The Shipbuilder's Guide To The Galaxy (Commander Rotal's Replica Build Thread)

To skip the Drama and go streight to the post where Workshop links start go here.
To skip to the first post about the current project (the Survival Galaxy Class) go here.
To skip to a post containing several unfinished Starfleet builds that are NOT Galaxy Class starships go here.
To skip to the latest chapter go here.

Edit: I formated the thread and put in spoiler boxes to hide most of the pictures. Would appreciate a short bit of feedback if it's more readable now. It was a real mess earlier, sorry for that; i literally spent the entire night writing this and had to leave to work pretty much right after proofreading it once.


I really didn't think my ships deserve their own thread. Still don't, actually. 2527 hours into Space Engineers i don't have a
single truely finished ship to showcase. But i've recently been told that there is interest - and that i'm overspamming the ship,
an observation that i agree with to some extent - and @Sinbad has made the suggestion to use the
thread to document the Galaxy Class's creation and the problems that arose (and still arise) from building on this scale to beef
out it out a little. Having just finished writing and going over it all to try and catch the biggest grammatical
offenders before work i am afraid that i went a little overboard in this. So i'd like to make this clear; this is a
Me-Myself-and-My-thread. It's about my
experiences with building a 1:1 Galaxy Class starship on the scale of a community build all by myself. There
will be tears. There will be blood. There will be budgies. And there will be talk of Galaxies. And there will be
pictures of Galaxies. CELESTIA HELP ME be there pictures of Galaxies. I think i got the linking of Galaxies out of
my system for a while now.


Please note that it's been a while since i started to play this game, well over a year in fact, and i lost a crapton of screenshots
when... well, we'll get to that.


Chapter 0
Introduction

Once upon a time there was a game called Star Trek Online.
It's still there, actually, and giving out Tier 6 Galaxy Class-equivalents to veteran accounts for free, so one of these days
i might finally make my dream of piloting a Galaxy Class Torpedo Boat with an actually useable BOFF design true.

Anyway, said game astonished and entertained young Ensign Rotal A. Henricsson by allowing free access to almost every
ship available in Starfleet's Hangar Bays. A dream come true!
But while STO offers the ability to run around in a few select locations of your character's vessel there was something
sorely missing: about 99 percent of the rest of the ship.
You usually got the Bridge, Main Engineering, Sick Bay, the Captain's Quarters, a bar and if you're lucky they let you enter the
Transporter Room (i don't know if they have implemented the Hangar Bay yet). While an absolutely terrific experience it always
lacked the feeling on actually being on board of a starship. (And the ship interiors are scaled waaaay too big, something i'd
ironically encounter both in the exact same way and in the other direction in Space Engineers.)
As an MMO Star Trek Online offered quite a bit of downtime so it was not an unusual occurance when, one day, wee little
Ensign Rotal was browsing the Youtubes for a particular video, purely out of boredom: the one where a handfull of crazy
minercrafters had built the Enterprise D in Minecraft.
It's a beautiful thing they have created... but little Ensign Rotal should not find that video on day of days. Instead something
completely new attracted Rotal's attention: a socalled "spotlight" video for a Defiant Class starship built in a brand new Early
Access game called "Space Engineer".
Sadly I'm unable to find that particular video anymore (I've been looking for it more than once) but it doesn't much matter aside
from it being worth pointing out that the ship in that video - to this day - remains the most faithful replica of a Starfleet-design i
have ever seen someone pull off in Space Engineers, which is impressive considering how early a creation it was.
Either way - naturally impressed and intruiged little Ensign Rotal looked up that game on Youtube and finally found a game that
allowed the player to visit the actual inside of the starship - which was ALSO easy to create, and it even utilized a system that
little Rotal had already loved to death in Kingdom Hearts some years earlier!
By now it should probably be of little surprise that Ensign Rotal had a bit of an... obsession with the Galaxy Class. So the first
more specific search was, of course, "Space EngineerS Enterprise D". You can probably guess how that turned out (and if you
cannot - go ahead, repeat that search; nothing has changed since then), and exchanging Enterprise D with Galaxy Class didn't
deliver results either. This gave Ensign Rotal a moment of pause. Could it be? Was there really no Galaxy Class Starship spotlit'
on Youtube? Long story short: no. No, there wasn't. All Rotal could find were small scale versions, beautiful-but-unfinished
Galaxies or perfect replicas with no interior or Thrusters whatsoever.

By that point, though, i was already not caring about competition anymore; i had found a new long-term-project.
I would build my own Galaxy Class Starship and wander it's spacious corridors even if it was going to be a shitty little husk. Even
if there were tons of better looking, better performing, higher quality Galaxies out there - this one would be mine. Built by mine
own two hands, keyboard and mouse. It would be the one big thing i created. The ship and i would be a team.
We would work together and we would overcome any and all difficulties!

I was so very, very wrong.


Chapter 1
The Galaxy 1.0 That Wasn't

April 4th 2014.
After debating whether to invest into an Early Access game for more than just a few days freshly promoted Lieutenant Rotal A. Henricsson
finally acquired Space Engineers on Steam. Wasn't overly expensive, which helped the decision to give EA a chance a lot, and
the videos the Lieutenant had been bingewatching had done little to prepare for the problems that lay ahead.

The very first thing i built in Space Engineers wasn't anything even remotely resembling a Galaxy Class - it was a tiny testship,
just to see how this new game worked. Getting used to the controls and keyboard mapping took a short while of uncoordinated
techno dancing but after a few minutes i had whipped up a basic shape that could not have been bigger than... what, ten blocks
in length? With two nacelle pods to the left and right (mirror mode was a feature i would not discover and master until much,
much later) and a cheeky little Cockpit in the middle of it all it was meant to, kinda, sorta, if one squinted enough with both eyes
and a massive amount of alcohol intus, imply the overall shape of a Defiant Class vessel, though it probably had more in
common with the general appearance of a bath tub, which wasn't an unwelcome sight either at the time. Proudly i took the
chair in the middle, pushed the W-button... and promptly found myself outside, floating in space, while my Bathiant Class Tub
dashed ahead to go where no man had gone before, or at least to limp wherever it was going to limp considering the new and
unknown-to-me-at-the-time Thruster Damage had ripped the nacelles off the main body of the vessel.

A little perplexed i took the time to actually read up on all of Space Engineers' features. Later it dawned on me that "the
developers", as i had not yet absorbed the term "Keen Software House", were actually delivering patches on a weekly basis; i
felt secure in my knowledge of this game after reading up a quick guide.
Armed with that pittyful bit of knowledge and good intentions i ventured forth into my big project right after this first debacle; in
fact into the very same world, and considering this was before worlds were limited (only to be properly un-limited again later)
this very un-dampened Defiant was floating around in the background for quite a while; out of sight, lost, but never forgotten.
Because the damn thing kept eating up FPS.

These are two of the earliest screenshot of the original Amanda Tapping that i can find, for reasons that i shall document for
future generations of Space Engineers in a few moments. The one above shows the humble beginnings of the original Captain's
Yacht, the one below an early look at the unfinished Primary Hull.​

Originally i had no real access to the official Enterprise D Blueprints. They are by no means perfect (starting with labeling a deck
wrong and forgetting features like Jeffreys Tubes), but for the hull they were worth their weight in gold - which is a stupid
choice of words considering we're talking about paper; they're definitely more valuable than that.
Still, i didn't find them on Amazon until much, much later, so started construction ghetto-style: by holding a ruler to my monitor
and measuring scans of the blueprints i found online. Other than slightly ruining the edge of my main screen with a flat metal
rod, ripping at least one t-shirt and earning me worried and annoyed looks from my budgies this produced surprising amounts
of useable results; it took me forever but once i had assembled enough data i immediately started the production of Decks 09
and 10 of the Primary Hull.

The Galaxy (at that point still nameless and not yet bearing any bloody 1.0s, 2.0s or 3.0s), from the start an ambitious project to
be built with full interior (heh) and in 1:1 scale, already stated out with separation lines and modest interior design. Holding
myself slavishly to the data collected i soon managed to get this:

Sadly i have no better screenshot available to me anymore, but after some time spent on the Primary Hull i set the date for the
first test flight. I don't know if it was a foreshadowing of the curse that lay upon the original Amanda Tapping or if it was simply
not a good idea to aim a ship without sufficient Thrusters or Gyroscopes at the nearest Asteroid and shutt off the Dampeners
but while the Saucer dutifully accelerated to a max speed of about 5 meters per second it soon crashed into my Research and
Development base - the very second lesson learned after "Read Patch Notes" was "Isolate your construction site".
Incidently it's a damn shame i have nothing to show from that base. It was glorious; back then i was going ham on... ghrhg....
on Rotors, Landing Gears and all the other cool gimmicks this game offered me that i had not yet learned to dread.
I had Escape Pods, i had swivel-driven- and player-made-piston-doors, i even tinkered around with an elevator.
That was before the dark times of enlightenment, of course. That was before the first flip happened. That was before i learned
of... their horrors.

26th of April, 2014.
After a frantic few evenings of work i finally felt confident enough to subject myself to a selfmade Youtube Video. The FPS were
already plummeting, but i was in good mood - i liked what i had produced and to this day believe it wasn't all that bad, all things
considered.

The very same video also shows one of the more substantial reasons for the bad performance: i still had Primary and
Secondary Hull located within the same world, separated by several thousand meters. This was a mistake and once i realized
how much it was affecting the numbers i corrected that mistake at the first opportunity (i am unsure if copypasting between
worlds was a thing yet. It has been well over a year.).
All in all everything was going rather well, though - the first iterations of several sections lookedfine , i really loved my Nacelles
and i had a particularl crapton of fun designing Shuttles - a distraction that i indulge in waaay too much to this day.
There was... there was just a thing... I encountered it first around that time, actually. Just... a small thing. Before we go into
that, though, i would like to show you my original Main Hangar Bay, because i was very, VERY proud of it at the time. (it's partly
visible in the video above but that early stage doesn't do it justice in my opinion)

The Main Hangar Bay was supposed to house about two dozen Shuttlecraft of three different classes: Personal Transport, Cargo
Transport and Courier, the last ones, of which i do not have a screenshot anymore, got dummied out because they didn't
provide enough additional acceleration to distinguish them enough from the Personal Transport-variant. The three variants each
had a color code assigned to them: Personal had a blue stripe, Cargo was yellow, Courier was green and experimental
Shuttlecraft were asigned a red stripe that was not to be used on active starships.
All small craft were stored for semi-imediate use (plus an additional one right in front of the Hangar Door, ready to take off at
any point in time) with the Small-Rotor-To-Large-Rotor-Trick (I'm not doing the groaning-spiel for that, we'd be here forever.).
Four Observation Pods for hull repairs and three customizeable Jackson Class Runabouts, of which one used to haul a Missile
Turret around, completed the Main Hangar Bay's compliment of auxilliary small craft.

Yes. Really. Shuttlebay Three used to carry a Cargo Variant of this with it; Shuttlebay Two stored a small variety of Shuttles.​

The Work Bee Depot sadly doesn't have any surviving screenshots to it's credit. It carried six of the ship's ten Work Bees and
each two Work Scorpions and Work Crabs, variants of the generic Work Bee of which one was based on Andrew Probet's
Sphinx-design that never made it on the big screen.

​

Overall the ship made beautiful progress. Yeah sure; performance wasn't the big winner i wanted it to be, the player-made
piston design only allow the original Hangar Doors to open up but a tiny passable opening (the main reason why i switched to a
simpler design) and, of course, there was that... little problem with the new iteration as well, but at that point in time i was
still... malleable.

Lieutenant Rotal did not yet understand and expected a fix to sort this out.
And so Rotal went, once again, on decoration sprees in between finishing hull sections. And over time, using the Small-Rotor-
To-Large-Rotor-Trick, the ship filled up in both interior and exterior.

I don't have any ego and i don't usually have much reason to pat myself on my own shoulder but i truely believe that the original
Bridge was a marvel to behold, at least for my humble taste:

It was a glorious time. The ship was nearing completion in it's earliest form; the outside was almost done. I started dabbling in
Exterior Lighting:

And at some point during the development process the ship received a proper name, lifted directly from my STO-Galaxy and
under heavy headaches after beating my head over more than once for not choosing it sooner; after all, once i had settled on it,
that daring thought of naming a virtual ship after an actual Real Life person (who would, admittedly, probably never hear about
me, this ship or this very game), a slightly, shall we say, naughty idea; once it had settled in it just felt right to name one First
Lady Of Science Fiction after another:

Rotors... Rotors everywhere...


