Ships with no life support

[Rastaman (OP)]

My fighter design doesn't have life support and still works just fine I think. Am I missing something?

[Shadow]

What do you mean? That you can build it and it works despite not having enough crew space?

[Rastaman (OP)]

Exactly. It has just a crew of 3 and a small crew quarters is for 50, so i just omitted it.

It fires weapons just fine too.

[Shadow]

Might be a bug. I think you're supposed to use at least Command Modules (crew space for 20).

Or are fighters actually expected to do without any crew space at all? I know bridges are unnecessary for them, but...

[Charlie Beeler]

Once you create a design you can build it, there is no check to see if it is a valid design.  Your not supposed to build anything that is displaying a design error (ie can not be locked).

[Shadow]

Oh, needless to say, I thought the game would actually stop you if you tried to build faulty designs.

[sloanjh]

Once you create a design you can build it, there is no check to see if it is a valid design.  Your not supposed to build anything that is displaying a design error (ie can not be locked).

In fact, it's a good idea to only build locked designs - that way you're protected against accidentally changing them.  I thought Steve put in checks to keep you from building unlocked designs, but there might be holes in them.  I have a vague recollection that you can't retool to an unlocked design, but if the SY is already tooled for a similar class (so it can build both classes), then there's no check that the non-tooled class is locked.  I might be mis-remembering though.

Probably worth a bug report.

John

PS - I've noticed several relatively new users starting threads in mechanics over the last few weeks with questions that are probably more suited to The Academy.  Please keep in mind that Mechanics is where Steve tends to post notifications about major enhancements/changes, so it's in our best interest to not dilute his threads (it makes it a lot easier to find that thread you remember seeing 6 months or a year ago....)  Thanks!!

[Ziusudra]

Currently, the game will lock a design as soon as you retool a shipyard for it. It's hard to say as I often just leave SM mode on, but I've never had to lock before retooling.

[SakSak]

Anything that uses the design in my experience locks it automatically.  Unlocking the design requires SM mode and if memory serves this is because changing the design once it is 'out' so to speak immediately applies all changes to all instances of that design.  Including ships that have already been built.

Personally, I'm in the habit of manually locking a design once I'm done designing it.  Any changes are then put into revision 2,3 etc, created by copying the locked design and renaming it.

[jocan2003]

Changing design using SM mode when you already have that designed built and in service will give you some bugs, such as ship wont have the same max speed as in the new design if you upgrade engines or whatever, some ship statistic are save with a per-ship basis, while some system use the *reserched* tech. I.E.: you change the fire control system it will use the new fire control as its not saved with the ship information.

Ship information saved goes as follow (list not complete and will not be to prevent spoiler or abuse) Thermal Emission, Ship cross section, Current and max shield, Crew grade point, Fleet trainning points, current reactor power and some others . If you change design that affect any of these value and some other not-state it wont affect those already built wich cant cause a headach trying to figure out after a while who is what, Mk1? or s-med Mk2?

This i hope will solve some question reguarding modifying design with SM, its good if you want to change something at last minute while you are building it, but as soon its out of the shipyard it may not update every piece of data.

[Brian Neumann]

If you sm changes to a ship design once ships are already built the way to get old ships updated is open up the individual ship F6 screen and look at each ship that has been modified individually.  This will bring them up to date

Brian

[jocan2003]

If you sm changes to a ship design once ships are already built the way to get old ships updated is open up the individual ship F6 screen and look at each ship that has been modified individually.  This will bring them up to date

Brian

Good to know i iddnt know... i was going in the database each time hehe

[Father Tim]

The original poster said "fighter" - since fighters are built in factories instead of shipyards, the code to check for and/or Lock the design is most likely not being called - especially since small craft factories don't have to retool for designs.

[Steve Walmsley]

Good to know i iddnt know... i was going in the database each time hehe

Be very careful modifying the database. The reason I password the database is so that people won't play around with it. When you alter information in the Aurora program, anything saved to, changed in or removed from the database is checked first to make sure the change won't break anything. By changing the database directly and bypassing those checks you can cause a lot of bugs. If you report bugs after changing the DB, please mention what you changed when you report the bugs.

Steve

[jocan2003]

Oh i know about that, i dont play enough to encounter bugs and when i do it been a long time they are already reported.