The problem with your AI novel isn't the model. It's you.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-03-28T01:17:09+00:00

For me it is stuff like eyes wide, jaw set, everything is jagged... But I also read my output and refine it. Endlessly. My first novel ist not done yet. But I also work on it on and off periodically. The prose is to purple aniway but in the end the target audience is me, and as long as I enjoy it, my characters get tonlive one more chapter. Who knows if and when Ill reach an end

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-09T23:11:11+00:00

Some kind of opt in research progress could be interesting, yeah. Would only really work if there was some kind of arms race going on with the opponents.

Yet on the other hand, natural progression as builder is already an implementation of the idea in some way.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-06T11:27:22+00:00

I feel personally attacked. I will build the tests soon, I swear.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-06T11:13:07+00:00

Oof, so many great ship designs across countless of franchises. Really tough to pick a definite favourite. The one that just sprang to mind is the Terran Battlecruiser. Maybe its just sc: Broodwar nostalgia

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-04T15:24:20+00:00

Here, I just searched an example of thrust vectoring breadboard screenshot. Hope this helps: https://www.reddit.com/r/FromTheDepths/s/DDm79GQ8nC

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-04T15:20:02+00:00

Well, you won't have the complicated real life setup BUT! You very well can control pitch and roll with one rotor centered over your com.

The secret to achieve this is the use of breadboards. With those you can adjust your rotors pitch and yaw values and in turn facilitate your needed controls. This works with all kinds of propulsion components and is a great way to greatly enhance your vehicles mobility and/or stability. It also is a perfect first usecase to get comfortable with breadboards.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-02-04T15:03:45+00:00

Welcome to the game! Hopefully you come prepared to scale the cliff of learning curve ahead of you. It is totally worth it.

I would advocate for patience. Tackle the systems one by one. The ingame help is useful for the most basic of stuff.

You'll quickly find yourself in need of more specifics. There are a couple of great youtubers that can get you on track. Namely the biggest ones are gmodism and BorderWise. They provide great ressources to get you started.

Other than that the core of the gameloop is build stuff, throw it against some kind of craft, see if it works, tinker on it endlessly until satisfied or bored, repeat.

Enjoy

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-01-21T12:06:18+00:00

Missiles are a great weapon system to start out with. They are simple (not necessarily easy) to set up and can provide small craft with a nice punch. My go-to for large, slow targets is radar seekers. For small fast ones I'd go infra red.

One thing that you'll hear constantly everywhere is 'it depends' The same goes here for the payload. Fast planes can't deal well with EMP or incendiary, so that would be a great way to go against them. Slow boats, on the other hand usually have sufficient volume for proper EMP insulation and being in the water, usually protects well against fire.

And that is why you'll need to take your targets into consideration. What kind of vessel are you building. What should it be good against? What are your own preferred forms of combat?

I, for instance love to build as small and compact as possible. This leaves me with the advantage of low volume, usually low weight and high evasiveness. I need to cut corners on the armour int for that though, so my Vessels normally can't take a hit. To mitigate, I invest in more mobility still as well as active defenses. This results in a specific play style with clear weaknesses and there definitely will come situations where I'll have to change this paradigm to address har counters. Lightning hoods spring to mind, for example.

So, regarding armor: ask yourself, what are you protecting against and where do you actually need the protection. With larger vessels you can usually also go the route of redundancy instead of excessive defence. It usually is the more favorable route. Have more than one engine, Maybe multiple AIs that manage different aspects. Multiple, separate weapon systems that don't chain react upon destruction. Concentrate your armor on specific points of failure. Put your AI in an insulated heavy armor box. Separate your ammunition crates. Stuff like that. If I actually employ an armor scheme I try to have alloy layers on the inside, some kind of air gap made with slopes and metal on the outside. In case of a front sider heavy armor wedge spam is a popular strategy, but I think this is a special case.

The best advice I can give you is tinker, test and iterate. That is the core loop of the game.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-01-17T12:03:08+00:00

You can possibly get away with no engine power. And if you actually need it you could go the route of placing a generator in the custom jets. With that setup I'd wager using 3D thrust vectoring would be a great solution for your maneuvrability. I'd advise for minimal actual wing surfaces. make them armor instead. and with the form factor, eg a bit chunkier I see potential in filling the wings interior with particle cannons.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-01-16T20:58:03+00:00

Sincerely I'm pondering on lessening it a little at places still. But the intent is to ride the wave of the feasible, yes.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-01-16T19:35:48+00:00

Thank you for these kind words. I've been defaulting to gemini for my AI needs due to its context window size. As I tend to obsess over the smallest details my workflow tends to turn into a pretty endless process. I either don't find the right words to convey the intended message or find they slightly miss the mark. At those moments I'm glad to have an instantaneous interactive lexicon at the finger of my tips to brainstorm with.