​

There was.... there was just this one thing.

Like a noisy insect in the heat of summer it kept picking at my attention. Like that tiny little buzzing of a mosquito that would
keep you awake at night when you needed your rest the most. It had been going on for days, weeks, every now and then; not
always in the same spot, but... it kept happening. THEY kept happening. And THEY started to turn into a problem i would have to
deal with sooner or later.​

The goddamn Rotors.



​

 

Chapter 2
All Good Things

Other than the Big One that i'll talk about in a moment there really isn't any one point in time at which i could point and say
"this is where things went south", but that's only because my finger, despite being suitably thick for my stature, isn't wide
enough to point at more than two weeks.
At the end of the day the game was simply too early in development to handle a ship of this size - the Amanda Tapping was
built as close to 1:1 scale as possible without breaking angles (she actually ending up twenty meters longer and wider than
planned) - and SE didn't really like that, as demonstrated in the following screenshot taken a centimeter or two away from the
vessel's hull and the resulting 2 FPS:

(My PC didn't like that either but that's for later. )​

Since this was on the extreme end of the spectrum i soldiered on. What else was there to do, right?
While i had to wade in lag and stuttering the ship itself was getting around quite nicely: while initially met with little interest on
the Workshop it somehow managed to sneak itself on Page 1 of the current top dogs. I still don't know how that happened; i
always suspected a Spotlight somewhere but i never found it. Over time she racked up almost eleven thousand views, over
threethousand downloads and (most delighting to me because i know how rarely people can be arsed to "like" a Workshop entry
the like) about 80 thumbs up, resulting in a four out of five stars rating (and very few thumbs down). I so wish i still had a
screenshot of that but i foolishly believed Twitter would store those images forever. I was so gullible a year ago.

Freshly promoted to Lieutenant Commander i was intermittendly tasked with cleaning up Starbase 253
Also called Shuttlebay Station, 253 was where most of my testing concerning Shuttles was going on. I had tons of fun with it, even build a little Asteroid Base with elevator, all very cute.

However, there was an issue brewing:

My early small craft were almost allways outfitted with access doors and hatches built using Rotors and Pistons. While the pistons rarely acted up (though that DID happen too) it was usually the Rotors who presented me with increasingly stingier headaches. Shortly before the save containing Shuttlebay Station corrupted itself and put it out of my misery i found almost the entire Hangar Bay (with the notable exception of the non-rotor'd Cargo Shuttles) doing little dances, floating around in the last rows of a dance of death originating from Rotor Wobbling, micro stuttering and the feared and dreaded Tearing problem.

​

A problem that was not confined JUST to small ships, by the way.

However - i was still going strong. At least that's what i like to think; back then i was increasingly getting stressed out and
worried over the tiniest of little things, mostly because they tended to become rather big things if left unchecked. Like
fourhundred meter wide Saucer Sections accelerating to speeds that make Max Speed Scripts look quaint:
​

Over time the problems got... more substantial. The "Render Overloaded"-error message in the upper left corner ingrained itself
into my lateral field of vision and haunts me to this day, ships tore themselfs appart because of warping and the ship's Master
File got corrupted more than once. I learned quickly to shut off Auto Save and to save often, particularly before touching the
ground (as this was known to cause.....grhhghghg.... Rotors to detonate, and detonate they did). I ended up stacking backup file
over backup file just to be on the save side.

Speaking of saves; every now and then the ship would become too large to save:

The problem would, somehow, go away by itself almost every time it occured.​

After the Amanda Tapping had become big enough to cause these kinds of problems on a daily basis i had always worked on
the edge of my PC's capabilities - 95 percent RAM usage was the usual, Processors kept loading to their limits. My PC wasn't
particularly bad, it was just a bit old, and it had always had heat issues due to the position of the tower and bad airflow.

I don't blame Keen. It would be a futile endeavor if i did anyway. I don't even blame the Amanda Tapping. Be that as it may, on
a fateful day, the file took... a bit longer than usual to load. Past-Me didn't think much of it; once it was loaded the world was
running a bit choppier than usual but that was to be expected: I had just proudly announced that the ship was about two
weeks away from leaving Dry Dock, so to speak. The interior was practically done and all that was left to do was a tiny little
passage way in the Secondary Hull that needed Spotlights and a few last touches.
At that point the Amanda Tapping carried over threethousandsevenhundred Spotlights and looked absolutely stunning when
loaded up with a Darkness Mod. Despite hitting the all-time-low of 2 FPS and the UPS reaching depths that made them barely
worth counting anymore i was really, REALLY happy with the result. Taking strolls through her decks was barely possible
anymore but damnit was it fun.
However - working with 2 FPS and under conditions that make honey seem like a prime example of the perfect lubricant,
stuttering my way from block to block, i had taken up the habit of building smaller ships that were more in line with Space
Engineers' likings. I found that ships of about 300 meters length were the absolute biggest the game could handle without
jeopardizing performance.
While i loved my main project dearly i had taken up a different side project at the time. See - i don't advertize those often
because they never really go anywhere, not even by my lousy standards (ooooh boy, just wait for the last chapter to see how
bad that one gets).

The funny thing about this Bastard is that it was running with extremely high performance for it's size because it was basically
nothing but regular armor cubes.
So, as established, we were two weeks away from the final release of the Amanda Tapping. I was doing some stuff with the
windows in the aft-area of the Secondary Hull. Things were running particularly stuttery that day and it really got annoyed,
particularly because i did not have much time to work on her that day. So i exited the Master File and loaded up the Star
Destroyer to cool off.
The Bastard, to his credit, started to load. And kept loading. And kept loading a little longer.
And, just to make this totally clear, kept loading.

Until...​

​

The Crash Of 2014 happened suddenly and without a (clearly defined) warning. But it left it's mark on my old tower. Heat issues
had softened it up beforehand, dust was already in the process of faking a left hook and the Crash delivered the final uppercut
out of nowhere.
My Chief Engineer and i were never able to put together a complete list of broken parts but we did confirm that the heat- and
overloading-induced crash had grilled the graphics card, possibly the RAM bars, the external harddrive needed a reformatting
but was salvageable and the processor, though we are not sure if that one was damaged in the crash or as a product of
continued overheating beforehand, kept behaving weirdly after the crash. We can't say which damage was already going on
before the crash (which was a rather violent and LOUD one; definitely something mechanical) and which was a direct result of
it. Either way - my PC was limping to the finish from then on out and it didn't look like it was going to reach the goal standing
up. Only held together by good wishes, shoestrings and a lent graphics card i managed to tide it over until i could find a
replacement tower a good two months earlier than planned; my old rig was due for a refit using Holiday pay; instead it turned
into a completely new system thanks to the "I'm already at it, might as well do it right"-directive.

About three weeks after the Crash i was finally able to resume work on the Amanda Tapping. Hanging on life support already
she was running not better or worse than before on my new, vastly more powerful machine, but that was fine. I was used to
the FPS, grudgingly accepted the UPS and i was close to being done with her, ready to sit Alpha out and wait for Beta so i could,
at some point in the future, finally start my own voyage. The year itself hadn't been running that well in RL either so it was quite
relaxing to take in the slow movements of my Engineer as i, once again, floated over the Secondary Hull in order to finally put
the last touches to the exterior, with a last roundup of interior decoration and window illumination planned for the immediate
future.
And then, one day, one fateful Patchmas, Keen fiddled around with the default Rotor Displacement. Phand told me in the Bug
Report thread to that topic that "it is a Physics problem".
Of course it was. Other ships, using the same abundance of the Small-Rotor-To-Large-Rotor-Trick for interior design, just on
vastly smaller scale due to their size, now had giant holes in them where chairs and tables and beds had been just a day
before; i could only imagine how much more strain on the poor engine the Amanda Tapping must have produced with all her
interior decoration and Shuttle Pads.
The Amanda Tapping, already beaten down by corruptions, Tearing, Warping, Microvibrations, files that didn't load for
seemingly no reasons, constant crashes, Rotor problems, Pistons problems, engine problems and my own insistance of breaking
the engine with over 3700 Spotlights.... simply gave up.

The Galaxy Master File and well over fifty backup files collectively corrupted, Rotors or not. The entire frame was somehow
corrupting almost every file it was contained in; all but a single, several months old backup file, that i would only find weeks
later buried in an older folder, saluted one last time, smiled and noped out of existence in a digital mass suicide.
The Amanda Tapping, back then a work of several months and a literal thousand hours of work, was irretrievably gone for
good; my Galaxy Class was dead.​

 

Chapter 3
NCC-One Hundred Four Thirty One-Nothing

It kept staring at me.​

This... this red square-ish looking thing. Daring me - nay, taunting me to click on the "OK"-Button. To leave well enough - or, in
this case, bad enough, i guess - alone and continue to greener fields (probably in the hopes of corrupting those too).

​

Now - this was not the first time the Amanda Tapping had corrupted itself. I was confident in one of the update threads, at least
i think it was an update thread. Something to the effect of "I'm sure i'll fix it and if not Keen will".
My boast was not entirely unfounded - there are ways to fix corrupted worlds and i had successfully repaired the file more than
once already. The last time had been a bitch to fix but i had made it happen.

The Amanda Tapping was gone.​

Mostly.
For quite a while i was not doing very much in Space Engineers. I was beaten. I was not particularly surprised that this project
so dear to my little nerd heart was taken away by bad luck but i was particularly pissed off - and sad, and the sadness was
definitely greater. I like creating things. Even if it's just aping someone else's design and using mirror mode, i built this ship with
my own two hands. It was my ship. The ship and me, we were supposed to be a team. And now she was cruelly taken away
from me by a mad team of mad developers, probably in league with mad scientists and considering Marek's AI-Project we might
be in deeper shit that we even know yet.

I spent most of my freetime in a survival build during those days, with a few mods to try and catch up with some of the Survival
mechanics for the inevitable day i would go back and start refitting my other Starfleet builds; the idea of starting from scratch
on a new Galaxy Class was a silly one and i didn't exactly feel like investing another mountain of time, effort and emotional
attachment into a new ship. It wouldn't be the same. It would never be the same.

I was working on a Warp Nacelle in said Survival build - nothing fancy, just a flatted cylindrical thing that was going to house a
few Reactors and Thrusters - when i noticed something in the distance.
Looked like a dust cloud, i thought, which is a silly thought considering that even today the only form of dust the game has to
offer only appears at high speeds (and looks more like thrown rice anyway). It was something faaaar off in the distance. Looked
a bit like a spikey Asteroid. At first i didn't think much of it - probably just a graphic bug; those happened all the time, right?
Then i remembered - nope, they didn't. Not really.
My curiousity was captured. Leaving my Nacelle alone for a moment i made sure to carry enough energy and made my way
towards the strange anomaly:

It was later explained to me that this was a product of the corruption. For a while i routinely tried to load the Galaxy Master File
before doing anything else in Space Engineers when i came home from work - couldn't do any harm, now, could it?
Apparently the corruption prevented both a proper loading AND unloading of the world's contents; because of this a ghostly,
incomplete, bugged out texture-only form of the Amanda Tapping would appear in a world after a failed load. For a while it was a reproduceable bug.
If you haven't shed a few tears after getting to see something you spent this much time with and thought you'd never see it
again... i can only say: i did. Not many, but i did.

At first i was just happy to see the old girl at all; i had not yet found the old backup that mysteriously escaped the mad suicide
pact. After a while, though, it hit me - the thing was still, at least partially, accessible! As i'm so fond of saying: i'm not a
developer, programmer or modder, just a gamer, and not keen on changing any of those anytime soon. However - i thought
the fact that this was readable enough to load some of it meant that, if i found an old enough file, i could try to get at least a
backup to work.
Maybe.
Not a particularly techy train of thought but it was good enough for me; the idea of not having to start from scratch and maybe -
just MAYBE - getting the Amanda Tapping back was worth a try. Leaving Survival by the wayside i leapt back into action, spent a
good few hours hardloading every single backup file i could find. For some i had to dig really deep into salvaged files from the
old PC, but eventually, hilariously, i found the one and only working backup in a folder in my main SE Save-order - one of the
very few that i had not bothered to check because there was an exact duplicat of it that had not loaded earlier. Another thing i
learned - Powerlevels AND File Names are Bullshit.

