The Removal of Attachment Plates

[Kodey]

There's a dev response to this, and this is currently the most updated one. Keep in mind, I've had to change a few things in this post, but it's otherwise the same.

Earlier today, the devs announced that they were removing attachment plates.

While I wanted to make this big post about it, I realized that I wouldn't be the best to post something like that. However, I did see a few things that did stand out to me.

I don't think having X ship justifies removing heretical ships, and after seeing this, I wanted to make a very quick post that shows off some of the designs the community has come up with, which I’ve posted as Imgur galleries.

Vintage:

http://imgur.com/a/GWBHwOT

Nomads:

http://imgur.com/a/e3YHKIP

Tactical:

http://imgur.com/a/gQI0jvp

Beatbreaker's Ships:

http://imgur.com/a/dsFo9Vq

And here are some of my designs

http://imgur.com/a/ePgj2li

Removing attachment plates would make a lot of these ships impossible, especially Varick's and my ships, and to make this easier to see, I’ll be releasing a lot of my Blueprints for people to see. You're free to distribute these, as long as you give credit to me. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JpJu6EnFLO0a9vjmKDnZT4W-DnRAoZf_?usp=sharing

Original Message by DerPfandadler#0001
"Alrighty
Attachment plates are cool and broken. But mostly cool
I'll divide this into two topics. First plates and then beams separately as they are two totally different stories.
So. Plates...
Attachment plates make it EASIER to connect plates to each other directly as you can use attachment plates to get points to put bolts into without having to add additional plates or beams. The attachment plates themselves however are not what is taking the stress/structural impact or whatever you want to call it. They are just allowing you to connect one part to another putting the load onto the parts themselves.
Attachment plates keep a low profile but not as low as other methods that exist to achieve the same exact thing. Like.... placing bolts from inside the plate. If we had plate welding we wouldn't need the inherently broken attachment plates for them, we wouldn't have to emulate plate welding by placing bolts from inside of plates anymore and everyone would be happy when it comes to plates AS LONG as it gives us enough freedom. The area required and the max distance for a weld should be relatively lenient.
Beams...
Beams are in a tough place. We do not have enough variety to make a lot of more complex shapes work without leaving gaps that have to be closed with attachment plates or adding ginormous beams destroying the shape. If attachment plates could only be bolted into beams everyone would be happy on the beam side. I know that this means a investment in development that you wanted to avoid. but if you are going to remove attachment plates take all beams that can cause gaps with them as well as they won't be properly usable anymore to anyone who isn't willing to mess around with moving around beams without snapping and finding a place where they will weld....

I just can't wrap my head around how Attachment plates have to be fixed -> we don't want to spend time on that -> let's remove them -> how do we connect beams that don't line up perfectly now? -> let's invest time into finding a solution for that instead of just making attachment plates work for this exact problem and nothing else and just be done with it makes any sense to you.

It shouldn't be impossible to make attachment plates structurally invalid when they are connected to anything that isn't a beam until you have a better solution. Right?"

Note: Removed "considering" since it wasn't clarified, it's a hard fact. And added a message from Pfand

 

[Saltylelele]

Precisely this. removing them is just a terrible idea.

 

[Walord]

bad idea until we have an alternative

 

[SubaruSama]

well, they were nice to have, but after welding became a thing I haven't really used them except for keeping some free form plating and such stuff in place
some kind of replacement would be nice, but not a 100% necessity in my opinion
also if they remove them before EA or shortly after EA so that only a part of the alpha population has gotten used to them, the vast majority wouldn't even miss them and would have always build without them

 

[Walord]

well, they were nice to have, but after welding became a thing I haven't really used them except for keeping some free form plating and such stuff in place
some kind of replacement would be nice, but not a 100% necessity in my opinion
also if they remove them before EA or shortly after EA so that only a part of the alpha population has gotten used to them, the vast majority wouldn't even miss them and would have always build without them

but they were really nice to show off the extent of what you could build in starbase, and sucks to not have them in EA to show to new people

 

[SpacePanda1000]