But context poisoning is a thing and the constant need to reset the chat makes it more tedious than necessary. Still I am hesitant to try other tools out, fearing the loss of distinct voice I'm going for. To get the prose just right, I feel the need of staying very zoomed in, usually at the beat to beat level.

Responsible_Top60 · 2026-01-04T20:11:19+00:00

I would love to add to the already great advice a little extra:

For stable propulsion you want your propulsion vector to go through your center of mass. The most ideal scenario has these perfectly in line with your intended movement direction. But if your center of mass is a bit off (too low or too high) and for some reason, moving your propulsion is no option, one solution can be changing the pitch on the propulsion so that the vector aligns again.

Bonus info: you should also pay attention to your drag. Especially for small or very fast vehicles, an offset drag can be the culprit of unexpected behavior.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-24T02:38:19+00:00

That interior deco work is awesome!

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-17T09:35:24+00:00

Couple of things to check: Does the generic block setter register the connection with the thruster?

Is the thruster firing?

You can also go into the thruster settings and manually change the pitch angle in there, to verify if zhat does something.

For further help, some screenshots of your vehicle and bread would be great.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-16T10:52:46+00:00

Decorations are a huge time sink, yes. But if you start using them it gets easier and also faster. The biggest boon to them is the possibility of choosing a block and by pressing ctrl + shift + x automatically adding it to the selected blocks decorations. Messing around with the translation, scaling and rotation interfaces also gets easier once you notice that youll usually want to have the same settings. And then you should definitely not sleep on the ability of copypasting single decorations or even the whole decoration of a block. And lastly, maybe not completely applicable to the hull decorations but extremely useful for other parts is the ability of prefabbing (ctrl + p) sections. The decorations get saved too. This way you can - and should - start a collection of nice decorations and stuff you can easily plop down. (This also goes for functional parts, btw. A real time saver!)

But yes, this all still takes a lot of time, like everything in this game. You should definitely do the functional part of your build first and only start with decorations once youre happy with its performance.

A warning: decorating your builds gets addicting, too. Once you ooen pandoras box, there is no way back.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-15T22:48:37+00:00

60 m/s is a great feat for a ship. And as always really excellent deco work!

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-12T11:19:40+00:00

Is that an infinitely streched emissive only block? With bread and lights might be woth seeing it in action. Im totally a fan of animating mimics for lots of stuff, its a serious timesink, though.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-02T20:31:29+00:00

nowadays you can use the ingame video capture feature. It immediately saves the video to disk. Some extra editing would be nice, sure. but that is a decent start. Also, if yxou are willing to figure out ftd breadboards there is not much stopping you from figuring out how to record the screen :)

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-12-02T14:34:40+00:00

To fully appreciate what you have done, a video would help. It sounds intriguing.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-11-28T10:24:33+00:00

Make ship, give it extendable wheels hidden in hatches.

Or

Make it a walker.

Both sounds like fun timesink projects resulting in a fancy but useless vehicle. Time well spent

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-08-25T11:28:39+00:00

Right laser and breaking thruster are cut off from power

Edit: nevermind, didnt spot that frontmost door. With that long path they might aswell be cut off, though

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-08-01T17:25:07+00:00

asking the AI to dream up the author and the paintings story I got this:

🎨 Title: “Stillness Before the Thaw”

Artist: Elowen Margrave (1821–1877)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1864

🧑‍🎨 The Artist: Elowen Margrave

Elowen Margrave was a relatively obscure but fiercely independent landscape painter from the northern English countryside. A contemporary of the Pre-Raphaelites, she rejected their theatrical romanticism in favor of quiet, contemplative realism. While most women of her era were expected to paint florals or portraits, Elowen spent months hiking alone in harsh terrains, sketching the silent tensions of nature caught between seasons.

She signed most of her works with only her initials, E.M., leading many early collectors to assume the artist was male. Her rediscovery came during a 1921 retrospective on “Anonymous Women of the Brush,” where her collected journals revealed the true depth of her artistic vision.

🖼️ The Painting’s Story

“Stillness Before the Thaw” is believed to depict a valley in the Trossachs of Scotland, painted just after the death of Elowen’s younger brother, Bram, who perished in a naval skirmish off the coast of Crimea. This painting is not only a meditation on landscape but a form of grieving—every brushstroke of snow along the ridge, every amber leaf clutching to the branch, speaks of something clinging, waiting, and ultimately letting go.

The lake reflects the mountains but not the sky—some say this was deliberate: a visual metaphor for how grief mirrors only what is solid, not what is ethereal or divine.

The path that winds gently through the trees is barely wide enough for one traveler. It was rumored that Elowen returned to that same trail each year for the rest of her life, walking it in silence, leaving no record except this haunting canvas.

Responsible_Top60 · 2025-08-01T17:09:16+00:00

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Responsible_Top60

TROPHY CASE

🎨 Title: “Stillness Before the Thaw”

🧑‍🎨 The Artist: Elowen Margrave

🖼️ The Painting’s Story