It was an old one, though.
Over the months i had subjected the Amanda Tapping to a crapton of redesigns and it would have taken another month or two
to get her up to speed. She was, basically, an early version of a late prototype and while her exterior was mostly fine...
Well, let me put it like this: the exterior isn't the problem. The exterior is NEVER the problem. It was the interior that was
lagging behind badly and i was looking at the choice of starting a lengthy refit (that might go the way of the dinosaurs at any
time as well), starting from scratch or abandoning the problem again.

In all honesty - i don't know what i would have chosen if things had proceeded differently. I don't have any screenshots of the
backup handy, unfortunately, but it was in such an early stage it would have literally been faster to just crank out a new frame
and start interior design with that; i had learned so much about the Galaxy Class in my research and about building in Space
Engineers since that backup had been made that i was no longer able to accept the state of it.
Ii had also, admittedly, allowed the vast numbers of views and downloads (peanuts for the bigger names on the SE-Workshop
but astonishingly high for me as a no-name and owing them in their entirety to the Galaxy Class' innate fame) to go to my head.
I wanted - no, i demanded of myself to only upload the highest quality i could, going as far as feeling shame for my, more or
less, abandoned other Starfleet vessels that i no longer had any time for (and still don't have).
Investing in this project would mean a hefty dose of work in either case - not counting the third option - and that was a choice i
did not want to make lightly.

In this mess of a situation i eventually received a message from the user @Lvllord (who i don't think is using the new forum?
At least it doesn't seem to detect his Steam username.). He had actually found a way to restore the Galaxy Master File! The trick was simply to set the ship's status to "Station" by editing the file. It didn't run any better than before and FUCK ME if it
didn't corrupt itself immediately when turning back into a ship - but the file loaded up without an issue when a station. Overjoyed to finally stand aboard my baby once again the gears started to turn. I smelled hay burning up. Smoke everywhere,
really. Sulfur in my nose. I had ideas.
That was when my mind went to the evil thoughts.
That was when my eyes went to the hatchet on the wall.

Ever heard of a program called SE Toolbox? Of course you have. We all have. It's the Space Engineer's last line of defense when all else has failed.
Despite glorifying the Galaxy to an absurd extent and having an admittedly slightly creepy attachment to the Amanda Tapping it
might surprise you to learn that i don't actually personify the ship. It is, after all, just a file in a game; but just like sailors, who
may or may not be godfearing people or atheists on land, may feel a certain... connection to their equally non-sentient ships i
started to feel rather bad for what i had in mind.

I had a vague idea that either a particular block or simple overloading caused the ship's corruption, and of course i had Phand's
statement about Physics Problems to work with. So i loaded up SE Toolbox, told it to load up a copy of the corrupted Galaxy
Master File, silently asked the Amanda Tapping for forgiveness, grabbed whatever SE Toolbox uses as the equivalent of a
chainsaw and went to town.

It took the removal of thousands of Spotlights, Interior Lights, Windows, Turrests, Catwalks, Conveyor Blocks and production-
related blocks and a shitload of fruitless loading-attempts trying to find the minimum amount of cut' blocks. But after several
hours i had done it: the Amanda Tapping, in ship-status, was once again loading up.
And the state she was in broke my heart. The video above doesn't really do the destruction justice. If you know a little about the
magic bullshit-science of Star Trek you might be able to relate when imagineing a ship without Bussard Collectors (in fact with a
good chunk of it's forward Nacelles flatout missing), with no Deflector Dish (mostly a problem for those classes that should have
one) and no windows. It was, basically, a whole lot like the aftermath of this:

There was some initial lag produced by literally hundreds of blocks that were suddenly floating around freely because the blocks
they used to be attached to were suddenly gone. This meant that the first order of business was to copypaste the Amanda
Tapping a few hundred meters away and cleaning up the mess left behind it.

Before recording the video linked earlier i took a moment to observe the mess i had created to save the ship. It was a proper
graveyeard scene is what it was, and wouldn't have looked out of place in the famous scene at Wolf 359 if i had just used the
painting tool to blacken up a few areas to mimick damage left behind by the Borg's Cutting Beam. It was in this strangely
peaceful moment that the idea of starting from scratch looked to, maybe, not be that bad an idea. A Galaxy 2.0, you might say.
But i wanted to give this a go. I owed this to the old girl. And frankly i still thought i was going to be faster cleaning up.

To my ever growing dismay i was unknowingly only prolonging the inevitable.
We may argue about what exactly caused the corruption - i maintain it was the changing of default... urhg... Rotor Displacement
distance, maybe it was something else - at this point it no longer matters. Whatever did it - it had by now taken hold in the
ship's very code like a bored paranormal phenomenon. While she displayed a very brim and proper behavior the Amanda
Tapping would soon once again cause game crashes. This would not have been so bad if the crashes had just been cases of
bad luck or overloading. Those happened too, particularly when shutting off Space Engineers. But i kept the performance-
intensive blocks to a minimum and a day or so later i finally found out what caused most of the ingame-crashes.

I had been intensifying the idea of a Galaxy 2.0 (then still just thinking of it as a new version of the Amanda Tapping built the
same way as the original one, maybe with sticking an -A after it's registry to honor the original i loved - and still love - so
deerly) and my research had led me to the official Enterprise D deckplans on Amazon. I had imediately ordered all three that i
could find (they were dirt cheap and second hand); while they were on the way another patch happened without fixing the
crashes.
The bug report was done and acknowledged. I had done everything in my power to save my poor baby from it's inevitable
demise, up to and including necromancy, but at this point even i realized that i was fighting an uphill battle, noteworthy because
there wasn't any hill to speak of in sight; i fought a ship that seemingly very deliberately did not want me to save it.

By coincidence the day the deckplans arrived i loaded up the Amanda Tapping, NCC-100431-nothing, silently waved goodbuy to
the burnt-out husk of her Deflector Dish and her unfinish but patches Nacelles.
With a heavy heart my Engineer (who i just now realize i never had any emotional connection with whatsoever, which should be
weird but somehow isn't) took the seat in the center and shut off the Navigational Blinkies. I told Space Engineers to exit the
world and, fittingly enough, the game crashed (which sounds like the beginning of a creepypasta but the game did that all the
time during that period, particularly when leaving a world or exiting the program).

During the next few chapters the Amanda Tapping was still up on the Workshop, and, somehow, despite very prominently telling
visitors that the ship was effectively cursed (and currently uploaded in a gutted state), still collecting a few dozen views per
week and even got downloaded.
It took me a while to do this because i was pretty damn proud of the numbers she had achieved and did not want to let go of
them, knowing full well that they were a fluke... but at the end, when i was already working on her successors and had already
managed to produce a good chunk of what would later become the Galaxy 3.0, i finally remembered that these numbers where
not why i put the ship on the Workshop. Recognition is a nice thing but ultimately this was about sharing the ship, and she was
no longer functioning.
I finally took the original Amanda Tapping Entry (and all of her numerous bug-report copies) off the Workshop as i did not - and
do not - feel that a ship this broken (and beaten back into a way earlier state of production) has any business displaying this
amount of praise. Because there was praise. Celestia, was there praise...


With that the story of the NCC-100431, at least chronologically, comes to a close. The next chapters will deal with her
successors who are all named in her honor. She has discovered numerous bugs, many of which have been fixed by now. She
was a proud member of an anonymous group of ridicilously oversized ships who still had an actual interior AND were capable of
movement, ever-trying to find new boundries to break through, damage on either side be damned. She spawned several ships
of the same name, many of them even in Star Trek Online where i made it a habit to designate all my Galaxy Classes after her
(after she herself had received her name from my tanking Dreadnought). The Amanda Tapping has done her part in "Space
Engineer"'s early development, as small as it may have been.

​

She deserves a rest.​

 

Chapter 4
The Galaxy 2.0 Project


A) The Galaxy Class Restoration Project
The NCC-100431-Copy

At some point during the attempted restoration of the original Amanda Tapping i had started making heavy use of Projector
Blocks to get the hull back into shape in a way that i hoped would be faster than by rebuilding her by hand. I had a good time,
actually; i went back to my love of building small craft and designed several primitive but fun Welding Barges.

​

At some point i had taken a bad turn and had welded myself into a corner. Realizing just how easy this was i started to grow interested in an experiment - welding the entire ship from a blueprint using giant walls of Welders:

I actually made a fair amount of progress with this and even continued patching up the Nacelles - but the really interesting part
was that i soon discovered that the newly materialized blocks did not possess the same crashy properties of the originals.
Once that had sunk in i immediately started to project and weld the Primary Hull as well.... which turned out to take forever.
And the size of the Welding Barge required for a clean job was playing havoc with my computer. I was not going to lose
another one to this game.
Having already begun work on two other ideas and flirting with an improved Vanilla Galaxy 2.0 anyway i abandoned this project,
but the method works, it's just horribly, terribly slow. Might come in handy in the future though. Once again the old girl tought
me something new, this time even from beyond the grave.


B) Small Ship Gone Wild
The NCC-100431-A

One of my side projects at that time - i would later retroactively make it part of the "Galaxy 2.0"-project - was something
completely nuts. This is a short entry, sadly, as i don't really have much to say about this construct; the picture below really
speaks for itself:

​

I must say, though, that i have never felt as creative as when i was whipping up crew quarters, bars and Escape Pod Modules
with small ship blocks. It just works sooo well. Sadly the game really can't handle small ships of this size. As you can see this
screenshot mods were in use, but even without them the RAM usage really didn't fall all that much. Though i knew i would
upgrade to 16 Gigs in the near future i wasn't going to invest any further time into a project that was more or less doomed from
the start.

C) U.S.S. Monsterprise NCC-1701-Hodor
The NCC-100431-B

Have you ever been annoyed by Space Engineers' large ship block size? I have. Because it's more or less impossible to REALLY
squeeze a deck into a single block's hight, at least if you actually, you know, want to have walls and consoles and beds and an
iron throne.
I pondered this a bit. I pondered. I wondered. And eventually i asked myself:
"How much bigger would a Galaxy Class starship have to be in order to squeeze it's decks in between TWO Blocks?"

About 150 percent of it's original size. ​

I don't think that the Monsterprise (a nickname she aquired, together with her tongue-in-cheek registry, on my TS3 server)
would be a big problem for the now vastly improved engine if it was an empty frame; however, when i started work on her
Decks 09 and 10 i really wanted to make use of my new deckplans and was already planning an empty hull for the regular-sized
Galaxy anyway - it would have been redundant to make another one in Plus-Size (and kinda pointless considering the fact that
having enough space for proper decks was the entire point). The heavy use of mods didn't eat as much performance as i would
have expected but it was still noticeable enough to abandon the project not much after these screenshots were taken. It's still
something that i want to persue in the future; I like breaking the engine.

As long as it doesn't break my computer.

 

Chapter 5
The Galaxy 3.0 Project


A) Not Even Once

Rotors.

I can swallow the treachery of Pistons - they are useful but i can do without them. I can forgive the drama-queen-tendencies of
Interior Lights and Spotlights - they had a rough childhood and their parent is still neglecting them.
But Rotors.
Oooh, the goddamn Rotors.

From Day 1 of the now officially (as official as a nerd can state such a term in front of two sceptical budgies, anyway) named
"Galaxy 3.0 Project" there were rules in place. (Don't worry, talking about the project was okay, and talking about the project
was fine too.) (I briefly considered the term "Amanda Tapping 3.0 Project" but that's not only too long, it also sounds like bad
Stargate lemonfic.)

