Code Fairy

I planned to do a Code Fairy follow up today, but after some thought, I’m thinking it’s better to wait until the 18th.

Soon Eventually

If Sony lifts the scene blockers on Volume 2 like I’m hoping they will, I can actually provide some new screenshots. (They don’t always do that, sadly) I’m not even above recording some gameplay so you can see how terrible I am at playing Raid Type Zakus. I did complete Volume 3 today and it’s all good news as far as game impressions go.

This also means that on December 2nd or sometime around then I’ll be doing the same thing with Volume 3.

As much as I want to get into it now, I think it’s better to do a follow up specifically for Code Fairy on the 18th and the 2nd respectively.

Here’s looking forward to the 18th and beyond.

Fleeing Victory #8

Something coming way sooner is Fleeing Victory #8. That one should be ready this Sunday. The conflict between Cordaea and Munica will take yet another major turn with this issue.

I’m thinking 4 issues per [REDACTED] should be a good fit until we come near full circle to the titular part of this pantser series.

Space Engineers

Gut

This took way longer than it should have, but I did some stress testing on the Cosmo Stuka as well as gave her a paint job. Most of the painting was easy, but I ran into some major trouble along the way.

The fuselage was a piece of cake, but once I had to start dealing with the subgrids, two problems slowed me down or outright threatened the whole ship. Firstly, I couldn’t use symmetry mode on the subgrids. They’re separate entities in the game, so each wing section had to be done separately, as well as the landing gears.

That’s 8 subgrids painted individually.

The tail fins didn’t give me much trouble, but the wings, oh boy the wings! So I took a chance by detaching the right wingtip from its hinge, moving the ship away slightly so I could make some edits while also painting that section of the wing. Once I was finished, I carefully inched the ship close enough to the wing to reattach it. This went off without a hitch. I was dumbfounded by how easy it was. Once again, though, symmetry mode doesn’t work on subgrids; I needed to do the exact same thing for the opposite wing.

No problem, I thought. It worked flawlessly the first time.

Holy crap was I in for it this time.

Things were fine on the other wing right up until I tried to reattach it. Somehow, for some inane reason, the hinge connected to the landing gear’s hinge … even though it wasn’t in range … even though it wasn’t aligned with it … even though it was already attached to another hinge. The force of stealing another hinge head from a connected and locked hinge, and forcing it about 60 degrees in another direction at the speed of frame data sent my Cosmo Stuka spinning like a top. For good measure, the original detached wing got flung away into deep space.

Naturally, I was confused to ‘audible’ levels, but I knew something could theoretically go haywire, so I already made a copy of the wing just in case. I inspected the Stuka for damage and then tried to figure out what happened with the hinges. I didn’t know the hinge had been stolen the first time since it hadn’t moved back to the other hinge, it was just rotated to match the offending hinge’s position vertically. So I tried this nonsense again and the same thing happened. Oof.

I muttered to myself that in the time it would take to reattach the missing wing I could have built another one from scratch.

I was correct.

That’s also what I wound up doing because I didn’t figure at the time that I could get around the problem by just rebuilding both wings with the hinges farther apart. So this is a pretty weird and interesting design flaw in this subgrid ship. I probably couldn’t have learned about it in any other way so I’m glad it only wound up wasting a little of my time instead of half the day.

Anyway, this is likely going to be the A model of the Cosmo Stuka. I plan on making a few others with different configurations, including the G model, everyone’s favorite tank buster. I already found and tested the perfect weapons for it from Akiad’s defense mod. I just need to find a good gun pod design to build around them and the ammo containers. I’ll also be addressing the hinge issue in one of the subsequent models. Maybe the B model, but we’ll see.

That’s all for now.