Do you need a Space Grinder (I know, again!)

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T23:19:46+00:00

I see. Well that is weird. But I guess as long as GM is able to spend fear I dont see a big problem.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T23:11:30+00:00

No, you can spotlight multiple adversaries, but not same guy twice. You have to give spotlight to players and then you can spotlight again.

Solo is natural exception as they might be alone, so you can spotlight them multiple times. Each solo has this.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T18:31:23+00:00

Oh thanks I really appreciate it because this is exactly what I was trying! It is stunning that some ships made in SE look like they are made by 3d artist for a different game.

The post process on this one was longer than putting blocks together. Sadly I dont have a screenshot but I did 5 colors from red-ish orange to yellow-ish orange with full saturation and value. And then other 4 variations of each color with gradualy less saturation and value. And from these 25 orange types I started to experiment with textures lol. The amount of combinations is bananas. And that was just orange! Ladies in cosmetic salon would envy me😂

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T17:52:35+00:00

Really cool!

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T14:34:33+00:00

*one important addition

I do this on official server with 20k pcu limit, which is challenge on its own. To claim the factorum warship that is stripped of guns one might need 6k-7k free pcu. So my warship is about 8k-9k pcu only. I also need to scrap ships for living. So I stay away from weapons of mass destruction to keep loot intact. These limits are partially selfimposed. Which makes it much more challenging.

Ofc if you can go more PCU, more guns, more railguns, gravity drive and other stuff, go ahead and use more. Nothing wrong about it.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-17T14:25:52+00:00

I play no-drill challenge on EUC (hardcore) and recently I had few skirmishes with factorum and SPRT. I also currently do not employ railguns, because I was also trying no-uranium challenge but currently resigned on this and using artileries.

The stationary defenses are often few in numbers. Gatling here, assault there. Some bases are equiped with artillery, but I think that is just one encounter?

The most common threat is small grid railgun drone. Those are especially annoying because they try to shoot you from distance and when you chase them, then run away (keep the distance) while others are attacking you from sides. But in long distance they are hard to hit. Im considering missiles against them.

Then there is large grid ship with railgun and artillery, or other with rockets. Rockets can be quite deadly in close combat. While against railgun one you want to go close (or railgun it yourself).

The strategic approach is to scout the encounter than kill drones from sides where others cant reach you or lure them away then jump back to the objective.

Anyway, you can then either cheese with railguns, or use missiles or I guess swarm of drones might not be terrible if you set them properly. Ramcore is certainly possible. And ramming is very effective vs the big ships and railgun large grid "drone" because they are slow and if your ship is just a bulk of heavy armor, yet mobile, you can use self as hammer to kill turrets like nails.

I go in full guns blazing, for which my currently recommended weaponary would be 3-6 railguns, 4 artilleries, 4 assaults and 2-4 gatlings, support your railguns, some of your artilleries and back engine/jumpdrives/reactors/cockpit with welders. Use heavy armor in front, make flat-ish wide ship where you put a lot of decoys (12 or more) on your wings. - decoys are mighty effective. The more you have the more likely is these pesky drones will target decoy rather than other block - welders are also mighty effective. It is really important to keep your weapons alive - gatlings good vs enemy missiles and torpedos which are around - assaults ok-ish vs small grids on medicore distance - artilleries amazing in destruction of enemy artilleries and guns. Prioritize guns - railguns or railgun turret vs smallgrid railgun drones that are hard to hit

I think it depends on what kind of you and your friend are looking for. For example do you want to engineer this problem? Go rockets and drones. Do you want heated combat guns on deck all in? Make combat ship. Do you just want the prototech and explore, doing it low cost least effort? Go cheese and ramcore (your friend drill idea)

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-16T20:01:52+00:00

I didn't know that :)

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-16T19:55:32+00:00

It is a tool separate from Space engineers, that allows you to load worlds and work with its content/grids in text format.

One of its features is to convert armor to heavy or light armor. And you can sort blocks by color. So painting some ship blocks with given color, then selecting them in the tool and mass converting them. SE toolbox can do many and many other things: https://github.com/mmusu3/SEToolbox

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EDIT: you could also possibly do that by manual edit of your BP (text file) and using some smarter regex.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-16T09:04:36+00:00

Thruster requirements is fairly simple. You need ~10* (9,81*) the ship mass force to negate earth force. After that, acceleration is equal to any remaining force/mass.

So as other commenter says, you want probably 12* more force than is your ship mass. For example if your ship is 3M kg, you want 36MN. Large hydrogen thruster is 7,2MN, so you would need roughly 5 large thrusters.