The Rules were as follows:
Rule #1: No Rotors. Not even one. There will be no saving the file while a Rotor is present anywhere in the world.
Rule #2: No Pistons. Same deal.
Rule #3: Lighting Blocks cut down to the absolute minimum for Survival purposes. No Warp Nacelle illumination
unless possible without performance drop while turned off (this used to be a big issue as Spotlights would eat FPS and UPS like
nobody's business even when deactivated).
Rule #4: There shall be these versions: Replica, Hero, Budget, Vigilante and Empty Frame. Additional versions to be determined; construction starts with the Empty Frame.
_ Alpha) Replica: 42 Decks, Saucer Separation, Warp Core Ejection, Decoupling Nacelles, Detachable Bridge Dome Module, Self
Destruct Mechanisms. Survival Ready if possible.
_Beta) Hero: 21 Decks, no Saucer Separation, Warp Core Ejection, static Nacelles, static Bridge Dome Module, No Self
Destruct. Survival Ready at all costs.
_Gamma) Budget: minimal deck count (to be determined), no Saucer Separation, no Warp Core Ejection, static Nacelles, static
Bridge Dome Module, No Self Destruct, Little to no Lights. Survival Ready if performance allows it.
_Delta) Vigilante: variant of Budget redesigned with Space Engineers-PvP in mind. Minimal deck count (to be dertermined), no
Saucer Separation, no Warp Core Ejection, static Nacelles, static Bridge Dome Module, Self Destruct Mechanisms. Survival Ready
at all costs.
_Echo) Empty Frame: empty version of the basic Galaxy 3.0 and the foundation of all upcomming variants.
Rule #5: The health of the computer - and the file - must be and remain the uppermost important variable during production.
If FPS or UPS start falling below an acceptable amount imediate redesign must take precedent over all other considerations. If
"Render Overloaded" appears on the screen even once the entire project must be rolled back to a significantly earlier state.

Armed with this handfull of rules on i started work on the new ship that was yet to receive a name. I already knew that one of
the vessels would receive the beloved 100431-registry but i was not sure which one; the names would play ring-around-
the-rosie for weeks before finally setting in.
The first batch of 3.0s soon received their names; none of them worked out and in the end only the Amanda Tapping, one
generation later, would be actually in use (the other two names were Jennifer Hale and Amber Benson; the Hale made it far into
production but fell victim to performance issues as she was an early testbed for Replica; Benson eventually swapped names
with the Tapping and is now sceduled to be used for the nameless Nebula Class starship on my workshop).

Upon realizing that two of the Enterprise D Blueprints were in perfect condition and the third one only slightly damaged one of
the intact ones immediately went into storage as my backup copy. I kept the second intact set close-by, both for redundancy and
to be able to check a few things easier. The third, slightly imperfect set was sliced appart for easier ruler-use.
Working out the scale was a headache and a half because i didn't immediately catch on that there was a problem. The scale
displayed on the actual prints was blatantly wrong - in the end i worked out that one centimeter on paper was 9,2 meters on the
"real" ship. Which meant getting a new calculator because for the majority of the comming weeks thick layers of paper would
take over my desk, leaving me with little to no space to so much as use mouse and keyboard.
Still, totally worth it: in a few days the still nameless hull was taking shape:

Because each deck is supposed to be 3 to 4 meters tall but was built using 2,5 meter blocks the entire thing ended up way too
flat. I was now facing the challenge of inserting rows of blocks in places where they would
A) increase the ship's hight
but
B) not fuck with the angles that i was already fairly happy with.
In the end it came down to a a decision between the correct hight and aesthetics; eventually the looks lucked out as the "correct
hight" of the Galaxy Class is an entirely different bullshit alltogether anyway as nobody seems to agree on it - nobody but the
few that go with a hight of just under 200 meters which is at best questionable research and at worst impossible.
My own calculations lead me to between 135 and 145 meters, depending on the depiction. The Galaxy 3.0 is slightly narrower
because i couldn't find a way to insert more rows of blocks without breaking angles (which would have meant breaking the
Saucer appart and calculating the size of elliptic half decks - which i know i'd fuck up without even noticing it before it'd be too
late).

It's a decidedly unawesome solution to a decidedly unawesome problem but the difference is still smaller than the 20 meters the
original Amanda Tapping differed from the canon design; at least i improved and that's already something i can be happy with.

A) Empty Promisses
The U.S.S. Galaxy, NCC-70637-A
Workshop Entry: here.

​

Eventually the Galaxy received a name and was henceforth known as... U.S.S. Galaxy. Inspired by the ship that managed to
outlive both of it's sister ships AND survive the entire Dominion War i deemed it a good start to inspire future generations of
non-sentient, uninspireable Galaxies by naming their older sister after a survivor.

B) If You Like A Thing You Shoulda Put A Nacelle On It
The U.S.S. Lord Mirdalan, NCC-100437
Workshop Entry: here.

​

Stealing ideas from the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation i decided to do something i had always neglected with
the original ship: turning her into an All Good Things-style Galaxy-X Refit.
I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret of mine. You got that? It's a secret, don't tell. Come closer.

Closer.
Still closer.
Ready?

BUT YOU DIDN'T HEAR THAT FROM ME, 'KAY!?​

Real Talk; i obviously love that ship but that's the one area where i believe Mister Probert overdid it a tiny little bit; the entire space above the Nacelles is just... kinda empty. The third Warp Nacelle does WONDERS for this problem and i absolutely love the Galaxy-X-design; really, the only reason i don't prefer it to the regular Galaxy is - well, are - these stupid little horns to the left and right of the Bridge and the Torpedo Launcher behind it. I mean what even ARE they? They're probably no sensors because the Federation, by that point, usually puts them into Sensor Trenches (like the black line in the edge of the Galaxy-Saucer) or into giant Sensor modules. I've heard them called Megaphasers, but... i mean i get the concept of Overkill but when you have a Phaser Lance the size of a Constitution Class just HOW MUCH MORE DAKKA do you really need?

Bit of a tangent, i'm sorry. Where was i... ah yes, talking about the Lord Mirdalan. She's actually named after one of my budgies. Well, short of; his full name is His Grace His Excellency, the Duke of Bird, Lord Sir Scott Mirdalan Vogel von Wayne.
But that didn't fit on the Saucer.

C) Late To The Party
Nameless Nebula Class Vessel (File not updated yet; Workshop-file to receive the designation U.S.S. Amber Benson, registry to be determined)
Workshop Entry: here.

​

Originally just a side project the Nebula Class kitbash of the original Galaxy 3.0 slowly evolved into a proper third member of the
3.0 Family - the crazy cousin, so to speak, but you gotta invite him, you know. He knows things you don't want to get out.
By the time i found, ah, time to work on this i was already thinking about the next iteration of the Galaxy 3.0 and consequently
the Nebula Class took much, much longer to build than i had anticipated. She's fairly off in a few places because the entire thing
was built using visual measuring only; considering the parts are all to scale i felt that a few meters in the wrong direction here
and there wouldn't hurt and i'm actually somewhat proud of the result, as incorrect as it probably is.
Unfortunately i never found the time to properly label her, always wanted to do that later. However, with the Galaxy 3.0 Project
turning into the Galaxy 3.1 Project i no longer see myself going back to this design; any Nebula in the future is most likely going
to be a completely new 3.1 Kitbash. The only update to the Workshop File i'm still planning is giving her a proper name.

 

​

Chapter 6
The Galaxy 3.1 Project


The U.S.S. Amanda Tapping, NCC-100431-C
Workshop Entry: here.

Now, considering this is the most recent upload (following hot on the heels of the Nebula Class to make sure it's as outdated as
possibl as soon as possible!) i guess this is what most of you are here for - that is if anyone's clicking on and/or reading any of
this; i might be talking to myself here. Well, my birds are listening, i guess.

The 3.0's development was very easy on my nerves; techwise the biggest hurdles were the times when i had to copypaste huge
chunks of the hull, for example when experimenting with the Saucer Rim. You might have noticed that the rim is pretty damn
thick on the final 3.0. That was an outgrowth of trying to squeeze additional decks in to reach canon-hight (or whatever passes
as canon-hight this week) and while it reminds me a lot of the 4 Foot model of the Enterprise D (which get's a lot of shit but i
like it) it always felt... a little off. So when i was about to start work on the Hero version of the Galaxy 3.0 (then still intent on
calling her the Amber Benson, as reflected in one of the videos below) i left myself a little wiggleroom with the Saucer later on.

The very first order of business was indeed flattening the Saucer Rim back to three blocks (two slopes and one actual rim).
With one fell-swoop the entire 3.0-lineup was now visually incompatible with it's successor, necessitating an evolution in the
project's designation.

Another important change was a new Warp Nacelle design that incorporates the new-ish two-block-long-but-not-really-slopes.

One the more annoying aspects of building a Galaxy Class and trying to make it look like one is Andrew Probert's attempt to
drive me crazy thirty years after the fact. There's barely any streight lines on that ship and while the Nacelles LOOK streight on a
sizde glance they really are not; there's a curve to them that i was always unable to replicate.
(This is completely and utterly besides the point but looking for a good picture to demonstrate that curve i found a video of some
insane guy building a 1:1 scale Enterprise D in Starmade and that dude just schooled my ass so hard i now go through
flashbacks from being beaten up in between math classes. I mean jesus that's awesome...the ship, not the beating.)


Where was i.... ah! Nacelles.

The old Nacelle design attempts to replicate this but never really succeeded in that (i tried. Hard.). Also tried it with the new
ones but we're still lacking a few blocks for the two-block-slopes; it didn't really work even when i tried to hide the gap with
additional Running Lights. Eventually i went with the new design because most angles (except the front and the back, both of
which profit heavily from the new, now more oval shape) add the illusion of a slight slope anyway.

Another obvious thing (to you, at least) is probably the hull color. Some of you may or may not have wondered why the ships
are white. There's a reason - i'm colorblind (Go Team.).
At first i tried to get a grey coloring going but i soon gave up on being exact; the Heavy Armor Camo pattern (Camo IN SPACE!!!)
was ruining it anyway. Looking for hull color inspirations i found one in the Constitution Refit.
(Yes, i know it's got blueish and greenish color panels too. That streetlight is indeed green and no, i'm not going to tell you
which shade of red that green t-shirt is. Dickhead.)

At first i messed around with Light Armor Blocks to get rid of said pattern; the fact that it took forever even for the tiniest of
areas wasn't as big of an issue as my dislike for releasing a ship that wasn't going to be able to take care of itself; the Galaxy is
not a fast nor agile ship and not even armed properly - it's main defensive strengths lie in it's Deflector Shields, and that is ALL
i'm going to say about that particular topic.​

Aside from the Interior there is one last, big construction site on the outter hull of the ship (not counting parts that are
technically located on the inside but require cutting out holes like additional Cargo Bays, Windows and the Captain's Yacht): the Deflector Dish.
I swear that thing is harder to get right than the Nacelles. With the recent balance changes to Thrusters i will probably be able
to remove the two in Dish; Starfleet REALLY doesn't like visible sublight engines, do they.

Just earlier this week, shortly before uploading this baby to the Workshop, i also tried my hand at using the two-block-slopes to
smoothen out the Secondary Hull. Parts of it looked really cool but the rest... ugh. Not a fan. Might revisit that idea in the future
though.

(Ah, Space Engineers, always good for a laugh; not a day after telling everyone how well you behaved during the 3.0's development you crash on me out of nowhere. Proofreading-comments for the win!)

A few accompanying words on this video showcasing what little of the interior is ready for showings yet:​

Nothing is truely operational yet, with the possible exception of the Main Hangar Bay that isn't really supposed to be pressurized
all the time anyway. This is in part because of the unfinished air system.
Here's one of the many problems i ran into while building big - i don't know why, i don't know how but for some bizarre reason
Conveyor Blocks of all things have become a new evil in this land. They're not as bad as other offenders on the list i could
mention (grhjghhgr...) but considering they're kind of required for oxygen you need a shitton of them if you want to equip
every room on a ship of this size with a functioning Air Vent. I ran into that problem on an early prototype of the Replica
Variant; a few decks in i not only had the problem of running out of space (because you have to put those Conveyor Blocks
somewhere and that's usually on the deck below), i also ran out of UPS. Took me a while (and two redesigns trying to push the
deck limit down to what was supposed to be Budget-levels of unused room) to realize where the problem came from.
At first i thought this was going to be a huge problem but i'm still trying to assess the situation; i am now using a centralized
array of Air Vents to supply a sprawling system of, ah, Air Vents; that is: air tunnels built mostly with the Passage Block or
simply by surrounding an empty gridblock with other blocks to create a "pipe" of sorts. It's a massive waste of space but it
seems to work just fine, sooo who knows. It's an experiment. The downside, of course, is that it's rather easy for a single leak
to ruin it for everyone on board. So if you visit the Tapping, kids, take your Environmental Suit with you and pack the Duct Tape!