Imo YES we dont NEED them anymore to build ships but like you also dont need decoratives blocks to build ships uk. Even if we not rly need them they are still good to have for all the creative options they allow us to do. Like you can angle weld beams if its like a chain intertwined in each other but with attachment plates you can make the same thing a lot smoother and with less space use. If you look at my collection (beatbreaker) like the UFO I wouldnt have rly managed to make it without the attachment plates there, at least not with that little space :/ And if they take them from us i tbh would prefer a real welding tool more like that uses hot metal for example so you can fill these gaps on a corner with voxels and then they are together (ofcourse just rly with a 12 cm radius or smt) But idk is probably hard to implement though ppl were talking about "uhh they can just add new stuff ect blablabla" but what says that this new stuff wont be exploitable either? Wouldnt it be better to go on with what we have. like for me attachment plates were never the issue in SB :3

 

[Mutleyx]

I can understand why FB would want to remove them, but I think we'd need to be given tools to make our regular ships work when they are gone. The current "replace all beam bolting" simply does not work well enough to suffice. Out of interest, I did a survey of my ships attachment use:

Ship            | Attachment    | Critical?
                | plate count   |
-------------------------------------------
Bumble          |  234          |  Yes
Buzzard         |  8            |  No
Dragonfly       |  41           |  Yes
Keg             |  0            |  -
LotPress        |  0            |  -
Midge           |  51           |  Yes
Mosquito        |  138          |  Yes
RockHopper      |  0            |  -
StarBream       |  1            |  No
StarBreamCLF    |  1            |  No
Talon           |  1695         |  Yes
TriFin          |  0            |  -

So I feel if FB are going to remove them, we should at least be given some advanced warning, to give us time to transition away from using them, and the tools to help make that happen.

 

[JoelFB]

We are preparing a more informative post about this (and already were before all of this happened in Discord). It should answer many of these questions and concerns, just might take a while longer as we were not planning to announce this so suddenly. So hold tight, more info coming.

 

[Saltylelele]

We are preparing a more informative post about this (and already were before all of this happened in Discord). It should answer many of these questions and concerns, just might take a while longer as we were not planning to announce this so suddenly. So hold tight, more info coming.

I do assume this is jsut like the rest done before EA?

 

[Cavilier210]

I honestly support getting rid of them. Less rendered objects is better for performance.

 

[Kap]

I can understand why you want them gone.

They were for attaching beams together. Then we requested beam welding over and over until we got it, and it was great! It is great. Building a frame became much, much easier. Gone were the days of having to carefully build your frame using corner pieces, intersections and all of that. (I barely even use those beams anymore except for some extremely cursed stuff)

So, really, we don't need attachment plates anymore, they are a remnant of the past.

But wait.
Because that's only half the story.

I see a lot of people essentially saying what can be boiled down to "Well, I don't use attachment plates anymore on my ships, so neither should you!" or "None of the ship shop ships uses attachment plates" or "We don't use Attachment plates at OKI", the list goes on.

I use attachment plates for the following:

1. Frames that are not possible to do with welding. (Sure, I can find you cases you can't just slap a 'side-weld' on, at least not without blowing the ship up (a lot) in size)
2. As a bandaid for fixing mistakes in my frame.
3. As a bandaid for attaching plates to other plates, or devices to whatever.
4. For forcing specific bolt-lengths.
5. Cool hinge-doors.

Removing them now, if you are going to remove them 100%, is the right call. You can't remove them a month into EA, if you think today's drama was spectacular, wait until you do that..

But it just feels like such a slap in the face to remove something that some of our stuff depends on, without introducing something that fills the void that deleting attachment plates will create..

