General Enhancements for better overall play:

[SHROUD]

First I love the game I enjoy it alot.
After nearly 300h there are some things I recommend that are not on the road map.

Ship construction is too complex: This is a huge detractor from the game, ship repairs maintenance and general care and feeding are HUGE turn offs for the game.
To address this I recommend removing cables, pipes and bolting from the game. Change the mechanics to just allow things connected to the grid to work. Force everything to snap into position and call it a day. Give everything the max available durability for the number of connection points. This would greatly simplify construction and maintenance. I know folks worked very hard on these mechanics and some people love the flexibility offered with not using snap points but for the good of the community please consider this.

The community needs a waypoint system / HUD we need to be able to drop reference points that we can quickly share, visually identify and move to. This is so basic but absolutely essential to good game play.

Also some form of active or passive ship detection would greatly improve this, It doesn't need to be too large say 10km active, and pickup any active within 20km. This is very reasonable considering modern tech.

Allow us to enter the shipbuilder anywhere, why cant I work on building a ship while mining in the middle of the belt. It doesn't hurt anyone, granted maybe I shouldn't be able to purchase ships or run tests but at least provide access to the design mode.

Can we please get the ability to print ships somewhere other than origin Please. This is crippling to the overall spirit of exploration and wonder.

On the whole Starbase has huge potential I hope these recommendations are considered for the betterment of the community.

 

[Womble]

A bunch of those things are in the pipeline.

But don't touch the ship designer concepts If anything, I'd want "proper" (that is, what most experts would call "excessive" bolting to be more significant; a factor in the quality of a given ship. And repair needn't be too bad, apparently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starbase/comments/phpge0

 

[anton_stezhkin]

Pipes and cabels are good! And bolting is awesome. What I don't like is the field-reapairs they are nightmarish.
So my suggestions are:
- give an opportunity to automatically connect a pipe/cabel to the closest socket.
- give an opportunity to restore bolts/pipes/cabels according to the blueprint.
- increase the durability of the pipe/cabels/bolts
- increase the collision damage to the frame. Intact frame after falling to the moon or crasging a fully loaded space-train looks weird.
- make connection of control devices to tables boltless. Buttons and panels botlted to the cockpit look untuidy and not futuristic.

 

[Throdnk]

To add to this:
- Add some kind of visualization so it is easier to grasp whether cables/pipes are actually connected to ducts - and where they got disconnected from them due to dmg.

In general, ship building is great in starbase, but it needs QOL improvements in implementation and design - of which many are already planned and just take time.

(The first part of the op post somehow reads like a troll post; "Remove everything that makes ship design in starbase interesting without replacement")

 

[Womble]

... field-reapairs they are nightmarish.

- give an opportunity to restore bolts/pipes/cabels according to the blueprint.

Have a look at the reddit thread I posted in my thread above. This is already possible, apparently. Haven't had cause to try it since discovering it, but maybe you can?

 

[Womble]

To add to this:
- Add some kind of visualization so it is easier to grasp whether cables/pipes are actually connected to ducts - and where they got disconnected from them due to dmg.

Agree. 1000%. WTB continuity tester.

 

[anton_stezhkin]

This is already possible, apparently.

WooooW! How to do it?? I F* up my thruster literally yestoday, the current piping and cabeling is a mess. I want to restore it.

 

[LauriFB]

We are working on a number of repair improvements, including some field repair improvements.

 

[Womble]

WooooW! How to do it?? I F* up my thruster literally yestoday, the current piping and cabeling is a mess. I want to restore it.

As I said before "this is possible", look at my previous post with the link to the reddit thread. You set the Universal tool "Blueprint" tab to "fill blueprint" and let the blueprint pull the components you've pulled off and repaired with the repair tool back into position, and then you use the pipe tool and the cable tool to "paint" over the ship and those will restore the networks. Apparently. As I said, I've not tried it, and someone might be pranking us, but it's easy enough to do a simple test that you can easily fix by hand.

 

[oophus]

To address this I recommend removing cables, pipes and bolting from the game. Change the mechanics to just allow things connected to the grid to work.

Bolts needs to be automatic or removed. Instead of bolts, just use the "beam" (talking about internal physics calculation, and not beams) function to connect to items, which can break. The damage system that bolts give is important imo. But the work-around with just doing all of that in the physics engine is way better.

As for electricity, I feel robots in the year 2100 (or whatever it is) have figured out how to send it wirelessly. Add some electricity-transfer items to the game instead, with max flow-rate of power. So that we still keep the damage system intact, and the ability to power stuff in zones. So instead of having to wire all up, we simply place down power-transmitters which have a visual "box" or "sphere" of influence. That way they can be damaged.

I don't like the idea of removing fuel lines though, but they can remove the balance of current "engine spam" to get to 150m/s to remove a bunch of it. Instead let us min/max through fuel flow, fuel pumps and connections. One engine should be able to be min/maxed to like current 10 engines when we get access to better and better fuel through the gas system later. Like mixing Oxygen and Hydrogen from ICE would give different results than other more exclusive gasses we get access to later from moons for example. So remove Tiered engines, and introduce "tiers" through fuel and gas instead to remove a lot of the engine spam.

Force everything to snap into position and call it a day.

Yes!
The G function should be implemented as standard by surface normals. Select an item at the surface, and the pivot automatically adjust to that surface in the middle. If you need more control, press G and select other "vertices" on that surface-normal.