Starmade: WSAD Server, Month 1 Roundup

Bobb (the guy building the Enterprise the first Starmade post) and I have been busy on the WSAD Starmade server. I finally transferred the server to him, and he started his second "overly-ambitious project". Bobb can't do anything small. It's big or go home. Can't deny the results though...

The Enterprise NC1701-D (Galaxy Class Enterprise) exterior is about 90% complete. It's 1:1 scale. and dominates everything around it in terms of size. Check the shop in the image showing the underside

FULL IMGUR ALBUM

(has more views of each ship)

1:1 Enterprise NC1701-D

I've finished the Armageddon/Bhaalgorn. At a rough guesstimate using my eyechrometer, I'd say it ended up about 1:2 scale. Custom paintjob because I felt the yellow hull didn't match the original Armageddon, and the white-blood paintscheme of the Bhaalgorn is a bit hard to pull off. The Armageddon is about 50% combat worthy at the moment. The main cannons do 600 damage and the secondaries do 400. The antimatter cannon blocks for the primaries run the full length of the ship. It also has two powerful power drain beams (because of the Bhaalgorn's neuting role in EVE), but because of mechanics and balancing issues these don't function that well at the moment.

Then I started a Tempest but got bored and made a Drake instead:

 

Bobb meanwhile made the Defiant...

 

... and fixed the server so that pirates now spawn properly. The problem is that you can enable the pirates to use any ship you have saved in the catalogue. Thus, the buggers would regularly interrupt building sessions in ships designed purely for combat (mostly guns, no aesthetics). This lead to some rebuilding/re-buying....

KSP

If you have not heard of KSP then shame on you and you should YouTube it right away!

Blasting little green aliens into space has never been so much fun, and being able to customise your rocket from the ground-up is the whole reason why I play the game. There's a "get to the moon" component but that really takes second seat to me just playing around making cool looking ships that hopefully have functionality too.

Splaty and Pacific_War got me onto the game initially and it wasn't long before Pacific_War managed to make this:

 And in turn this: (out of square panels!):

It wasn't long before I decided I had to do something like it. My first attempt turned out like this:

 And eventually culminated in these:

Pacific_War and I decided to combine our efforts into a "Star Wars Pack" for KSP. Some ships and functional and others not-so-much. The full album, and the reddit thread that attracted some attention is linked below:

Imgur Album
Reddit post

Download link

Starmade

Starmade is a fantastically fun little game made by Schema. It's free to play (for now) and is in Alpha. By Alpha, I mean VERY alpha. It's basically Minecraft in space and has seen a lot of reasonable high-profile coverage recently including by the Yogscast. For the 3 people that have played Minecraft and don't know - they're pretty much the biggest partner on YouTube for Minecraft-related stuff, and even indie-gaming in general.

Starmade has MASSIVE scope for game that's only in alpha and if you played Creative Mode in Minecraft and enjoyed it, then Starmade is a great alternative for tackling creative urges.

I've touched on the creative possibilities that others have already explored on my EVE blog, but here's some more screenshots of what I and some of the guys I play with have been working on (click on each image for larger version):

 Rex_Starfucker decided to blow a hole in the shop. Logic dictated I needed to make a station to fill this gap. Currently powered by 2xAA batteries (houses shields and power), a factory for when crafting is fixed, and a dry-docks for two of my cruisers. The ship in the top-left is the Bhaalgorn which is WIP and can be seen below.

This is why you don't do PvP around the home station.... Stretch's glorious Vengeful_Spirit copped a wayward missile. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" shot, and he didn't save the ship in the catalogue!. FUUUUUUUUUUU.

You can save ships into a catalogue and buy them in at any time using in-game currency. Fantastic for PvP (test a ship and blow the crap out of it) but you have to actually save the ship first :(

 This is a WIP for Bobb. Pretty clear what he's working on* but shows the scale you can get to - it's MUCH easier to go bigger than Minecraft, and the game has symmetry planes and the ability to change your "brush size" which helps to no end with large ships.
* In case you really couldn't work it out - the Enterprise.

Lastly - a WIP of my Bhaalgorn - modelled after an Armageddon/Bhaalgorn from EVE Online.

I'll finish up with a copy/paste of my conclusion in the EVE blog:
Because of balance issues, getting to what currently passes for "end-game" content is faaaaar too easy. If you want to play it now, I'd recommend playing it as if it were Creative Mode Minecraft - use Dev commands for infinite resources. If you were more of a fan of Minecraft's Survival Mode or, say Terraria's PvE challenges, then maybe hold off until the game reaches Beta.

I'd definitely peg this as a game to keep an eye on.