Ok so wtf should you do? Good question, some ideas, some good some bad:

1. You can fix stress/durability instead, the root of the issue. (I can attach 2 engine pods of 60 box thrusters and 400 crates each, and hold them together with a 384cm beam for instance (WHAT???).
2. You can severely limit attachment plate count, so we still get to use it for a little bit, but the big exploity stuff is gone. (mostly)
3. You can give us custom beams(KSP Procedural Wings), down to 1cm increments. (A worse (really bad) version of that is beams in length 1cm.. 3cm.. ... 23cm..)
4. You can make welding tool more lenient.
5. You can give us plate-to-plate welding (superglue? lol)

I'll end this by saying that Starbase, for many of us, is a one big ship building sandbox, and then there's an mmo ontop of that, cool I guess.
I'd rather not see AP's straight up removed rather than changed, but if you absolutely want them gone, now is right time. I just pray that you will in time give us back tools that do for us what AP's do today..

 

[Cavilier210]

Kodey, I don't think your poll is fair by the way. An alternative or keeping them are two different things. Its manipulation to lump them together.

 

[Kodey]

Kodey, I don't think your poll is fair by the way. An alternative or keeping them are two different things. Its manipulation to lump them together.

I’ll keep that in mind.

Your words have been heard http://www.strawpoll.me/45355996

 

[MoonSet416]

Plot twist: ducts now have the function of the removed attachment plates
jk

srsly tho unless there is a new system that completely replaces the function of attachment plates (so both joining beams that are a bit off AND joining parts) there should not be any change at all. And this isn't even taking into account the countless hours of work players put into existing ships.

On the other hand, if something with this much impact on existing ships has to happen tho, now is the last chance to do it. If old ships keep getting intentionally broken after EA honestly that just becomes disrespectful to the time and effort of ship builders.

 

[Sirisian]

I wrote about my support for removing them in Discord, but I think I should summarize my thoughts here. I've made suggestion posts in the past about beam gaps. Specifically I mentioned creating automatic shims for situations where beams align on a plane with a gap between them. This creates an elegant solution for a number of cases. Even back then it seemed clear that attachment plates weren't a real solution and looked bad. I've written suggestions about increasing beam angle choices. This doesn't solve all the situations in designs, but it does handle ships with gradual beam angle changes. (Would still maybe need beams that are not on a plane).

Now that we have ducts running along beams it makes a lot more sense that the game should focus on beams that connect to one another. Ideally ducts should be able to traverse any beam structure later elegantly. Having gaps with attachment plates wouldn't fit into that.

For reference, I only had 4 attachment plates on my medium sized ship that were on the windows holding them together. It's been mentioned a lot now that plate welding would replace the usage of small attachment plates for plating situations. (This was already relatively rare on ships, but some people used them).

I think everyone that's using attachment plates should take pictures of their connections with them and try to think about new beams that would fulfill the same role. I'm guessing that introducing a handful of new beam choices might give designers the same flexibility while looking a lot better and maybe working better with future plate additions.

The other issue that is hurting creative designs is plating in general and the lack of options for elegant hull skinning. Even if I had the 28 angled beams I listed I would still probably need a number of plate changes to make my ideal ships. Others have pointed out that even with the current beam situation there are a lot of plating configurations that just don't work or exist. In the ships shown the plating gaps and arbitrary choices to fill various holes shows this issue. I would encourage people to suggest new plate designs. It's also possible that a handful of decorative curved plates might handle cases where people were trying to use curved beams. That is the beams would be close to the desired shape of the ship and then decorative plates give the final curves.

Also I'm against bolting in general and attachment plates just adds more bolts. If we have to have bolts they should at least be logical and somewhat minimal. Right now ships have thousands upon thousands of bolts and any mechanic that uses them needs to be seriously rethought. (It's like the least fun and least elegant thing about ship building apart from cable/pipe clipping).

In conclusion, removing the attachment plates is a good direction even if alternatives aren't offered immediately. Removing them now will get new players suggesting actual solutions and ensure that the developers don't rely on them as a fix for inflexible beaming. Personally my point about running cables/pipes along beams is probably one of my biggest points. I want all the beam and plate mechanics to be elegant and work together with cables/pipes.

Also I joked about this with friends, but players shouldn't get Stockholm syndrome with "cursed" mechanics presented in an alpha. They should be giving feedback on alternatives that keep the flexibility and present a more intuitive mechanic without any of the flaws.

