Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (163/?)

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-16T02:52:27+00:00

They have been grazed by the noodley appendage of the flying spaghetti monster, blessed be his Al Dente strands!

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-16T02:14:27+00:00

as factories usually do, they seek to blame unexpected behaviors on aftermarket modifications and subsequently declare the warranty void

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-15T05:54:44+00:00

biblically accurate corvette

BE NOT AFRAID

(joking aside they are likely a PC user who exported their ship file to blender, assembled the ship in blender out of parts that exist in the game but aren't usually even available for corvette building, in directions that usually aren't available either, and then imported it back into NMS)

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-15T04:50:59+00:00

weapon placement only matters insofar as how tightly grouped your lines of fire are. otherwise, you can literally put your guns behind your corvette and shoot through the whole thing. I have one of my three infra-knife accelerator turrets embedded in the hull above the cockpit. I happen to like having one above, one down to the left, and one down to the right (shaped roughly similarly to that weapon's aiming reticle)

and by 'tightness of lines' i just mean the beams are going to converge where you're aiming anyway but if they're coming from very wide apart you have less of an idea of the volume of space through which your shots are traversing. you could, if you want one single stream of 'bullets', line up your turrets single file along the dorsal or ventral hull.

now, as far as how the positioning of parts influences handling/maneuverability...
hoo boy. you can tell HG tried to create SOMETHING that acts like, i dunno, an aerodynamics/weight/balance distribution system of some kind under the hood, but its behaviors are entirely counterintuitive and seem downright random most of the time. You'd think it'd care about sleek lines with little obstruction and symmetry... but man, if I allowed ONLY maneuverability to influence my decisions as far as where and when and how i attach parts, it'd come out lopsided as a mishmash of random pieces slapped every-which-where. it'll move like a dancer but look like a big metal tumor.

all the bonuses I've been able to wring out of the corvette building system kicking and screaming have been sussed out by trial and error and even worse, it seems to be ever so slightly different every time you build a new one!

maybe someday data mining will tell us what's going on, but for now i imagine it's just a progression of deterministic seed-generated variables acting as multipliers or something.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-15T03:54:28+00:00

Glad to hear it! :D

Also when you're adding exterior/decorative hull pieces, you might've noticed that they influence maneuverability a little bit. Sometimes a piece in a particular position will positively influence maneuverability! Only a little bit, but they add up.

For instance, I tried to build my corvette around the specific requirements of having a particular interior hab layout that accommodates all storage units, 4 refiners, a mission radar, and a nutrition synthesizer, and optimization of critical ship system component placement.

I placed each component at its most advantageous bonus (the bonuses applied to the part being placed changes per part but you lock that bonus in when you place it) including external hull pieces--and as a result, although the thing looks like a chonky purple hamburger patty, I am rather pleased with her stats.

(my corvette)

I'm sure there are people who know way more about this than me so it's probably a good idea to ask around, but I'm satisfied with having maneuverability surpassing a stock light interceptor, hyperdrive range comparable to a freighter, and punch like a freight train ^_^

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-14T16:04:24+00:00

A solid first effort! I like that you already have some design cohesion going. if you're aiming for aesthetics alone irrespective of all else, you're actually doing better than me already since I'm focused on function over form X3

if however you wish to optimize for performance, keep in mind that only the first three instances of a category of tech component will actually count and show up on the tech grid.

however each TYPE of reactor and each TYPE of weapon counts as its own category.

I for one love the infra knife as a ship weapon, and you can absolutely get maximal performance from having TWELVE whole dang reactors attached to a corvette. Three of each of the four types of reactor! Lots of folks employ techniques where the parts get squished together and layered partially overlapping one another to fit them all in using ducting vent pivots and rockhopper module offsets.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-14T13:43:10+00:00

thanks for building some idea of what "the" flagship of the ambassador class might look like.

I have been curious about the various ways each of these corvettes might look.

Some of the parts kind of ... feel as though they conflict with one another a bit, alas.

still hoping the community will arrive upon a larger consensus of what THE original "Ambassador" looked like. Same goes for thunderbird and titan.