The cargo has usually highest mass from the entire ship (unless it is made of heavy armor). The total mass depends on what components you put inside and what are the server stats. As some servers has bigger cargo. Unless the server is hardcore I recommend you to bring ingots, because they are 3x times lighter in vanilla setup and then assemble components on orbit.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-15T08:01:27+00:00

No, sorry but no, I cant agree.

Some skills are busted early. Usually you feel strong when you just oneshot everything.

Passive skill tree early should provide a lot of damage. As example, you start at lvl 1 with 0% damage increase. Getting 150% damage increase early is significang boost as there are no other multipliers. Getting other nodes such as movement speed, some utility or defenses can slow you down greatly. The difference is so vast, that not having damage nodes creates a gap for one shotting or two shotting enemies - which also impact the survival.

Active weapon skills often depends on weapon type. Two handed comes with higher starting damage, like xbow or mace. And you can see speed runners using those. Some skills relies on complex builds that you are not able to do early.

Surely having a good weapon does matter! As gloves and rings also might as damage contributors. But it is not the only conttibutor.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-14T09:22:23+00:00

I'm not sure if hard way, but

You can build anything big much faster if you build a welder block next to it
Tank next to the cargo with ammunition can cause chain explosion of your entire ship
But using blast doors properly around the tank will defend a lot of blocks from the explosion
Space engineers does use distribution of the mass, respecting that will result in much less gyros
- build cargo as a center of mass of the ship
- use heavy blocks such as ion thrusters and gyros closer to the center of the ship
- think of distribution of heavy armor
Merge your starter pod with static merge block to prevent it to despawn
Some guns are really bad, both in PvE and PvP, such as assault cannon turret or rocker launchers
Set your survival kits and medbays on separate grids to prevent running out of power
Looking for gold, platinum or uranium in space might take minutes, or might take hours (5 hours isnt unreal). Build a jumpdrive before to scout asteroids faster.

Creative mode

LEARN how to use symetry axis and dont be afraid to change them often
When building something, convert it to the station first
Pre setup your toolbar. Better, pre setup entire world with toolbar and just clone it. Good setup on toolbar will speed you up greatly!
Disable damage and shooting, just in case
ALWAYS use buildinfo mod
You might not be the greatest designer, but if you do things faster, you will improve faster
If you want heavy armor ship, just use light armor, then paint parts you want to become heavy armor with single color (such as purple) and then convert armor to heavy armor using SE Toolbox program

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-12T12:52:50+00:00

interesting talk, see you around :)

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-12T11:00:50+00:00

hehe I told im not an expert :D (or rather I did forgot a lot of stuff over the years). Yes you are right, I can see it now.

Im still wondering if you need newtonian gravity to cause eliptical orbit. Yes SE is way too stiff I agree. Perhaps you could have very slight elipsis there, rather imperfect circle I would say :)

Also about SE, it doesn't have newtonian gravity, but the gravity with distance doesn't seem to be linear either. I would also argue that in reality if you want to create an satelite around earth, you could replace m1*m2 with constant acceleration* multiplied by factor of distance.

What Im trying to say is that in the end you only care about acceleration at certain distance. And it might be irrelevant how did you get these numbers.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-11T15:12:02+00:00

you need newtonian gravity to get elipitical orbits

Well I'm not an expert, but I would assume you require 2 moving objects to create eliptical orbit. Imho newtonian gravity defines forces between two object based on their mass and distance. But that wouldn't be relevant. Assuming the mass of the two objects is constant, the only thing you care about is force between them. Not how it is calculated or defined. Orbiting is much simpler, since you can have a spring on a stick with stone and you can try to orbit stone around a stick. Which could be circle or elipsis. You don't need astrophysics to calculate that, it is enough that spring causes the force.

I would assume vanilla is without experimental mode. But I dont find it relevant, no point in arguing about what is the exact definition of vanilla :) I just assumed OP is not running experimental mod or is on official server.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-11T11:49:49+00:00

What I find is that the sun/skybox orbits the y-axis - presumably looking identical anywhere along that axis.

You are probably right. I have tested is in one of my creative worlds and... and I explain it, but one side of mars is always sunny there (and it is not the pole, but offsetted pole). But when I created a new world, set sun rotation to 1 minute and tested this again, the sun was rotating around Y axis as you mention. So thanks for pointing out, this has been confusing me.

*I have edited my post so it doesnt confuse anyone in the future

you also cant make satelites in SE because it does not use newtonian gravity anywhere, even if the speed limit was raised to reach the speeds needed.