 

[Blargh]

Just chiming in about the attachment plate fiasco. But the attachment plates can only be abused because bolts are allowed to travel through either thin air or multiple objects. Instead, when bolting through a attachment plate, make it to where it must directly hit a single object behind it and can't pass through multiple objects.

 

[Mr Volts]

Just chiming in about the attachment plate fiasco. But the attachment plates can only be abused because bolts are allowed to travel through either thin air or multiple objects. Instead, when bolting through a attachment plate, make it to where it must directly hit a single object behind it and can't pass through multiple objects.

There are many ways to do that using other plates.

This is what I wrote in discord:

Hmm I think people need to listen to people who actually build ships e.g. Kodey. I for one was forced to use them as the beams are not designed well
[12:09 PM]
Using them was not a choice and removing them severely limits designs. No alternative/ fixes to beam dimensions was offered so exploits may have to be used to attach the beams when there is a gap. Eventually those will be likely patched and there is likely to be incredibly little use of a lot of the angled beams because of it. Attachment plates made it so it was easier to design ships and make cool designs(edited)

Mr Volts — Today at 12:20 PM
I have professional engineers in my faction who struggle to use beams without attachment plates, let's not subject everyone else to that, the skill cap is high enough(edited)

Message #ship-design-discussion

 

[KaiFB]

Thanks for the enormous outpour of feedback on attachment plates!

We were a bit hasty in announcing they'd be completely removed from the game, and are currently discussing if we are able to find a better solution.
Please continue sharing creations that rely on attachment plates to work, so we are able to fully assess what needs to be done.

It's easier to make big changes like this during Closed Alpha than after Early Access has launched. We're thankful for how invested you all are in the future of Starbase. Going forward, we'll try to involve you all more in the process when thinking of making big decisions such as this, and we hope you keep the discussions civil.

 

[Nedos]

I super often use them to fix the small spaces between beams which can arise through angled beams as you can see here.

a possible "alternative" for that would be custom beam lengsths.

 

[MoonSet416]

When I actually thought about it, I couldn't think of a time when I win or lose a ship fight just because of "cursed" beams or plates held together by attachment plates. Honestly do these exploits actually matter all that much in the grand scheme of things?

Edit: I thought a bit more about this. I think what I described in the original post is largely due to attachment plates being only a way to increase durability. This can happen in two cases: 1. increasing durability from below 1 to above 1 or 2. from above 1 to a larger number.

In the first case I think removing attachment plate is strictly a bad thing, in that it just simply allows fewer ships to fly, especially those that look great with composite angles and curves. And it's not like those ships are meta in combat or mining (mainly due to most internal components still being mostly boxy) so removing them is simply reducing variety and design freedom without having any real balancing impact.

In the second case, I feel like a higher durability number doesn't really mean much either. Yes in mining higher durability means in theory you can carry more things. However that is not really true in practice because most of the time it's not the crates that have trouble getting bolted to beams, it's pretty much always plates and other devices that don't carry load anyways, so increasing durability on those won't really change the real carrying capacity. And it's not like mining is somehow a competitive sport where every last bit matters either. Another argument may be about ramming in combat, which seems like an advantage until you realise it doesn't happen very often, and both ships get heavily damaged regardless. The thing is that durability can't really be consistently used as a weapon against other players and thus there's really no balancing issue here.

Overall, since attachment plates is simply just a tool to get durability, and durability can't really be used practically as anything that will affect the balance of the game, it does not warrant such a sweeping change that will break many ships.

As an alternative, I would suggest a slight limit to how much stress the attachment plates can carry based on what they are connected to. In other words when connected two two beams of course they should be as strong as they were, However if only one side is connected to a beam, it gets a bit weaker and if it is not connected to a beam at all it gets even weaker (but should still be enough to hold plates, just not entire generator assemblies). I feel like this is a course of action that most suits the severity of the issue (which I think is honestly not big at all) and requires very little redesign of ships. (unless of course if a ship is holding a ridiculous amount of weight with just attachment plates) Also this should require the least amount of dev time as well since it's just a tweak on current features instead of having to come up with entirely new replacements.