Leading from the Main Hangar Bay downwards on both sides are two short tunnels that channel into the two Shuttle Depots.
A far cry of the original; i hope they will at least work; i'm not particularly convinced Keen will ever make safe docking between
small and large grids possible. I'll be damned if i park a Shuttle there on my personal version...
Located at the front of each Depot is a little ressource bay where Shuttles will be able to load off and receive materials; the
Connectors and Collectors are currently not hooked up to the Ressource Grid which will hopefully change in one of the next
updates; it's kinda emberassing how they uselessly dangle from the ceiling and gape upwards. I simply haven't had the time yet
to think about how to work them into the Conveyor System of the Primary Hull's already existing Cargo Bays.

Speaking of which - they are designed to automatically distribute ressources into their respective Large Cargo Containers. This
works fine until you want to take something out of them without consulting them in person; i must do some proper testing on
that in the near future. I'm not really a Survival Player.

The Bridge Dome Complex is probably the only part that i would say is truely final; getting the ramp to work is a nightmare with
2,5 meters difference in hight and i highly doubt i'll be able to get a better version in this regard. It's not as good as the old one
(back in the day when i clamped small ship block structures to Landing Gears and used.... yach.... used Rotors... grrr. argh.) but
for what i have to work with i believe it went down fairly decently. Still needs Lights, though.

Main Engineering exists but is in a very unfinished state due to actually being a leftover from an earlier version of the ship. First
and foremost it needs to be refitted for the new oxygen-system; it still uses (well - used, i ripped them out in SE Toolbox)
Conveyors. The Warp Core Ejection System works... in theory; the fact that the ship is currently a station means it's just going
to stand there and explode in your face should the need arrise to eject it.

 

Chapter 7
Galaxy Wing 93 Reporting For F5 Frontline Duty

​

In one or two of the screenshots in this thread you may or may not have noticed ships of Starfleet-design that do not belong into
any of the Galaxy Classes (not counting the Nebula). I like to use those for background shots when i assemble fleets for beauty
shots (every time a rather performance-intensive enterprise, no pun intended). I think i mentioned earlier that i have picked up
the habit of building smaller ships as little side projects to take tiny vacations from a ship that was consistently reducing the
more important performance-related numbers into the single digit area. These ships are usually still intended to scale roughly
1:1 to their canon counterparts but there's a lot more winging involved; i usually figure out a few of the more vital
measurements and then go to town. I will not go into any real detail about these because, frankly, none of these are in any way,
shape or form ready for display and i list them here mainly for completeness-sake because i intend to no longer use the
Community Creations-Thread to spam my Starfleet ships and instead contain my Starfleet-spam in my own thread (unless i just
happen to use the ship i'm working on to demonstrate a problem or feature; since i'm mostly working on Trek-ships... well
yeah.).



A) The Rejected One
U.S.S. Lee Everett, NCC-2703
Constitution Class Refit
No Workshop Entry Available

​

This Constitution Refit was the only ship i did not build by myself; about two thirds to three quarters were built by my clone
when i talked him into buying Space Engineers. (For some reason he declined to work on the Amanda Tapping even though she
was still pulling 5 FPS at the time. Weird.)
While it looks okay from a few angles there is no denying that it is a very old ship in terms of Space Engineers' development.
I've been meaning to refit (no pun int... wait would that even be a pun?) and upload her to the Workshop but both time and the
overwhelming amount of truely breathtaking Constitutions that are allready available have made me rethink that endeavour time
and time again. I don't mind building the upteenth Constitution but i simply don't have the time to do it while i'm still wokring on
half a dozen other ships i like more.
​

B) The Cloned One
U.S.S. Sean Copeland, NX-1952
Miranda Class
Workshop Entry: here.

​

Honestly it's a bit shameless how much i abuse this little crittler for Fleet shots but i just love this baby. It looks fairly good for
what it's supposed to be, if i do say so myself, it doesn't eat much performance and it just fits in with everything. Sadly
incredibly outdated; she still uses.... blurgh..... still uses Rotors, if i remember correctly. I really need to fix that before she
corrupts herself too.​

C) The Unlucky One
U.S.S. Nexus, NCC-100452
Cheyenne Class
Workshop Entry: here.

Whenever i need something nice to blow up it usually hits the Nexus. I don't know why, it's just how these things gotta go,
y'know? Back in the day i started to build ships from the Wolf 359 Graveyard Scene; all the trouble with the Galaxies has
prevented me from comming very far in this regard but i managed to build two ships i'm really happy with: the Cheyenne Class
of this entry and the ship in the next. Both use the same standardized Saucer and profit heavily from the fact that many of the
Wolf 359 ships were Galaxy Class kitbashes. As far as Starfleet Canon designs go the Cheyenne is probably my second most
favorite class behind the Galaxy; i have long vowed that, should i ever truely take the time to refit a ship up to my current
standards, it's going to be the Cheyenne Class. (She too uses Rotors so it's a race against time, people!)

D) The Unnamed One
Unnamed New Orleans Class Vessel, No Registry.
New Orleans Class
Workshop Entry: here.

The second Wolf 359-ship to make it to the Workshop never actually received a name, which is a damn shame, but for smaller
ships like these i just never really find a fitting one. Building her was a ton of fun even when taking the fucked up Deflector Dish
in account - i somehow really suck at those, i dunno.

​

E) The Unusual One
Unnamed, Modded Freestyle Construct
No Canon Class Recognized
Workshop Entry: here.

What looks like the unholy spawn of an evil threesome conducted by Centaur, Nebula and possibly a semi-sentient bag of poppy
seeds is actually a heavily modified attempt of refitting the Cheyenne Class listed above. At some point during the effort the
entire thing developed a life on it's own and somehow added mods to itself. Totally not my doing. Weird. This is the by the way
the ship that received a working Phaser Lance by way of modding. It looks okay from this angle but horrendous from pretty
much all others.

​

F) The Tiny One
SC Sonnenburg, NCC-100431-C / SC 01
Type 6-EWSS Shuttlecraft Prototype (Approved for Mass Production and Refit Testing)
No Workshop Entry yet for the Shuttlecraft alone, but the Amanda Tapping's upload contains one.

With this one i had a lot of fun. Not really sure how to safely store them in the Depots yet (probable answer: i won't) but
building them.... Shuttles have been my weak point from the start Unfortunately i can spend entire weekend doing nothing
but... but this:

G) The Honorarily Mentioned One
Unfinished Akira Class Vessel
Akira Class.... sort of.
Worksh-... Nope. Find and play with your own corpse!

This unholy spawn of Satan didn't really bother spawning itself in it's sulfuric entirety and prefers to dangle it's innards out of
every available hole, of which it has either a lot or one really big one, depending on your choice about how to count the lack of
well over half of it's hull. With burnt out, un-bussarded Nacelles and stunted pylons this thing never got beyond the earliest
design stages. Still kinda like it, though.​

 

Chapter 8
The Importance Of Closing Doors

Galaxy 3.1 Status Update
23th August, 2015

Envigorated by the positive reception of both the first Work-In-Progress-Upload and the accompanying recount of past events in this very thread, Commander Rotal went back to work.

The first order of business was supposed to be an inspection of the Life Support System - a nobel cause immediately abandoned after loading up.
I get sidetracked a lot, actually, and while it may produce useable results (on ocassion, that is) it usually ends up annoying me greatly as it makes sticking to a goal rather hard.

This time's offender: the ship's behind.
Generally i accept everything i do as "as good as i can do it right now" and even finished sections of the ship are technically placeholders until i get another idea to improve upon them; nobody is save on this boat
and for some areas (like the ever-redesigned Bridge) a file corruption seems to be the only chance for a bit of rest, which explains way more than i'm comfortable thinking about.
One of the bigger problem areas is the entire Secondary Hull. The Galaxy is smooth pretty much everywhere but the sloping lines of the Secondary deserve special mention.
Naturally the block-shaped nature of Space Engineers has reared it's ugly head more than once while building there and i always have ideas about improving it later on the backburners.
Usually they take a backseat because the Secondary Hull is going to get it's due makeover once the interior is done, but every now and then i look at this part of the ship and go: "this is ugly. Stop being ugly. Stop looking like a mayan step pyramid."

Somehow - sleep deprivation may or may not have something to do with it - i got it into my head to finally do something about at least the angle of the slopey part of the aftward underside, the part
that has Cargo Doors that never got used. (The Galaxy Class has a lot of unused features. That's one of the reasons i love it so much; it may be Magic Bullshit Science but it's well thought out Magic Bullshit Science.
At least on paper and until writers get ahold of said paper to subsequently completely ignore it. )
Working with the long two-block-but-not-really slopes is both a joy and a pain because when they interlock they look really awesome - and when they don't you end up with situations where you just want to
throw your controller against a wall, even when not using one. We simply lack a few of the more obscure connection variants to make them work in these situations.
Observe:

To be perfectly honest i don't like the new version very much - buuut i like the old one even less so it's staying for the time being. Eventually i plan to include Cargo Doors in that area and it needed smoothing-out anyway.
Don't appreciate how much it differs from the canon angle (note how the lower end extends too far back). This video shows the new design a up close and overall better than the overpainted picture above:

Shortly afterwards i actually started working on what i was planning to do.
By itself a novel occasion i quickly learned something semi-new: i had done good work on the Air Ducts in the past.
Apparently i had, at some point, opened a few doors (presumably to let fresh air in); when i prepared to check for leaks i told the Control Panel to close all of them while taking a selfie in the Meeting Room.
After refreshing the Keen Forums i tabbed back into SE and to my surprise found oxygen floating around Treebeard.

So basically the entire description of the initial update was a hat full of lies.

My previous constant talking about the Life Support Systems not working properly in mind i installed new Sensors to keep the Shuttle Depot Access Tunnel Doors closed
to ensure that Oxygen downtimes stay as low as possible - while most of the ship's interior will be, basically, one giant connected room filled by an array of central Air Vents, some areas, like
the Main Hangar Bay and Sickbay, have their own indipendant Air Vent batteries. Thanks to the quirks of SE's air calculations this had... interesting results:

I also finally installed Interior Lighting for the Shuttle Depots and tested the new Sensors. There was a bit of a hickup with another set of them that i just shut' off later (there might be an interesting suggestion
of merging Sensor fields to be had here!). Overall i am fairly happy with the Shuttle Depots, allthough they look a bit plain and empty without Shuttlecraft stored in them (Not even once).
I've been thinking about some decoration but without mods or small blocks... i don't know...
Having Sensors do their job might not be the hight of excitement but having something work out is so rare on this project that i found it worth mentioning.

After fixing the non-existent problems with Life Support there was only one thing left before i felt the changes big enough to warrant an upload: connecting the two Depots' Ressource Bays to the Ressource Grid.
That didn't take particularly long considering the process only involved throwing down a few Conveyor Cubes; the noteworthy part here is that i checked if the grid was functioning properly - and found that it did not.
The problem was that the Conveyor Sorters were set to suck in their respective ores and ingots but had a connection back into the Refiniers; the Sorters couldn't function as one-way-streets because the Refineries
acted as a detour. As a result my Cobalt-test ingots got sucked into the Sorter, went into their Cargo Container and then got sucked back out of them and made a beeline streight back into their Conveyor Sorter.
Ad infinitum.

Having become a master of breaking cycles by playing Mass Effect 1 and 2 (and parts of 3 before The Crash Of 2014 happened) for my 1-person-audience-Youtube-Channel i found a bandaid solution by
cutting the connection to the Refineries and installing a single additional Sorter in each Cargo Bay that lets only ores through.
Storage works fine now but i don't know yet how that will work out for the Assemblers. They have an unsorted connection to the storage units so that should be fine.
I need proper testing on that one. Any volunteers?


That should bring you up to the current upload status.
To add a tiny bit more substance to this post i have included these two screenshots of the first completely new addition since the original upload: the Chief Medical Officer's Office and the Intensive Care Unit.

I have plans for a Surgery Theater and Medical Storage as well and may even be able to salvage those from a blueprint i made a while ago. However, there's a bit of a hickup.
As you see in the screenshots the UPS stay high and rarely drop below 50 (staying usually between 58 and 63, only dropping when the game has to do some physics stuff). FPS, however, have dropped to a point i'm just
barely comfy with anymore (they tend to be much more varied than the UPS and have gone down to 9 FPS in one extreme case - i immediately exiled the offending Spotlight and replaced it with an Interior Light).
I feel like the Primary Hull may not be able to support much more features. I will evaluate this further once i have the Sick Bay Complex and a few Crew Quarters done.