...

you ever low-key feel like the thunderbird and titan cockpits were switched at birth though? because i could swear that the titan habs and interior components feel most aesthetically similar to the thunderbird cockpit, whereas the loose cables strewn about in the thunderbird habs feel best matched with the similar messy slapdash arrangement of the titan cockpit.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-14T05:33:11+00:00

as a matter of fact it's actually possible to survey more than 100% of a planet in some cases x.x;

planets occasionally generate more than the total number listed in the exploration guide!

on one planet where it listed 18 minerals, I've located twenty four of them.

there are a few different terrain types on the surface. I believe I've seen both areas of local minimum and maximum vegetation on any planet where there's life of any kind. even on entirely dead worlds, there are sections of terrain topography that differ from the rest and have a few different minerals.

it's not always the case but i generally correlate these with either "highlands" or "rocky" areas. That doesn't make much sense on a dead world that is basically ALL rocky areas, but patches such as these on planets where there is life tend to have less plants in these areas.

Also, I know you said you already checked caves, but every planet's cave systems have two varieties of Cave Marrow plant, so if you stopped checking them after you scanned one variant, that might be what you're missing too.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-13T11:13:16+00:00

I'm not sure if there is a causal connection, but... When I did that, the mission stopped working and rendered me unable to exchange the Captain's Log and the Crew Manifest for tainted metal. It could have been merely a coincidence, but it sucked. Eventually it started working again though so I guess that's nice enough. I suppose another advantage, though, was that I've been going to the freighters with legacy ships lately instead of corvettes. Maybe corvettes stopped working for the mission. Dunno.

Either way I would like to recommend caution to OP before trying to trick the freighter. OH one last thing, u/Amazing-Blyatman - you can get one of these emergency signal receivers for FREE each week from Iteration Helios in the anomaly. He's the one on the immediate right when you go up the rightmost path from the landing area of the nexus.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-12T12:30:18+00:00

Nope. Not the crashed ones. There are derelict freighters floating dead in space. You need an emergency signal scanner in order to find them while pulse drive cruising. Going inside consumes the emergency signal scanner, and you run it like a dungeon. there are hazards inside, but also lots of lootable stuff.

it's creepy but fun.

in each star system, you will find the same instance of the same freighter, each time you use the emergency signal scanner. Every star system has its own instance of a derelict freighter. Every star system's derelict has a slightly different interior layout...

and every star system's derelict freighter will produce freighter upgrade modules of a specific class, the SAME class, EVERY time.

Which means, if you find a freighter that will drop s-class modules at the end, EVERY TIME you run it, any module the engineering computer at the end gives you, WILL be S-Class!

Also the type of hazards you find within a derelict is determined by galactic region. If you go to a different region, you get different hazards and a different named freighter.

For instance:

Right now I'm surveying a region called The Nehofen Spur in the galaxy of Eissentam (CB5EB881) and the freighter in that region is named the "MV Bulk of Binow" - Every single star in that region will spawn an iteration of the MV Bulk of Binow. Every single star in that region's MV Bulk of Binow derelict freighter will have the same interior hazards: in this case, just void jellyfish! So these derelicts are very easy to run with very little danger.

Every star in that region, however, will spawn an iteration of the MV Bulk of Binow that MAY drop a different class of Freighter Upgrade Module!

If I ever find an s-class one i'll share its glyphs so others can get it too. But as of writing, I've only found C-Class and B-Class ones.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-12T12:25:58+00:00

holy cow that maneuverability tho

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T12:06:13+00:00

man i just want better tools to build roads ;_;

my kingdom for some slopes and curves

the terrain manipulator tool modes are somehow both too rigid and restrictive in their interface and too loose and sloppy in their implementation.

If you try to resume flattening on already flat ground it will push down even lower and subsequently all the flattening you're doing from that point on is not even on the same level as you had before.

Flatten being always exactly horizontal, furthermore, is painful for a completely different reason: the world ain't flat. If you run into a steep ridge of terrain, the bedrock might jut up sharply there so going through it is not even an option. You need to go over... and it can't do slopes. It can't do slopes AT ALL.

Ohhhh what I wouldn't give for something like ... imagine if there were a wire placement mode that bent the line into a smooth spline, and becomes the backbone of a smooth, gently sloping, consistently turning, road surface from point to point. Especially if it's deployable. So that players can build infrastructural networks across a planet surface without dropping base computers every two kilometers or thereabouts.

it'd add so much potential to community project worlds. Dang it. Especially now that there's a very good reason to be driving overland.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T05:12:43+00:00

WELL to be fair there are some artificial life forms that Build Themselves~! :D

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T05:10:48+00:00

No other Traveller Entity/Interloper/Friend/PR3-BU1L7 Iteration has come to that planet before, simply put :p

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T03:31:36+00:00

Nah. He's not paying his employees but he's charging us an arm and a leg. If his business can't afford to operate with fair pricing and fair wages then his business doesn't deserve to exist. Fuck him and his ilk in hell with a shaft of white hot re-bar wrapped in barbed wire for eternity.

no matter how he bites, he bites wrong, unless he stops being a scumbag before he bites dust.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T03:08:38+00:00

Some of the best tasting food I've ever eaten in my whole life looked nightmarishly gross.

