happens in a sector. Last time I played on Genxnova - and if you don't know, the admin there is very caring and looks out for bugs and error prone entities - some dude jumped to my sector, and his ship had a big turret, that undocked some time later, not by him but by some server side error. The turret was so huge and very deeply sunken in, that it totally wrecked my station by making so much lag that it saved my sector wrong, undocked all the entities that were docked to my station, and gave it huge chunk errors. Thankfully the admin fixed all our stuff - but all the other popular servers like Brierie and Systemhack don't have this service to this day. The point of this thing is: the more entities you have that are docked, the more error prone you station becomes, and it might be less usable on popular servers. I think and hope this paragraph will soon be obsolote if Starmade gets less bugs, but I am not sure if this is some small bug that will be easily fixed.

I have to add, that I make modular entity parts for my station at this moment too. It is some dockable port extender, that has a repeatable pattern. So imagine a pipe with USDs on it, and if you need more space you let your shipyard build one more and dock it at itsself. But I know, that it can cause problems as soon as only one of the extenders undocks. Still, I am willing to life with that and choose the functionality and immersion I get from this over the bug-immunity, because after all its a game and I do construct in the first place for the constructions sake, and the fun I have with stuff that I like to happen as mechanic, and not for the peoples demands sake. =)

 

[Drybreeze]

All very valuable advice for a newbie like me. Thankyou very much. I will limit the docked entities.

I will also be creating and publishing turret racks that can be spawned in or shipyard built which can be positioned next to a part of the shipyard and allow me and any user of the station to rapidly undock a turret from the rack, dock it to the station, fly back to the rack a few meters away, get the next turret and so on. I've already done this with the Aegis and it's saved me SO much time mounting turrets it's insane. I can mount every single turret on the top of the station in about 35 minutes... that's 80 Aegis, 10 Incise and 5 Sagitta... most of that time is astronaut flying to the rack of turrets.

With the new racks I will produce I'll be able to mount every single turret on each Spine Module's top side in about 3 minutes flat. Maybe less if I give the rack a much greater set of thrusters to move it from spawn point to deploy point faster.

 

[wizerdwolf]

Close up of wifi-enabled slightly angled lights.

Overview of wifi-enabled slightly angled lights.

Hey, how did you get those lights slightly angled? Did you use a turret axis instead of a rotation block?

 

[Drybreeze]

Yes exactly. Same way the lower spotlight arms are all on angles other than 0, 45, or 90.

 

[Drybreeze]

This evening's effort was focused mainly on finishing up inside the Spine Modules to back up the new hard-wired spotlights, and fill in under the armour with some more greeble, systems and things...

Armour skirting completed on the edges of the module and on the underside around the lights, encapsulating and protecting the area within.

I think I like the sort of half-open look to it, rather than trying to fill everything in to a complete external skin with a solidly filled volume. I know it will decrease the occlusion and therefore decrease frame-rate, but my laptop is performing reasonably well so far, and it aint like there's gonna ever be a zillion Port Vandermier's floating around in your sector at any one time... so I might keep it like this unless I run into trouble later... I feel it adds depth and realism to the station.

Beneath the skin isn't QUITE finished, although it's pretty close now. I've added the power lines to each individual light (I'll bury the actual logic lines within them soon), as well as filled under the skin with a few carefully placed systems for optimum results.

Some effort went into ensuring the cables running to the spotlights looked like they were being bundled and then fed into a section at the top of the outer wings of the modules. The systems you can see in the background will be hidden within the walls soon, I just ran out of time to do that this evening before posting an update. Plus I wanted to demonstrate how I've installed the systems in the walls before covering them up...

The section of the module above the plasma cycling units (which contain shield rechargers) is now filled with a volume approximately 3 to 4 deep of shield capacitors... it varies due to the curve of the module's armour skin of course... This section adds a further 2.5 million to the overall shield capacity of the station, so when all five Spine Modules have this installed the station will add a further 12.5 million to it's already predicted 63 million total shields... bringing the expected total to somewhere around 75.5 million shields. The problem now is in fact that the power output can't keep up with the shield chargers if the shield gets knocked out, so it's only charging at about 30% speed... I need to install more power generator chains.

This shows how I've run a double-chain of power generators around the perimeter of the underside of the skin... all the way from one side, around the outer most edge of the module, and then back in a mirror loop to the other side... At the moment I have them break in the middle, however I will connect them up in the middle so that they run around the entire perimeter of each Spine Module, maximising their efficiency (without interfering with the RP stuff inside the module's volume). Not THE most efficient method of generating power, but it's a lot better than a chunk of short chains tucked away in some corner somewhere...

This image shows how the power generator chains, shield generators, and shield capacitors are stowed in each Spine Module... approximately.

Note the break in the power chains currently. By closing that break it more than doubles one of the dimensions of the over-all power chain bead, which as you know means that the output for that single power generator chain is much greater than two chains as shown above. That's for tomorrow... along with filling over the systems with RP surfaces and greeble, and then finally I can move on to producing the opposite side's Side Modules and having the overall structure of the shipyard reach a completed state.

 

[AWildSylveon]

Very Good and Very creative, Will be interesting to see the finished results here soon once it is done.

 

[JinM]

If you like to, you can turn off "draw logic connection lines" in the graphic settings. Even though 80% of players have them activated.