Chapter 8, Supplemental
A Taste Of Things To Come

After finishing the two main features of the Sick Bay Complex i decided to take a short break and play around with natural gravity.

Chapter 8, Supplemental's Supplemental
A Taste Of Things To Cut

I have decided to severly cut down on the Surgery and Medical Storage Room in favor of trying to fit a few Crew Quarters in.

 

Chapter 9
Tired Rotal Is Tired

Galaxy 3.1 Status Update
29th of August, 2015

I feel a little obligated to keep this thread up to date buuuut i'm warning y'all
right from the start - this chapter is a bit on the light side in terms of features (and also a bit dry in terms of words.).
Got a bit sick this week, had a bit of a blood sugar thing, i may or may not feel like crap because of
new meds, yadayadasomethingsomethingboringRLstuffetc.
Point is I didn't get as much Space Engineers in as i would have wanted to had i wanted to, and
i decidedly didn't want to as focusing on not throwing up all over my keyboard was higher of my list of priorities,
particularly because the poor thing is already stained and crusted with blood from my daily blood sugar measuring.

With that out of the way here's a short breakdown of what you got today: the Sick Bay, appropriately enough; modest Crew Quarters; a bit of insight into the inner workings of the Amanda Tapping's air ducts and a short video about sticking it to the man (which is a fancy and selffelating way to announce that i have started looking into Telefragging a good year or two later than anyone else. Makes for good drama, though.).


A) Doctor's Quarters: The "Crew Deck"

Today's update is more or less split into two areas: the Sick Bay Complex and the Crew Quarters, collectively known as
"The Crew Deck" as i don't have a final deck count yet.
Aside from one necessity of Survival (a lonely Medical Room Block in the Intensive Care Unit) the Crew Deck, in it's entirety,
has one major role: giving the sense of being on board a starship. Admittedly it's too small to really convey the feel of a
Galaxy Class but literal corners have to be cut in order to keep the ship running.
The lousy highlight of the Sick Bay Complex is the Intensive Care Unit (the part of Sick Bay that is usually referred to as...
ah... the Sick Bay on the shows).
Equipped with a Primary Bio Bed, four secondary ones, showers and toilets it's a prime example of the hackjobs i have to employ now that i no longer use the.... ghhhrhrrrrotor-Trick anymore.

I'm wondering if a Landing Gear wouldn't represent the primary Bio Bed more accurately...
​

While the ICU is complete in terms of it's "features" (which mainly boil down to the Medical Room Block,
an independant Air Vent for emergencies and a bunch of Cryo Blocks and Passenger Seats for the same reason) i'm
going to take another look at it's visuals at some point down the road; you know, try to see what block i can bastardize
for what equipment and maybe even tinker with the colors. I quite like the blueish tone i gave the Interior Lights but knowing
my eyes they're probably pink. Which i'm very much fine with, thanks for asking. Pink is an awesome color.

To the upper left: Treebeard standing behind the CMO-office's windows. Not in picture: Spider-Man operating the camera from a ceiling-corner.
​

Neither the Waiting Room nor the Chief Medical Officer's Office (no wonder they shorted that) are anything
to write home about; they just highlight how much we really, truely need some interior decoration.
This room BEGS for a few potted plants!

Medical Storage and Surgery Room are both visible in the following video but unremarkable and really only there to... well, to be there, to tell you the truth.​

​

One thing that becomes imediately apparent (besides the lack of an audio track; thanks for that, Youtube*) is the
choppy, stocky, viscous and somewhat honey-y nature of the video. No, you're not seeing things, your eyes do not deceive you;
performance is getting worse with each new section and the impact is starting to grow.
This is one of the reasons why Surgery and Storage are so tiny, actually; i had to weigh my options. In the end, the
Crew Quarters lucked out.

The Crew Quarters themselfs are a blueprinted relic from one of the last few iterations of the Galaxy 3.0 Project.
Only one block high and with very little in the way of comfort they at least offer four beds (well... you know...) with
some degree of privacy, two showers per module plus a toilet and a movie theater.

Singlehandedly the most useless feature on the ship, but damnit, Godzilla's airing.

​

B) Inner Workings: A Short Exploration Of The Ship Via Spectator Mode

Just something i threw together to showcase how i do the oxygen distribution; someone asked a week or so ago
and i thought "why not abuse Fraps?". Generally i have to say that the Air Ducts have been a great success so far
and have probably singlehandedly bought me enough performance to install the Crew Quarters. It's a fairly
primitive solution but it works surprisingly well.
​

This might be as good a time as any to heartily apologize for the short length of this update post; the nature of
today's additions really don't give me much to work with and to be honest i really only am posting all of this
because i just know i'd forget about it if i waited for the next big thing (which is probably going to be Officer's Quarters,
the Sunkiller Bar aaaaand the little thingy i'm showing you in the next section; after that i'll start polishing the Primary Hull,
with the Secondary becomming the focus immediately after that).
And, to be blunt, i'm tired; i'll be sleeping by the time anyone reads this. I can already see me going over this tomorrow
morning, frantically rewording sentences to avoid word repetition and clear things up a bit D:​

C) Telling Physics To Shove It: First Telefragging Tests

Yeah, yeah, Rotal's late to the party, bite me. I never really considered Telefragging - i would rather have
a more immersive Teleporter that fits the SE-universe, but so far no luck on that front -, mostly because i'm
scared shitless of Thrusters fireing in such tight spaces.
To my delight, however, it turns out that Small Thrusters can fire streight into Passage Blocks - and
unobservant Space Engineers - without turning the surrounding area into a repeat performance of
Salvador Dalí's The Persistence Of Memory.
It's a rather primitive, early version of what i have in mind (among other things i want to fiddle around with the
arrival-chamber to try and turn it into a regular transporter pad; no idea if that'll be possible), but seeing it work
in Survival was delightful.
And corpsy. MAN was it corpsy.


Chapter 09, Supplemental
Setting Sails: Early Captain's Yacht RnD

One of more annoying outgrowths of exiling them from my ships is the (perceived) inability to savely carry small ships with me; i know people say they can make it work with Connectors and Landing Gears but personally i don't buy it; every time i try it turns at high speeds fuck me over and the attached ships go bye-bye. (Not that the ship is going to take part in parcours-challenges anytime soon.)
So while the Galaxy is offering ample room to store small ship Shuttles there's not actually going to be a stocked Depot - i will offer a few small craft later on but you'll have to park them at your own risk - which is a damn shame as a filled-up Shuttle Hangar looks awesome.
Unfortunately, simply using large ship Shuttles is not an option - the ceilings are simply not high enough.
However, there is ONE place on the ship where that is merely a secondary concern as the floor is open: the bay for the Captain's Yacht.

They like to hide their giant AAA-batteries right behind that hatch.​

I now plan to include a Captain's Yacht for planetary landings; it'll be hard to design one considering we don't have actual planets to test them yet but with a Natural Gravity mod i was able to whip up this:

Very, very early state, obviously, and for the docking bay i'll have to do some redesigning but it looks good for now.




* This video used to have two songs running in the background; usually Youtube will just monetarize
the video and i'm fine with that considering i wouldn't make any money off Youtube anyway; however,
with this one Youtube decided to block it in some countries, and i'm not cool with that.
So - off with the head; it's silent now and i think i'll just go with SE's own soundtrack in the future.

 

So the Tapping can't load as a ship anymore and/or crashes the game when turning her into one.
I made a bug report about it and got a quick response.
Well...

...shit.


(quote is from Phand, not tagged to avoid spamming her. Him. Them. Whatever.)

 

I turned up expecting my new ship to be ready Rotal! Havok?....HAVOK?!? I'll give you Havok!

 

Yeah, i dunno... i'll probably turn my thoughts into Chapter 10; at least i got more to talk about this week :/

 

Just keep building as a station until the game supports more blocks?

 

It's not a problem of optimization; the ship actually runs remarkably well since this week's patch. No, it's got to do with the game's physics engine Havok, which is a licenced engine that's already done; stick a fork in it, you can eat it now. There's nothing they can do to help Havok handling more blocks.
Continueing the ship as a station as long as i can is one of the options i'm contemplating at the moment.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen: we are now cheating.


To quote the good Dwarf Lord:



edit: however, we are not moving because all the Thrusters are in the wrong section. Still. I can work with this.
edit 2: anyone know how to make Connectors more stable? Something with scripts, maybe? Or is it as simple as having a Timer Block auto-connect it every other second?
edit 3: okay, at this point i'm calling No-Way on the block numbers-thing.

60 FPS and 60 UPS in a ringstructure set to Ship with almost 300thousand blocks (the Tapping has only 180-198thousand Blocks, depending on which file you look at).

 

Chapter 10
Also Sprach Commander Rotal, Part 1


1.) Letter: From The Past

An update to inform the flock about how i'm going to handle deez nuts.
I took a few days off to collect my thoughts, make plans, through them out the window, make new ones, ignore them again, write letters to my future self,
waited for answers and have finally made a decision. Kinda. More like a battle plan, really.

As established i have some serious doubts about the blocknumbers being the actual reason for the crashing so technically i do believe that it would be possible to salvage the progress i made offline.
However, that would (most likely) involve Keen helping out and so far i haven't been able to get Phand to respond, so outside of bumping the bug report
(https://forums.keenswh.com/threads/0...s-upon-loading-world.7367101/#post-1286828381 ; i'm not usually one to grub for posts but every friendly bump would be appreciated there.) i won't sit around with my thumbs up my backside photon torpedo launcher and wait for help anymore.
I don't know yet if i'm going to finish the ship as a station and hope for a miracle sometime down the line (i could upload it to show people what i had in mind, at least, though frankly even this skeletal
approach to interior design is a far cry from what i initially wanted, soooo i dunno...) but i have two emergency plans of varying priority for the upload file.


2.) Plan Number One: Clone It

Number One is a streightforward attempt to teplicate the cloning via Welders that i already tried on the original Amanda Tapping.
The hope here is that whatever is crashing the 3.1 is a problem with the ship's blocks and would not get carried over to a newly built version.
The main issue with this approach is that it may very well work but will take forever to print; i've got several hundred Welders working on it but every new line of blocks takes several minutes to print
because the game doesn't like the process very much (and for some reason the Projector's "Print Block" option simply won't do anything so it's manual or nothing).
I expect this try to take several days to a week, depending on how much hours per day i can handle being bored to death; loading the world alone takes a good ten to fifteen minutes.

However, as one might expect, a printing Rotal is not a building Rotal so until this experiment is over any work on the ship's interior (any version of it) is on hold (to symbolize this i have added a Breakbird-mask to my avatar).
Should this undertaking yield any fruits i shall continue work on the version of the ship i have currently on my PC (i may show you what i added below); if the crashing continues i shall
proceed with Plan Number Two.


3.) Plan Number Two: Gut It

Also known as the "Fuck This Shit"-method, Plan Number Two goes back to the absolute essentials for Space Engineers Survival and will mostly consist out of ripping out
everything not needed for actual play which would spell the definite doom of all Crew Quarters and the Holodecks. In an attempt to cut down on complexity and blocks i would also rip out the
Resource Deck and simplify it, the same for the Shuttle Depot which would then probably only consist of one small room right behind the Main Hangar Bay.
The Bridge would stay as-is, mostly due to it's size, and the Sunkiller Bar (not implemented in the online version) will most likely continue to exist, even if it's deck would then boild down to a long corridor.
As for the Secondary Hull: Plan Number Two sees a significant simplification of the Secondary, starting with eliminating Saucer Separation and probably getting rid of Main Engineering.
While the former will still find it's way into the ship as an emergency measure (likely via explosives or Grinders) the removal of the latter hurts me more than losing the quarters, but considering
Main Engineering contains not a single SE-gameplay-related feature i cannot justify it's further existence. Not with a looming Block Count-limit.
The main reason i'm doing away with Saucer Reintegration is this: at first i wanted to connect Primary and Secondary with Connectors (duh) which seemed to work nicely at first...
until i realized that in this case i would not only have to find a way to make those things idiotproof (i do NOT trust them at higher speeds; i'd probably have to do something clever
with scripts or Timer Blocks), with Connectors i would also carry a second, giant spaceship with me - so i'd always have to have one section push or pull the other one without using
it's counterpart's Thrusters. This doesn't sound appealing - or practical - to me, and considering the connecting area isn't to my liking anyway i might just scrap the Separation in it's entirety no matter how this turns out.

