The Long Moonlight

That title was spot on and I finally really got it around Chapter 8 or so. It wasn’t a long book, but I certainly enjoyed it. I also got ‘The Shadow’ vibes, which makes sense, as the author’s a fan. I’m not sure if I’m going to write a full review, yet. I’m not a reviewer and trying to judge the work of a much more experienced and well established writer sounds hilarious, but I’ll at least post what I think of the book in detail once I organize my thoughts. Right now I’m focused on other issues.

The initial verdict is: Great! Highly recommended.

Prinz Heinrich

I was actually very close to finishing the vanilla thrusters when I had a thought that made me scrap the whole idea. The only purpose of having a vanilla thruster system in place was so anyone who loaded the ship in a vanilla world without any of the required mods wouldn’t have a giant brick on their hands. At the end of the day, the Heinrich is designed around two specific mods and shouldn’t even be looked at if those mods aren’t present.

The Prinz Heinrich, the Pandemonium Bunker, and Admiral Hipper

Even if I only kept the passage ways mod and found a way to ditch everything else, there’s no guarantee huge chunks of the interior wouldn’t be loose if the ship was loaded into a vanilla world. The passage ways are extensive. There aren’t going to be that many mods in the final version, so I’d rather keep an up to date version of the modded thrusters the ship was designed for and not clutter up the hull.

Again, I was nearly finished with the vanilla setup, but it was starting to look ridiculous.

I did keep some of the changes the attempt at a vanilla thruster system forced me to make, but only some of them. It’s most noticeable just forward of the hangar doors where the hydra missile turrets have been moved back slightly and retro thrusters were added above and below the turrets. The aft deck airlocks just behind the spaced armor plates also had a staircase removed on each side. I can’t say if it looks better but it puts some space between the airlock and the upward facing thrusters that were added there.

With that, Heinrich’s thruster system is finished. It’s not what I set out to do initially, but the system, vanilla or not, is finished. So I’ll count that as a completed goal.

The trouble now is reining in the controls. The ship has an auto leveling system in place that I’m still configuring. Whether it’s on or off though, the ship has a bit too much momentum during certain maneuvers and can be hard to control. I’m thinking the sources are the three subgrids it uses: the search unit and the two spaced armor plates under the hangar. I could remove all of that, but if it’s possible, I’d like to solve the control issue while keeping the subgrids. So many builds in Space Engineers are ruined by the instability of subgrids, while others find a way to cope. I’d rather cope with the problem than scale the ship back even further.

Fleeing Victory and Lydia’s Golden Treasury

I tried to finish Fleeing Victory #16 today but I wound up crashing from fatigue. My sleep schedule’s been nuked. I’ll try again tomorrow, but as of the 20th, I’ll be finishing up my outline for Lydia’s Golden Treasury Chapter 5 and starting the writing process. It’s not going to be done quickly, but it is going to get done. FV is a lower priority but I’ll be working on those like usual. Hopefully I can still get both FV#16 and #17 done this week. If not, there’s still time.

Blog Articles

I’m heavily leaning toward the Gelgoog J FnF article for one of these. It’s actually already posted, I just haven’t finished writing my ‘personal thoughts’ section for the article or provided a link to the page. That’ll come when it’s finally done.

As for the other article, I’m still not sure. It definitely won’t be a How-to this month. Not unless I have an epiphany or something. I might take another stab at Code Fairy, but otherwise I’ll have to finagle something to meet that goal.

That’s all.