Spaceship Designer Questions

[XenoCow]

After seeing the spaceship designer video, I have a few questions:

• Will the ships that we design be able to be bought from a shop in a completed form?
  • Otherwise, does the designer just provide some sort of blueprint that we still have to build by hand as has been previously shown.
• Can designs be sold in-game to other players? What about licensing?
• Could the spaceship designer potentially be released earlier than the normal EA?
• Will the spaceship designer be necessary, or just for easy designing and testing?

I hope that staff or community members like you can help to answer these. If any of you have similar questions, please feel free to post them below as well.

 

[Amos.37]

I asked the devs about buying ships from the designer tool. They said you will have 2 options after using the designer:
1. Buy the ship outright for credits, with the system automatically assembling it for you.
2. Use the blueprint to make a 'holo-projection' sort of thing that you fill in using the building tool and requisite materials.

That was about the designer buying the ship though. I'm not sure if other players can buy the ship, or if there is some way to sell designs.
Presumably, seeing as you can invite other players to design the ship with you, there would be some way to make the design available to other players too.

 

[cranky corvid]

• Will the spaceship designer be necessary, or just for easy designing and testing?

You can assemble ships from parts outside the designer, handy for repairs, field modifications and the like. For actual development and production, making use of the various convenience features of the editor and blueprint system is highly recommended.

 

[XenoCow]

1. Buy the ship outright for credits, with the system automatically assembling it for you.

Then the question of how much is the time to build the ship by "hand," or potentially a factory assembly line, worth? Will it be a no-brainer to collect the resources yourself or are the credits easy enough to earn that buying the ship pre-assembled is more convenient?

 

[Amos.37]

Then the question of how much is the time to build the ship by "hand," or potentially a factory assembly line, worth? Will it be a no-brainer to collect the resources yourself or are the credits easy enough to earn that buying the ship pre-assembled is more convenient?

I don't know how hard or easy it will be to earn credits, but the idea is that it will cost more overall to buy the ship for credits than to build it yourself with materials.
I've seen conflicting comments regarding how much more, from %50 to %250 increase in cost, so I really don't know, only that it will cost more credits overall to buy a ship rather than build it.

As to how long, and whether the time is more efficiently spent earning credits to buy the ship rather than building it, I guess it depends at least in part how large the ship is, what materials are used, mass production or single unit, etc.

Also the devs seem to want players to invest in setting up assembly lines and factories, so presumably they'll try balance it so that building a ship is more efficient than buying it.

And I'm sure some people will find it much more satisfying to physically build the ship than just spawn it in, watching it all come together. So there's a gameplay aspect as well.

 

[XenoCow]

I don't know how hard or easy it will be to earn credits, but the idea is that it will cost more overall to buy the ship for credits than to build it yourself with materials.
I've seen conflicting comments regarding how much more, from %50 to %250 increase in cost, so I really don't know, only that it will cost more credits overall to buy a ship rather than build it.

I am excited for building my own ships, even if it cost more. However, I imagine that it can't cost that much more to buy it than to build it. Otherwise players who don't enjoy building will be penalized... Maybe there could be a market for repair shops or referbished ships taken after battles.

 

[Burnside]

As far as sale/licensing, you can sell the design on the market the same way you can buy a completed ship and having the station build it for you. Our understanding is "selling electronically" like that is viable, but is less profitable than the designer producing the ships by hand or factory line and selling the finished product, I think the difference is something like 2.3 or 2.6 times the price as opposed to the station's auto-print sale, so the player can make a fair profit margin by investing time into a factory setup.

Secondly, the devs have mentioned some kind of copy-prevention feature that uses a shape/build-matching algorithm to determine if a competing design is in violation of copyright or not, but I haven't heard anything new about it in a while.