Other things that will probably bite the bullet are the Nacelles' Interior Lights - it's not like they do their jobs anyway - and potentially the Meeting Room, though it's so small i reckon it wouldn't make
that much of a difference.

As a final bit of doom and gloom: i am contemplating the use of mods.

Now, don't get carried away too quickly; i am mainly thinking about a single mod that would reduce Gyroscope numbers, to be introduced and tested when everything else is completed.
The recent tweaks to Thruster performance may or may not make this unnecessary from a gameplay viewpoint but she still needs a metric fuckton of 'em and cutting down on that
is always an improvement for everyone involved (excluding the Gyros, of course. It'd be one of the gentler forms of genoside.).


4.) I Have Such Sights To Show You
The Liveliest Non-Live Updates You Will Find This Side Of The Rubicon

As i try to shoehorn a way to melodramatically refer to the usage of mods as "Acceptance" to reference yet another Silent Hill song i have noticed that the automated welding ship in SE has made good
progress: the picture above was taken when i started typing this post and by now almost the entire portside half of the Saucer is complete (well, the hull is; because the world is lagging so badly i have
not yet taken the time to see how many blocks the Welders didn't catch on the inside). And through the magic of the forum saving early drafts without me having to lift a finger i am sitting here, a day later, not even breaking paragraph, babies, and i've almost printed the entire thing out now, only a tiny bit of the Saucer's edge and the Nacelles need to be printed:

Can't wait to try turning this into a ship! Probably won't work. Still, gotta try. Instead of spamming the thread or updating this post after people may have read it already i'll just leave this post open
and update as i go along the project and click on Post Reply once this is over. A.... post-live live feed, so to speak! Shocking reveals! Action! Drama! Romance! And maybe even More Budgies!

​

Two and a half Hellraiser movies later (thanks, youtube!) a clone of the Amanda Tapping has finally emerged, just with her Nacelles clipped a bit. Whatever outcome this experiment will
bring, the ship shall receive it's own unique name - so, by all means, welcome with me the U.S.S. Repli-Carter, NX-100431-Kappa.

It probably won't have helped a bit but i enjoyed the experience of printing a ship like this immensely; even after the inevitable crash i will go back and finish the good girl off.
However, that will have to wait. First test to see if we can turn this baby into a proper spaceship.

​

Well. Fuck me with a bag of hammers.​

Chapter 10, Suplemental
Also Schwieg Commander Rotal

Unfortuntately the ship crashed again while filling in the last few blocks the Welders didn't catch; i guess at least i now know the rough number of Blocks the ship sustains :/
'twas fun but the Repli-Carter will be retired immediately and i shall start work on Plan Number Two tomorrow.
Maaaaybe i can get away with only deleting the Crew Quarters but i doubt it. We'll see.

 

By Celestia, this thread needs a page nr. 2 to not loading all that pictureness D:
Anyway, i'm still waiting for Thursday to reinstate the glorious rule of two-digit FPS counts for a better update video (and,
maybe, for a lighting fix) BUT i wanted to gather a bit of input on something.

Mainly: the Neck and Secondary Hull.


See the problem?
Actually you see a bit of a distorted problem; because SE doesn't offer a 2D-renderer (yet) the Neck, Secondary Hull and Nacelles are a bit smaller than they should be for a proper comparison but the situation is still clear: the Neck is too short and the Secondary Hull needs a do-over.

What i'm mulling over right now (with terrible, terrible FPS) is how much i need to change the Neck.


Here's what the ship looks like right now on the workshop. (Well. If you took the ship and cut it in half, i didn't upload the
Starfleet-equivalent of a carved christmas turkey. I think.) The too-flat Saucer aside i'm actually quite happy with everything that
isn't the Secondary Hull though the Neck sits too far back, could do with less hunching and needs to be taller.
Independant from other concerns i'll have to redesign the Secondary (perhaps even from the ground up) and i'll try to see what
happens if i move or extend the Neck forward in an attempt to give the Saucer a bit more bulk... but i'm not sure if i should
touch the Neck's hight.

Extended by two blocks the ship looks now like this:





I don't know, i like it but at the same time i'm worried that it might throw off the ship's visual balance. I've made my peace with
the fact that this thing will never be perfect, i'd rather it looks good on it's own.


Edit:


*tap's against monitor*

Dear Keen,

could we get a block for that? Or get rid of the goddamn black lines around blocks, please?
'cause this looks ass. You're slapping four black line-asses onto my ship. On both sides.

Please stop assing my ship.

Thank you.


Signed
Commander Rotal A. Henricsson.


Edit 2: Trying to come up with alternative ideas:



Edit 3: The Secondary is starting to look more like a bathtub...



Edit 4: She IS taking shape from some angles, though:


Still needs some work on the sides to get this sleek curve of the Galaxy Secondary Hull. And the Deflector Dish is in dire need of a rework too, but it's starting to improve.

Edit NUMBER 5 dadadada daaaaaaa da dadadada dadadada.... Mambo Number 5?

Anyone?

No?
Shit i'm old...



Anyone else miffed that the ramp edges don't have that idiotic SPACE CAMO pattern? Look, if you insist on heavy armor having that at least be consistent.

Edit 6:
I just successfully Saucer Reintegration that's actually somewhat realistic instead of going just a few blocks up and down i pasted it into the world underneath the Saucer and had to manually realign the thing. As you may have guessed i thus attached the new Secondary Hull to the old Primary Hull and while i misjudged the length of the neck (i probably should have gone with a length increase of five blocks instead of two) i believe it's definitely an improvement:


I moved the slope at the end of the Secondary forward and more or less redid the entire bow of it as well. The angle of the bow is relatively noncanon but right now i'm happy with the improvements, even if it doesn't look as good as it (probably) could. I also installed a completely new Deflector Dish and redesigned the Deflector Dish Bay, though i screwed it up and it - AGAIN - ended up too small.


Yeah, yeah, i know, not much difference.

 

I thought i'd make a quick satus update on the project.
As some of you may or may not be aware there was a bit of a hickup in regards to my PC again - nothing big this time, just a
busted RAM bar and apparently it wasn't even a new problem. We ended up replacing it and a broken fan and the poor baby is
now running at full capacity once more; a week of downloads and updates later i'm now able to invest more time into the Galaxy
again. I managed to backup all of my SE-saves before having to reinstall Windows (a tiny price to pay for a running system i must say)
but upon installing Space Engineers and testing the structural integrity of my files i realized that one of the last two patches
broke something with the engine; the ship now produces seemingly random drops in UPS. I'm trying to track down the problem
(seems like it's related to a broken block; i detected problems with the Airtight Hangar Blocks but deleting those didn't fix the issues)
and until it's fixed i'll try to avoid using whatever's causing it (i suspect Conveyors as i'm currently investigating the empty Secondary
Hull where the problem doesn't appear, but i'll use SE Toolbox for further tests). If it's too big of a problem i'll probably continue to
take a bit of a break; i've started another GTA 5 playthrough on my 360 during my forced PC-break (that thing has paid off waaaay
too many times considering how often my computer seems to crap itself) and both Life Is Strange and Tales From The Borderlands
demand my attention for all five unplayed episodes, and Resident Evil Revelations 2 demands my attention with Barry being awesome
and Claire's ass being awesome and Raid Mode being... well, enjoyable for the most part, let's keep this realistic.

As for the Secondary Hull: i've been toying with layouts before the RAM bar broke and so far i've made a few decisions, but nothing
concrete yet. If i can isolate and cut out the UPS-eating block (if there is one, they might just simply broke Havok for all I know) expect
a Hydrogen-Thruster update for the Impulse Enginges soon, maybe even swaping Doors with the new ones (those look so damn tasty!),
but other than that it might take me a while until i get back into the game fully.

I might rename this thread to "Commander's Log: Rotal's Diary". Or "Core Breach - The Woes Of PC Master Race Gaming".

Edit: yeeeah apparently it's "all blocks with Conveyor Connections" - I've been able to get rid of the slowdowns
next to Missile Launchers and Large Reactors by... deleting Missile Launchers and Large Reactors.
Think i'm gonna sit this out until next Thursday. Somebody make a bug report about this; i'd do it myself but
they'd just tell me to build smaller again. Yes, i'm still pissed about that.

 

Nice read!
I don't know why but I've always had a soft spot for the Miranda. I always think of it as the little ship that could for some reason lol. I know it's been reclassed role wise depending on which game or set of lore (tv series, movies, books, etc) its in several times but I seem to remember the Miranda being a destroyer in "Birth of the Federation" and I used to spam them like crazy to protect my borders and fight early enemy invasions. It was cheap, quick, and did the job.

For some reason as soon as I saw "The Unusual One" I thought "Nebula Prototype", I could picture that ship in TNG as a one off prototype ship used for some top secret experiment .... still miss that show.

I wish I had your patience with making ships

EDIT: "Nebula Prototype" Not Galaxy ... think I had Galaxy on my mind when originally writing this post.

 

@Fenris i actually do share the love for the Miranda. Wrath Of Kahn sharing the top spot for favorite Trek movies with 6 and 8 certainly helps but it's such a classic design, it's timeless. While nothing will ever top the Galaxy in my book it seems the older i get the more ships my head embraces as great designs; i used to look down on the Nebula, for example, but it's grown on my immensely after standing in an empty Galaxy; it's quite hard to really appreciate how much space that neck saves during construction.

 

Look who we found! Poor thing needs some love. Can i keep her?





(I was going to type up a post regarding the recent Galaxy 3.1 Update but as it happens the video tour i made of it is already outdated again D: Will proooobably do this later this week. MAYBE with another Galaxy Update; pretty consumed by work on the Excelsior right now. Started work yesterday and while i'm not happy with some of the details i do enjoy the overall shape. Not bad for a few hours.)

 

@Commander Rotal I have been most impressed with your dedication in bringing the star trek ships to SE But now you've gone and done it! You've created my favourite ST ship - The great experiment - The Excelsior! NCC-2000 Please for all that's holy say your going to put it on the workshop? Pretty Please?

Best Regards

 

Oh, you, stop it ^^

Ahm, two things: she's not technically the Excelsior, i just haven't pinned down her name and registry yet. As for the Workshop... weeeeeeell technically she already is ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575827215 ) BUT she's the same unfinished work in progress version you see in the screenshots, i suggest waiting for a proper release - the file on the Workshop is part of a bug report. (I'm mostly done with her exterior; still need to tweak the Nacelles, put in the side-Plasma Grill (or whatever the hell that thing is, i would assume the actual Plasma Grill is the stuff on top), the Impulse Engines, the Bridge Dome is missing, the Deflector is missing, the Shuttle Bay and that little weird thingy on top of the Pylon bar needs building and, of course, she has no neck yet) But still, if you want, download it and modify it to your liking!

In-Post-Update!
I did more work on her and we're about a day or so away from release, i think, depending on how much these freezing-issues piss me off tomorrow (edit: or today... shouldn't have jinxed it.) D: Still needs a few details done (the girl needs proper Thrusters, i haven't nailed down where to put the RCS Thrusters yet, we need more Reactors, Gyros, i'll have to think of a name and to be honest i don't quite like the Shuttle Bay and Deflector yet. And the Bridge could use a slight rework too, i guess).
Click the Spoiler for some Excelsior love.

 

Thanks Rotal take your time with it-no rush

 

I need ship names. Three or four. Canon-y sounding ones but don't have to be super serious.

In fact i'm in constant need of ship names. I'm starting to run out of my first batch of Galaxy names. Haven't actually BUILT or labeled all of them but most are - or have been - asigned to a specific Galaxy variation at some point in time and i find reusing ship names... offensive towards the ship*. There's a reason the Tapping carries a C.

In case anyone wants an update of the great experiment:



Only a little body work left to do. And labeling. We need a vanilla lettering system SO. DAMN. MUCH. This business with the LCD screens is... annoying. Let's say annoying.

* You can laugh now.