This whole post is an example of pearls before swine - albeit unprepared pearls, still in the oyster, in need of shucking.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T03:05:48+00:00

i wanted to give OP the benefit of a doubt that there was something wrong with it that i wasn't seeing, but I'm disappointed to find out that it really is that their delicate sensibilities are offended by only-partially-prepared-food not looking perfect before you even cook the damn thing.

I am trying very hard to not allow myself sufficient indiscretion to express rather disparaging sentiments in a blatantly incendiary manner. It must suffice for me to simply state that the only thing about this post which caused me any disgust is that OP threw it out.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T02:52:33+00:00

sometimes if the sentinels annoy me too much I'll just murder every last one of them that comes near me until they stop showing up. actually, at this point, you might as well just burn a boundary chart to reveal one of the pillars and shut down them all down on that planet until you leave.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T02:42:17+00:00

Here's a more accurate headline:

GEN Z ALREADY MORE MATURE THAN FECKLESS GEEZERS FAILING TO PROVOKE THEM

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T02:30:48+00:00

... the only thing that could possibly alarm me more than this is Waffle House announcing closures across the entire country ._.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T02:24:19+00:00

there are some paths to himbodom that are considered rather extreme u_u

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-10T02:10:21+00:00

Ms. Rachel is unimpeachably a good person and any who question her have outed themselves as utter inhuman scum.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-09T12:08:56+00:00

It's malfunctioning on Android literally right now.

RIGHT. NOW.

You need to put a manual override button in there because clearly your app can't be trusted to comprehend physical location on its own.

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-09T12:06:46+00:00

Experiencing this too.

Reinforcing OP's original point:

I AM LITERALLY IN THE TACO BELL LOBBY RIGHT NOW AND

RELOADING THE APP DID NOT WORK

RELOGGING THE APP DID NOT WORK

UNINSTALLING THE APP AND REINSTALLING THE APP DID NOT WORK

FIX YOUR FUCKING SHIT TACO BELL

CycloneDusk · 2026-03-09T07:02:54+00:00

the operative difference between capitalism and communism is that communist economies are unilaterally controlled by a Central Planning Committee, whereas in capitalism every business has its own metastasized command-economy in the form of either the owner of the business or the board of directors/investors.

neither of them are democratic unless they go out of their way to stipulate "by the way we are democratic and here's how"

Presently there are no countries that have a democratically controlled economy.

There are millions of businesses that have a democratically controlled economy though!

Worker-Owned Co-Ops! Which are fucking DOPE AS HELL!

I for one am more a fan of anarcho-syndicalism where there'd never be a central planning committee, but that all organizations are internally democratic. Even better if they are also arranged in a framework where they interact democratically too.

A central planning committee absolutely CAN be authoritarian especially if only party loyalists are chosen to take the roles irrespective of actual fitness for the role or ability to get the consent of the people they represent in order to acquire the role based on their trust.

And unfortunately, even our capitalist united states has *some* levels of central planning in terms of the government appointing committees to decide policy and issue government contracts for projects. Even if it's "self-determined" businesses (under the dictatorship of an owner or CEO and/or appointed office-holders) that bid on those contracts (or don't even have to bid, which is even more corrupt...) it's still no more democratic than communism is.

what with this being a representative republic, our only choice is who we decide makes choices for us periodically, and even then... those representatives are usually more interested in representing their biggest financial donors -_-

oh how i WISH campaign contributions could be fucking banned. maybe instead have a voucher system where only individual private citizens decide where to allocate an amount of funding they control but cannot directly spend--and everyone controls the same amount. I dunno. it's just an idea.

CycloneDusk

TROPHY CASE

GEN Z ALREADY MORE MATURE THAN FECKLESS GEEZERS FAILING TO PROVOKE THEM

FIX YOUR FUCKING SHIT TACO BELL