I’m not sure if I’ll post this to youtube or not. It’s fairly old footage, back even before Special Circumstances’ merger with the Wolfpack. It definitely needs to go on P.R. though, so here it is. I’m also swapping out the old version in the video section, though that one’s staying on youtube for posterity.
I woke up really late, so today’s just been hanging out with Enio Habev and my clan mates. Normally I’d be annoyed by the lack of productivity but it’s nice to take a break once in a while, even if it’s completely out of the blue.
Also, later tonight I’m going to upload an updated version of that one Kongo video I made.
Frankly, landing gears might be pointless for a ship this small with how Keen has handled tire and suspension parts. It doesn’t feel like there’s any love for proper planes or their aerospace cousins outside of the modding community. Even so, the last unmodded model in the Cosmo Messer series deserves all the flare it can get, so she gets landing gears in addition to retractable rocket launchers.
I’m also putting this gif up on Steam since I haven’t uploaded anything in a while and I think people tend to like streamlined mechanics like these. This also serves as an Easy Automation test for fighters, though I haven’t rigged up the rocket launchers the same way as the landing gears just yet. I’ve got the parsing down now, so that won’t take long.
All in all, this is good progress. I think the most difficult part of designing the Cosmo Messer F is going to be settling on the armament and the default color scheme.
I’m not sure what to ask Vermillion, here. My last question only overlapped with one other person’s, but it was about accessories, and those are out, now. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what VD’s direction with those is going to be. That’s always been my primary concern with the game. Likewise, there aren’t any burning question’s I’ve got for the dev team themselves at the moment. I may have to take a day or two to let my brain work on this one in the background.
I’m pretty sure replicas of my own intellectual property wouldn’t count here; nothing Aeon related has released yet and even if I was that far along, it would be my own stuff. Alas I’m oh so slow and painfully solo. Still, I think I’ll take a shot at this, especially since I want to have at least one of my M.A.S.S. builds finished or near enough by the time 0.9.0 releases.
I’ll take at least fifteen minutes each work day to chip away at it until that’s done. If I finish before September 9th, great. If not, such is life.
I guess I’m committed, now. It took about an hour yesterday but I managed to get all four main turrets replaced–ironically with the exact same turrets a much older version of the ship carried. Large sections of the prow had to be changed to have the guns fit properly, but the Hipper’s exterior is looking a bit more streamlined in the front, now. The turrets have decent firing arcs. I’ll put up some screenshots sometime this weekend.
Part of the reason I didn’t want to do this was that it brings the Hipper’s required weapon mods from just one to two, and the total number up to five. It might not seem like much, but mods add up extremely quickly. This is part of the reason I pretty much never use Mexpex’s missile mods on anything because it’s just a missile pack.
Ideally the one weapon pack I wind up using per build will have ballistics, missiles, and energy weapons, but most only check one or two boxes. The mods I do use across the factions are all popular enough, but you can’t expect people to have them or want to subscribe to workshop blueprints that won’t work without them. The idea is to aim for vanilla or as close to it as possible and let subscribers decide if and how they want to up-gun the ships.
This is going to be a real challenge to work around, but at this point I just want to finish the ship so I can start focusing on different factions for a while. There may come a point where I can go back and eliminate a mod here and there, but I can’t let this situation hold me up anymore than it already has.