Another week, another WIP post! As we’re still in new year’s mood, we’d like to present something to fuel your creativity, new accessories coming in 0.10.0! These are just the first ones and there’ll be more to come in the future, but we hope these ones will be to your liking!
Indeed they are! We’ll be able to make some fairly practical looking armor schemes with the plates. Then there’s the vents, which, I’m sure nine times out of ten are either going to be painted a reflective gold or just be glowing to really make a MASS pop. I really like the pods, too. They look like countermeasure launchers and I’ll be treating them that way once 0.10.0 is out.
This morning when I saw the update I actually got an unrelated idea for another build. I’ll talk more about that after I finish the original I was working on and get some photos and footage of that up.
Hello… and welcome back to the weekly WIP of M.A.S.S. Builder! We’re resuming this sequence of weekly tidbits and sneak peeks for the upcoming version, starting small from one of the scenes from a new mission…
Glad to see they’re going back to the weekly format. I’m trying to get this place revived, too.
Anyway, the stage is looking quite nice. Yellow’s one of my favorite ‘industrial’ colors, so I like seeing it incorporated with grays, blacks, and other metal heavy areas.
Alright here she is, in all her incredibly iterative glory, the Kaisers’ Admiral Hipper.
Hipper being filmed from a Messer E
I’ve been working on this ship for about a year now. She’s seen two complete rebuilds (from scratch) and over thirty overhauls (and I have the blueprints to prove it). This is one of several poster ships for my Kaiser faction, a group I’ll expound on more as more of their ships and small craft hit the workshop.
The Hipper herself is a ‘moderately’ armed cruiser with a large amount of internal space for small craft. Although I wouldn’t recommend fully loading the ship due to subgrid jitter and potential lag, she can carry 12(+2) compatible small grids at a time. 2 can be docked on the flight deck, 2 more on the aft connectors, and 8 on the newly updated carousel (version 4.0). In addition, the maintenance connector is as good as any other connector for docking. Add in the ventral connector for linking up with other, larger ships, and you have fourteen docking options before mag plates even have to be considered.
As for the ship’s regular weapons, the Hipper has a balanced spread of energy weapons and ordnance. She has a wave motion gun, 4 triple barrel 330mm positron batteries, 4 torpedo launchers, 16 SAM launchers, and a large mix of obvious and hidden pulse lasers for point defense.
Since she uses a wave motion generator (type 1400), her shields are extremely reliable against normal weapons. For example, Hipper can just barely break through her own shields with the wave motion gun, dealing virtually no damage in a doppelganger firing test. In theory, shield shunting could completely absorb the attack, including any preceding turret salvos.
Almost the entirety of the external hull is heavy armor to help a little against shield piercing weapons. Overall, the Hipper is best suited to skirmishes against a small number of large grids. Fast small grids can be a little dangerous at point blank range if shield passage is on, but at longer ranges aren’t a threat; they’re best left to the Hipper’s own fighters or escorts.
Admiral Hipper just prior to the war with the Repatriates
The first and most well known of her class, Admiral Hipper was constructed as part of a plan to reduce the risks posed to the Kaiser fleet’s battleships and fleet carriers, allowing them to operate closer to the heart of Kaiser space. The Hipper and her sisterships just barely fall into the Kaisers’ own specifications for heavy cruisers; nearly every other faction has labeled them as either battlecruisers or (upon seeing nearly a dozen messers leap out of the hull) light carriers. This tends to lead to a disproportionate response whenever these cruisers are sighted.
All Kaiser capital ships are primarily controlled through integrated artificial intelligence systems, massively reducing the ship’s required crew compliment from hundreds to only a few dozen. The Hipper in particular benefited from this system, allowing her to perform extreme duration operations.