All my builds are without consideration of the logic connection lines. They look ofcourse messy for everyone who has them activated. I think a future where I can use jump drives and lazors, and scan whole systems, but easy logic stuff still needs wires instead of wireless connections is not the setting I choose. Maybe we can set a trend here. :D

 

[wizerdwolf]

If you like to, you can turn off "draw logic connection lines" in the graphic settings. Even though 80% of players have them activated.

All my builds are without consideration of the logic connection lines. They look ofcourse messy for everyone who has them activated. I think a future where I can use jump drives and lazors, and scan whole systems, but easy logic stuff still needs wires instead of wireless connections is not the setting I choose. Maybe we can set a trend here. :D

I know personally I've considered turning it off before, but I decided to leave it on, as seeing the lines makes it easier to more quickly judge what's connected to what. These lines /can/ even be used as part of the aesthetics of the ship, though I personally haven't done this before. I haven't had any issues just routing the lines out of the way.

 

[JinM]

I know personally I've considered turning it off before, but I decided to leave it on, as seeing the lines makes it easier to more quickly judge what's connected to what. These lines /can/ even be used as part of the aesthetics of the ship, though I personally haven't done this before. I haven't had any issues just routing the lines out of the way.

Yeah I had issues. I have some really small buildings with some logic. And I am just very time focused, I allways think: ok I can reroute that ugly stuff that has no practical use for me or I just turn it off and save big time. And I think the lines take more than give me in terms of aesthetic or feeling. And if I really loose overview I turn them on once in a while - doesn't happen so much because I try to place my stuff in certain patterns.

 

[Drybreeze]

Very Good and Very creative, Will be interesting to see the finished results here soon once it is done.

Thanks Sylveon. Unlike many creative and especially large projects, I'm finding that I have more and more motivation to finish as time goes on. Often on large projects it is easy to lose momentum as you get bogged down in the mundane processes.

With this project I am finding a lot of creative satisfaction in the details. ..always something new to be building on it.

If you like to, you can turn off "draw logic connection lines" in the graphic settings. Even though 80% of players have them activated.

All my builds are without consideration of the logic connection lines. They look ofcourse messy for everyone who has them activated. I think a future where I can use jump drives and lazors, and scan whole systems, but easy logic stuff still needs wires instead of wireless connections is not the setting I choose. Maybe we can set a trend here. :D

I did briefly consider this and have seen the results of builds where people have turned it off. I suppose it makes sense that they're a building visualisation tool rather than physically visible in game.

But the last thing I want to do is either force players to do one thing or another (like switch off logic lines) when using my content, or have folks feel I took a shortcut. I would feel dirty and cheap and disappointed in myself if I did that. I should point out I don't mind if other people do it, but it's not for me I think. Thankyou for the suggestion though.

I know personally I've considered turning it off before, but I decided to leave it on, as seeing the lines makes it easier to more quickly judge what's connected to what. These lines /can/ even be used as part of the aesthetics of the ship, though I personally haven't done this before. I haven't had any issues just routing the lines out of the way.

I frequently trace along lines in build mode to find the blocks in a button relay chain for example. That's usually how I run lines within hidden surfaces. .. I connect strings of buttons where each button is like a pylon in a power line. .. in this way I can very specifically control where each line of logic runs. Your logic fires a signal to one end of the string (even as an output from some logic process like a clock) and all buttons in the string fire up and then off in that string simultaneously...

This is how I run power behind walls and then feed them through the little passage between modules and so on. You can find examples of this where I've run logic lines from the Con Tower of Messis to doors and linked switches etc.

It takes a bit of time but it's easy enough and I think the results are worth it for players that don't switch off logic lines in their graphics options.

 

[kikaha]

Hi !
I read this thread like a sci-fi novel. Love it. More, i need more !
I'm going to try and reach at least your ankle in my builds.

Idea for your angled lights. Maybe you could build a plateform onto your 6 spots would be. That way you have only the plateform to move an wifi link.

Anyway, thanks so much for creating this station.

 

[Drybreeze]

Hi !
I read this thread like a sci-fi novel. Love it. More, i need more !
I'm going to try and reach at least your ankle in my builds.

Idea for your angled lights. Maybe you could build a plateform onto your 6 spots would be. That way you have only the plateform to move an wifi link.

Anyway, thanks so much for creating this station.

Haha my ankle... yer awesome thank you
Yes I did consider the single platform per side or even per module, but in the end I figured that the effect was too subtle to be worth the effort.
Also, I was scratching my head how to make the spotlights connect to the Spine Module physically (ie: power cords). I could have explained it away with some internal nuclear generator or sth but I think I like the bigass power cords better... I'm a fan of greeble and "bits that look functional" on this kind of build.

Thanks very much for reading, I really stoked that people are getting something out of this, it really adds to my enjoyment of building it. I'm hoping that once it's finished it will be used in other people's universes to give their station collection a bit of an addition. I'm already considering the next few projects, but I want to make sure I don't hop from this to another, to keep up momentum. One at a time. I satisfy my "content release" bug by releasing a few small things from time to time... the next one coming is the Sentry Drone that will dock to the underside of each Spine Module.

I've just updated the first post in the thread, which I intend to have as a (reasonably) up to date progress report for any new readers, and also to give anyone a really quick easy way to find anything in particular they're after such as a particular video or content link.