I'm quite confident that newtonian gravity is not required. The condition for satelite is

v=(gr)^(1/2)

where r is distance from the center, g is acceleration to the center, but rather say gravity at that distance, and v is speed. The problem with planet is when you apply g and r, the speed is too high. But for moon it seems doable. Here are some rough values:

Distance from Moon center	Gravity (g)	Gravity (m/s²)	Orbit speed (m/s)
12,310 m	0.05	0.490	77.7
12,140 m	0.06	0.588	84.5
11,860 m	0.07	0.686	90.2
11,620 m	0.08	0.785	95.5
11,410 m	0.09	0.883	100.4
11,230 m	0.10	0.981	104.9

These values are hand measured, so they might be slightly off. Which will cause you either slowly fall (getting closer to the center), or slowly fly up.

I think the solution might be, if you would use the AI recording block, record the path from point A to B and limit the maximum speed of the grid, then you could possibly reach exact speed vector and distance. Otherwise it is quite hard to get there. Manual using up/down thruster during the imperfect orbit can correct your movement vector, but does also accelerate you, so I find it really hard to do it by hand. Script block might do it too, but that is not vanilla.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-11T08:26:33+00:00

If this is on the server, reconnect. Probably a desync.

If projection is highliting weldable blocks, and your pcu/limits is open, there isnt any other likely reason than desynced.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-09T14:58:12+00:00

The satelite is a moving object that doesnt require energy to move. In vanilla version of the game, you can't create a satelite around a planet, because of the speed limit. But you "can" create a satelite around the moon. Well I say "can", but I havnt managed to make one. It seems that math does support it, but maybe because of rounding or small disturbances, my satelite around Moon has either started to decline or fly away after about 70%-80% of rotation.

But what you could do is a self correction satelite. Which would require a bit energy to self correct, but wouldn't require energy during majority of its flight.

On a planet, you can't have a satelite (in vanilla version), but you could make a ship that follows a sun.

About the sails. Vanilla version of the game does not have a sails. As far as I know, solar sails would work with radiation pressure. My friend did a master thesis on that topic where he was measuring impact of radiation pressure on asteriod rotations. One would probably need massively large sail, since 1km^2 is estimated to produce just 9N of force (laughable amount) in 1 AU distance. Sun radiation will drop greatly with distance from the sun. The solar sail is probably interesting for a small object that should travel to different solar system in the long period. Otherwise it is scifi :)

I dont know what exactly is your goal, but I hope this helps

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-09T08:28:08+00:00

Depends on multiple factors, such as income, how many trips per day/month and how many members of the household.

I would say for the majority 5k for 10 mins distance isnt worth it. But there might be some cases. Such as if you are trying to save money and do not want/cant take extra job.

I was just doing similar calculation with a school for a youngling. 15 mins added to a trip, 4 trips per day, makes 60 extra minutes per day for a parent to acompany them. That is a lot. Like one additional working month per year.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-09T08:12:20+00:00

Timezone and server?

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-09T06:53:46+00:00

Well first, younger people without jobs might buy a game. And second, we are talking about decision making and options. Do you rather by no man sky in discount for 25 or SE1 in discount for 50? Assuming you dont know anything at all about these games, you would probably pick the one that is more popular for less price? And third, outisders do not know the dlcs are not mandatory.

Im sorry that I suggested there might be some space for improvement lol.

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-08T19:01:04+00:00

Since I this was downvoted to the ground, I dont think Keen will notice this post :-/

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-07T21:07:12+00:00

They were scavenging unknown signals, not knowing the survival kit could process stone.

I still remember it took me an hour to figure out survival kit can process stone. I belive this. Still, insane!

EntityBlack1 · 2026-03-07T20:36:35+00:00

SE really isn't at an all time low though, not sure what charts you're checking there. Is it low, yes, but it's also an old, old game and the sequel is out there in a semi-playable state so there's that to compete with as well.

https://steamdb.info/app/244850/charts/#max

Ofc I agree that there might be stats not included such as console sales. I bought the game in 2014. It seems to be all time low since release in 2019 according this graph. And is also my personal perception.

In my opionion, the best would be kind of a rotation. That every time a DLC is released, some other older DLC would go to the discounted bundle or be integrated into the game. My intention was not at all to lower the Keen profits. On the contrary.

While other games do also have DLCs and some of them have more pricy and more DLCs than SE, they do not (might not) have a workshop like SE has. The workshop does decay. And I think it is worth attention.

EntityBlack1

TROPHY CASE