I had to stop tweaking the Hipper early today, but there was some progress made here and there. The briefing room got slightly remodeled, though the problem that motivated the remodeling wasn’t actually solved. Let’s just say subgrids are involved and it makes a part of the floor look more hazardous than it really is.

As for the main issues I still have to fix, it’s mostly down to the consoles and programmable blocks, but there’s one major issue I want to figure out now that I’ve done some serious maneuver testing. The Hipper’s acceleration with the SDS gravity drive system is great, but the ship’s overall handling is a bit lower than I need it to be (especially considering the ship’s being tested with only two of the potential thirteen it can carry docked to it).

One possible solution: There’s an area near the bow of the ship that’s completely empty. Originally I had a large clang drive installed there to allow the Hipper to fly on planets, but clang drives are clangy and there were a few other minor issues that outweighed the benefits, so I removed that a few milestones back. That empty space is probably my last bit of wiggle room to work in some kind of large thruster bank to give the ship better strafing. Failing that, I might have to upgrade the gravity drive system with side mounted gravity generators instead.