Hipper during weapon trials in atmosphere
The Admiral Hipper was also the first Kaiser vessel to receive a carousel style hangar system adopted from Kusanagi Industries models. It is this carousel which allows the Hipper to safely house numerous compatible craft internally. While the system itself is delicate, carousels allow The Hipper to both carry and manage far more support craft than her external dimensions would suggest.
The Admiral Hipper launched with Commander Paul Wilk in the captain’s chair and lead numerous supportive missions for the Kaisers. Most of these missions included long range patrols, convoy escort, anti-shipping raids, and independent investigations.
The Hipper’s most famous action prior to the outbreak of hostilities with the Repatriate Navy was making initial contact with an unknown vessel, and the subsequent operation. The Hipper was initially attacked and forced to regroup with heavy cruiser Hessen, light cruiser Magdeburg, six Type 34 destroyers, and a prototype Type 36 destroyer. The fleet’s counterattack failed to damage the unknown vessel, and the Hessen’s artificial intelligence succumbed to a cyber attack that led to the loss of two of the Type 34s, the prototype destroyer, and severe damage to the Magdeburg. The unknown vessel escaped via jump drive and Commander Wilk was forced to destroy the Hessen with all hands in order to save the Magdeburg and the remaining destroyers.
Check the Bridge Auxiliary seat’s custom data for the remote control (Hipper AI)’s hotbars setup.
The Hipper’s been tested at low altitude on Pertam (1.2G) and can float just fine, but she hasn’t been tested with a fully load of cargo and fighters, so bear that in mind.
Things have been pretty slow for December. Not only has M.A.S.S. Builder news more or less stopped completely since the 0.9.0 update, but I also haven’t been able to make any headway on things. That’s going to change with the schedule shift in my work; I’ll have three days off going forward. Until now I’ve been needing about a day and a half to physically recover, so any extra time is going toward my projects and studies.
To be frank, I don’t think 2023 is going to be a good year internationally, but regardless of things going on in the world, I’ve got to press forward, or I won’t have anything to pass onto the next generation. With that, a quick update on some things.
Admiral Hipper
I wanted this finished by my birthday, but I can’t work on it right now, so I’ll finish things up tomorrow and, for better or worse, upload the current iteration to the Steam Workshop, along with a link to an article I’m working on here. That’ll be the end of that I guess. Then it’s onto some very important related projects.
Written Projects
My December goals are rolling right over into January with no real changes. My hands and feet are hurting pretty much all the time now and I need to find the right balance of sleep and medication to make it easier to focus. I’m also learning a lot of things, so that has my mind split ten different ways during much of the week. It’s not easy, but I’ll get this all done or go up in glorious flames trying.
Closing Out the Year
I don’t have enough alcohol on hand to do things proper, but Happy New Year anyway!
M.A.S.S. Builder – What’s Next 0.10.0 – Steam News
Hello everyone, welcome back to another "What’s Next" post of the year, albeit only the second one as we’ve only made two major updates this year. Again, we’d like to add a disclaimer that this post won’t go into details of what we’ll be doing for the next coming update, update 0.10.0 …
The first major bit of news is that the multiplayer test apparently went so poorly that plans for PvP are being shelved for the time being. There’s just too much to fix with multiplayer in general right now. I don’t think anyone who’s been following the weekly updates on Steam is all that surprised.
Here’s some good news from VD though.
What we can say right now is: 1. The first and foremost priority is to further develop multiplayer mode, mainly on matchmaking features (we’re still in consideration whether to only matchmake people with a ping threshold of under a number). 2. A reconnection feature must and will be added into the game as it is a core feature for multiplayer that we didn’t have enough time to complete in alpha phase. 3. More information of players in the lobby, more QoL issues in the feature.
Story missions are also getting worked on alongside the multiplayer updates, which is great. I don’t know if they’ll add more after the planned 26 are all done, but they probably will. It’s not like the story feels like it’s wrapping up per se.
The gist of this one is that multiplayer PvP has to wait until the more critical bugs are fixed and everything else is going to get as much attention as it can get. Works for me.