 

So, we heard you like starships...
(Do not attempt in actual game. I have used elite hacker skills to produce this Paint-picture.)​

Chapter.... ah... 11, i think
Also Sprach Commander Rotal*, Part 2

I'd ask "miss me yet?" but i haven't exactly gone anywhere so that'd just me comically playing up my own unimportance by ironically implying importance, which is an old joke and nobody laughs about it.
So. Update Post. Been a while.
I can't quite say there's any ONE reason for the delay, and frankly i hate it when content creators apologize for them unless they actually deliver on the promise on actually doing stuff more often in the future, and i can't quite promise that because i don't know, maybe my PC catches fire within five minutes; you never know what happens. So let's just mention technical problems, a bit of boredom with the Galaxy 3.1 Project in general (but, as it happens, not with SE in general), health issues, other games, another other game, the desire to play something with a story again and, of course, the notion that finishing the Amanda Tapping is starting to feel like an obligation and something i HAVE to do for myself. (It always felt like work, but i don't mind work if it's something i like to do.) I found that taking breaks leads me to actually want to go back and work on her; the breaks keep getting longer but eventually i'm always comming back to her, so for now the strategy is working - and we're close to being done anyway. Today we're going to discuss a few big topics, plus i'm going to offer a question to my esteemed audience (which will most likely not answer, i know you guys).


"Gravity Is A Harsh Mistress."
Planetary Crash Videos

My inactivity in this thread (and, incidentally, on the Workshop) might be indicative of the break i spoke about above, but truth be told i still spent quite a bit of time playing Space Engineers, dividing my attention mostly between three activities: testwork on the Amanda Tapping (mostly regarding the Neck), playing around with Planets and smashing starships into said Planets. Naturally i've posted most of them in random places but i find this an opportune time, place and, ah, opportunity to list them all again in chronological order. Click the Spoiler! Do it.

"Captain, This Is An Almost Completely New Amanda Tapping!"
Galaxy 3.1 Improvements: The "Hydrogen Thruster and Planets"-Update
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=501767620

Jebus, it's been SO long since the last update... doesn't mean i wasn't budy with SE too when i found the time but it DOES mean i kinda forgot what the last build before this one already contained, and being the bright young lady that i am i uploaded the new version
a week ago, so i can't go and check. Brilliant strategy, Past-Me.
Well, a LOT of aforementioned downtime was actually sunk into nailing down what i currently consider to be the final (or overall-final, except for MAYBE the Secondary Hull's backward-half) shape of the outside hull, with only minor tweaks following.
Last week's update focused mostly on a bit of cleanup and updating.

-) There has been some heavy remodeling of the Secondary Hull to smooth out a few of the nastier edges. I tinkered with quite a few different files and tested shapes so i honestly kinda lost track of what the last one had but i'm PRETTY sure the entire Deflector Dish assembly
is new too.
-) Slight remoddeling of the Neck. It used to be a much bigger change and i almost uploaded her like that but a last minute decision made me rethink that choice. And for the better; while the neck is not, strictly speaking, the correct canonical shape, it has not only grown on me,
i also believe that it works very well with the overall shape of the Space Engineers-representation of a Galaxy Class vessel. Notwithstanding new blocks the Neck, along with the shape of the Saucer, Pylons and Nacelles, is probably final as-is.
-) Added placeholders for future potential windows and corresponding illumination. Tests have shown that the current lighting situation is not conductive to pretty window lights, though that might change. I hope it changes. Lit' ships are beautiful.
-) Replaced the hidden Thrusters inside the Primary Hull with hidden Hydrogen Thrusters and added an assortment of Hydrogen Tanks. While she won't be winning any twerking contests in the near future i am quite happy with the increase of acceleration in pretty much all directions.
-) Every so slight redesign of the Primary Hull Impulse Engines to replace the Ion Thrusters with Hydrogen Thrusters.
-) The Secondary Hull's Main Impulse Engine Casing has been slightly redesigned and the Ion Thrusters were replaced with Hydrogen Thrusters.
-) Started work on the Secondary Hull's inside deck division. Not terribly much room in there, and figuring out the way down the neck without working Turbolifts was a bit of a nightmare and a half. I'm using ramps now. *sighs* They're so ugly...
-) Removed the Gravity Drive that was supposed to help the Saucer descent savely onto Planet Surfaces (Heh. Hindsight...) and installed Cargo Connectors in their place (hidden behind the Cargo Doors on the underside of the Saucer).
-) I'm not quite sure but i believe the aftern Cargo Bay in the Secondary Hull is completely new. Though it will probably receive heavy changes in the future anyway, so it doesn't matter much either way.
-) Added a little Survival station nearby that offers a Cryo Chamber, energy, Hydrogen Bottles and Oxygen Bottles for those who like to play it a bit more survivaly.

Hit the Spoiler for Videos!

I believe this is the first tour through the new and primitized (...is that even a word?) interior of the ship.
To be blunt: i have tried to build this ship to my own personal taste for close to two years now, and i have failed. Not because i couldn't do it but because the game cannot handle it. And most likely never will.
If i built it out of Heavy Armor exclusively, maaaaybe. But what's the point of a nonfunctional starship? I'm not happy with just any result, but a complete and finished ship, even when it's less than a far cry from what it was
supposed to be, is still preferable to a failure. The newest design directions pays tribute to this by, basically, baking most features of the Saucer into a single deck (plus hidden Thrusters, Reactors, the Bridge and other parts
that didn't fit). It's horribly spartan in nature, looks ugly as sin and frankly i haven't tested the Conveyor Grid once but at least the Saucer - ANY version of the Saucer - is practically done; biggest changes to come are one last
touchup of the interior lighting and, hopefully, windows and window lighting.
The Secondary Hull will mostly contain hidden Thrusters and Jump Drives and is considered more like a reverse-sled for the Saucer (a little like the canon design, except that treats the ship more like one vessel that halfs instead
of a Saucer being carted around by the Machine Section). That's why i consider the ship to be close to being done; it's not a halfassed job the way I would use the term... but she got hit hard by reality. And reality won.


"Hm... Incredible Machine."
The Excelsior Class Upload
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=578658331



It took me only a week to crank these out but i have to admit - i really like how they turned out. I don't usually toot my own horn (well... not tooting it too much, i like to think so at least) but these look... they just look right, you know?

Welcome to the Federation Starfleet Excelsior Class 4-Pack Upload Information Post! (FSEC4UIP for short. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?)
All four ships are built in full size:

Length: ca. 480 meters (with the Refit Style adding a few centimeters for the Nacelle Fins)
Width: ca. 187 meters
Hight: ca. 80 meters

Overall i was surprised how close these numbers are to the official size (which suggests 467 meters, but we don't have any CANON numbers, so that's good enough for me; i might tweak the Nacelles a bit to make her shorter).
All ships offer a primitive interior.
<<This version of the upload needs a little polish on the interior on three of the four ships; the Exterior, however, is finished for all of them..>>>

They come in two styles with two variants each, namely:

Styles

1.) Classic Excelsior Class Style: inspired mostly by the NCC-2000 model
2.) Refit Excelsior Class Style: based on the U.S.S. Enterprise-B and the U.S.S. Lakota

Variants

a) Standard Variant: the regular SPACE ENGINEERS-version of the Excelsior
b) Elegant Variant: nearly identical to the Standard Variant but sacrificing significant amounts of acceleration as well as sinking and rising-movement and covers up the Shuttle Bay for a sleeker design that's closer to the studio models.

Notes: this World is not yet Survival ready and Performance is slightly worse than it could be because of four illuminated large-ish ships grouped close together; you can find Blueprint versions of all 4 ships on my Workshop page to combat this problem.
For actual Survival play i recommend gutting one of the Standard variants and adjusting it to your needs. I plan to shift focus back to the Galaxy 3.1 Project after cleaning up the Excelsior-upload, though i might build my own version of a pure gameplay-Excelsior soon if inspiration strikes me often enough.

Blueprint Links:

U.S.S. Lucille NCC-41495 Classic Excelsior (Elegant Variant): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579135265
U.S.S. Ashleigh Ball NCC-104113 Classic Excelsior (Standard Variant): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579152200
U.S.S. Eaves NCC-1962 Excelsior Refit (Standard Variant): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579156764
U.S.S. Sto Helit NCC-92824 Excelsior Refit (Elegant Variant): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579159065

Oh. And yes.

I smashed one into a Planet


And Now For The Question!
The Part Where Rotal Talks To Herself.

I see myself working on the Tapping next week either way but i am wondering which side ship i should do next. I have, basically, three ideas:
1.) A Wolf 359 ship (probably the Springfield or Freedom Class, as the Niagara would be better suited to be built after designing the Ambassador Class),
2.) The just-mentioned Ambassador Class (i found an old Fact Files sheet with a few angles; the FF aren't known to be terribly accurate but that's still better than meassuring from a monitor D: )
or
3.) Something i've been wanting to do for a while now: refurbishing some of my older ships, first and foremost the Constitution Refit.
Which of these would interest you the most? Have any other suggestions?


* (....eventually)


Edit: btw, i haven't forgotten @Wizlawz's challenge, i'm just not sure when i will take the time to attempt it. Probably towards the weekend. And for Molestia's sake, can this thread PLEASE get a second page? It takes forever to load ;_;

 

Chapter 11
Supplemental



Just a veeery short post, mostly to show this imo beautiful screenshot of my newest creation, an early attempt to recreate the hollow shell of the Earth Space Dock.
I horribly misjudged the curvatures and i'm sitting at 11 gigs of Ram-usage (of 16) with only the empty mushroom head present, but still - the fact that this is possible at all...
The Earth Space Dock (or Starbase 1 as it's sometimes called; i'm not sure if that thing even has a canonical name) is this thing, btw:


It doesn't really seem to have a nailed down canonical size; on Ex-Astris-Scienta Mr. Schneider postulates a diameter of 3.8 km which is still on the low side; i have not even attempted this.
Instead Starbase 253 - also known as Shuttle Bay Station - was designed with a "mushroom head"-section of about 1 500 meters diameter, with the rest of the design fitted around that size.



Still plenty room for quite a few ships, all things considered, though the Amanda Tapping couldn't be pasted in because of the pasting boarders; i haven't tried it with the cavity empty yet, though;
i was too busy making screenshots like this one:



Or this



and even this



I'll try to add as much as possible but my most optimistic presumption is that i'll probably won't even get to the second big portrusion. But that's okay; it might change with time and Beta, and if not - this is still a nice show room.

Plus: from the inside it's A LOT easier to hide how awfully angular that upper hull ended up

 

​

Chapter 11's
Suplemental's Suplemental
Earth Space Dock Upload
Workshop Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=583949804

Ever wanted a 1:1 scale Space Dock? Me too. Sadly not really viable.




This little puppy here was built at small scale, a little under 1:2 according to the best estimations on Ex-Astris-Scienta.org (about 3.8 km in diameter). With a diameter of 1500 meters and 1700 meters tall (not counting the antennae) it's still
singlehandedly the biggest thing i've built in Space Engineers so far, and technically it's two things because the game couldn't handle all of it's glory in one piece. I had to attach the lower regions via Connectors and turned them into a Station
via SE Toolbox, otherwise the game crashed due to too many blocks in one grid.
With over 2,300,000 blocks combined the world runs like molasses, it lags like you wouldn't believe, loading takes twenty minutes and there was no performance-budget left for any kind of detailing (plus i screwed up the curvature a bit) - but
it makes for REALLY nice screenshots in my opinion. The upload does not include a planet nor a door for starship-entry; the former because of performance limitations, the latter because it looks nicer this way and i haven't really given closeable
doors any thought due to the low quality of play with the final assembly; this is meant to produce nice looking screenshots and an attempt to explore the upper limit of SE's engine. Besides, by carving out a door yourself you can easily customize
the opening to your own ship's specs; i would assume every Survival build has enough room inside and the station's mushroom-head section is big enough to accomodate ships up to the Galaxy Class with wiggle room.

I have decided to classify this station as a PC Killer because it eats up well over 12 gb of Ram just to load. Do not try this world if you have a weak PC.
And speaking from experience: when you paste ships in - make sure you don't accidentally CTRL-C or CTRL-B the station itself; it'll freeze your game. BE CAREFUL is all i'm saying.

 

.........so have you tried dropping it on a planet?

 

I'd love to ;_; but turning it into a ship crashes SE. I may build a tiny one for that one day though.