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Author Topic: Reverse Engineering  (Read 7562 times)

Leight

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Reverse Engineering
« on: December 13, 2018, 07:27:15 AM »

I've played a fair share of 0.9 for now and what bugs me the most at the moment is the blueprint system.
It's nice if you find really powerful blueprints right from the start but if you want to use specific ships in your playtrough, especially with mods you can get pretty screwed.

One one side it forces the player to adapt and try different ships which is good, but if you really enjoy piloting ship x/y as an example it can be pretty disheartening at times.

What if you could build a building in your colonies to reverse engineer ships?

You could need a different amount of Ships/Weapons per type to successfully reverse engineer.
As an example 4 for frigates, 3 for destroyers, 2 for cruisers and 1 for capitals. These are lost in the process.
Cost is 2x(?) the cost of the ship(s) as an example.
Time needed is the cost divided by the amount your heavy industry can put out.


Example:
All numbers are made up

Buildings needed: Reverse Engineering Lab, Heavy Industries with pristine nanoforge
Ship you are trying to reverse engineer: Paragon, lets say the cost of the ship is 500 000 Credits
Reverse Engineering cost: 1 000 000 Credits
Heavy industry on that planet can put out 100 000 Credits a Month.

-> You sacrifice your Paragon, 1 000 000 Credits and your Heavy Industries is occupied 10 Months to get a Paragon Blueprint. For this time period your Heavy industries cannot produce ships/weapons on this planet.


In short you are using your Heavy Industries ability to build ships to instead disassemble them and the Engineers/Scientists record the process to create a blueprint.
It would be an expensive and time consuming process but if you really want some specific ships it is a 100% guarantee to receive it sooner or later.
And you still need to conquer/buy/find the ship of your choice by normal means.

Thoughts?
« Last Edit: December 13, 2018, 07:50:29 AM by Leight »
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2018, 07:37:50 AM »

Before others would post, I should point out that the Starsectors' lore is not absolute, and had been(and will be) changed to reflect changes in the game mechanics. Things like this would be better approached as purely gameplay perspective.

That being said, I don't have any solid opinion on the suggestion. With blueprint encouraging explorations, this might be redundant and possibly work against blueprint system. But that's as far as my thoughts goes.
A specialized building in a colony might not be needed though, since after a while the building will no longer see its use.
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Leight

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2018, 08:13:52 AM »

thanks for the heads up regarding the lore. I have not taken that into account.

The way i see it *if* something like this would be implemented it should not be possible without great investments. Aka an alternative in the late midgame / endgame if you want to be able to produce specific ships.
These are:

- requirements to even do this (Colony, pristine nanoforge, additional building)
- you lose your usable ship(s) of that type
- costs a lot of Credits
- Occupation of Heavy Industries / Not being able to build ships/weapons for a time
- Additional Building slot gets occupied by the Research lab on the planet
 
You could also have it require alpha cores and thus have kind of a reasonable explanation why this works?sorry im not that familiar with all the lore
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Sutopia

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #3 on: December 13, 2018, 09:27:55 AM »

I thought it was pretty clear stated people were not able to copy those blueprints in sector?

The State Of Affairs
Posted February 21, 2011 by Ivaylo in Lore, Media
Quote
A blueprint  consists of a factory control program stored on a Universal Access Chip. Most are also augmented with custom circuitry, and decades of corporate competition ensured that the chips are nearly impossible to duplicate, leaving companies with a tight hold on their manufacture. Before the Collapse blueprints of all items made in the Domain had been available from their makers, but not many such blueprints had found their way into the sector. The few functioning autofactories had them on hand, while the rest belonged to armchair historians, tinkers, and the insatiably curious. Overnight, these devices had become the most valuable commodity in the entire sector. The people that had access to the chips were rarely able to benefit from this value, as others, a more cunning and ruthless lot, were quick to ‘liberate’ the UACs from their rightful owners. Whether it was a forced barter, a theft, or worse, the chips quickly found their way into the hands of the highest bidder, no questions asked. Seeing this, many owners hid their UACs where ever they could, in the hopes of being able to recover them at a later time. Some were buried, others launched into low orbit, hidden in asteroid fields, frozen within glaciers on icy moons or simply jettisoned out the nearest airlock, lest they fall into the hands of those that did not deserve them.
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SCC

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2018, 10:22:05 AM »

I think that the bigger obstacle is not lore itself, but premise of the game - sector is kinda falling apart. If the player could just get access to everything and fix every problem, it would make all the existing factions look like fools. I think that while not impossible, it shouldn't be something you can do just like that.

Megas

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2018, 10:59:07 AM »

I think that the bigger obstacle is not lore itself, but premise of the game - sector is kinda falling apart. If the player could just get access to everything and fix every problem, it would make all the existing factions look like fools. I think that while not impossible, it shouldn't be something you can do just like that.
Given how often they keep sending invasion fleets at you to their doom, the major factions seem more like a cabal that wants things the way they are at any cost.  They may be at each others' throats, but they view any upstart as an existential threat greater than themselves.  Basically, they are all part of a super league of villians not unlike Persean League, except with all of the major factions.  Things are only falling apart because the factions are all run by petty (and incompetent) warlords that do not tolerate success.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2018, 11:01:21 AM by Megas »
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #6 on: December 13, 2018, 11:30:35 AM »

I think that the bigger obstacle is not lore itself, but premise of the game - sector is kinda falling apart. If the player could just get access to everything and fix every problem, it would make all the existing factions look like fools. I think that while not impossible, it shouldn't be something you can do just like that.
Reverse engineering could be one of the tools player have to resist the sector falling apart, though, and as long as things overall goes progressively shittier I think the premise is fulfilled. For example, the ships you produce always have some D-mods, nanoforges degrade, etc.

I thought it was pretty clear stated people were not able to copy those blueprints in sector?
*facepalm*
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #7 on: December 13, 2018, 01:44:35 PM »

I actually thought about making this exact post as well. I like the idea of reverse engineering something given that you already have several copies of it. I think requiring a pristine nano-forge could satisfy the lore side of things with a bit of hand-waving. It would make it into an end-game mechanic to avoid annoying blueprint searches.
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Sutopia

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #8 on: December 13, 2018, 03:16:41 PM »

I'd say please reverse engineer coca-cola before you try to reverse engineer a spaceship.
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Deshara

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #9 on: December 13, 2018, 07:04:42 PM »

what if you got the option to break apart derelicts and recoverable ships post-combat for points towards getting a blueprint of it? That'd give an alternative reward for players who don't want to recover hounds 40 hours into a playthru but also have no interest in scavenging them for scrap -- even if you already have their blueprint you can just pawn it for straight credits (once you get it) without needing to lug around a hold full of hefty scrap metal
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Leight

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #10 on: December 14, 2018, 02:18:21 AM »

I'd say please reverse engineer coca-cola before you try to reverse engineer a spaceship.


There have been many cases of reverse engineering in the first and second world war as an example if you want to go down that route.
Chemicals and Hardware are entirely different things.

Additionally we are already able to restore a basically completely wrecked ships(several D-Mods) to pristine Quality, even if it is from a different faction.
How is this possible without any knowledge on how the ship is build and how the technology works??

As an example take a Paragon with Compromised Armor · Compromised Hull · Faulty Power Grid · Glitched Sensor Array · Unreliable Subsystems fly it to a Hegemony Station and restore it there to pristine quality.
This ships is basically falling apart and this seems to be no issue at all.

You could spin this around all day, i just wanted to know peoples options on the idea itself. At the moment Blueprints are a "lottery" and it only gets worse with more faction mods, either you increase the loot of Stations or you put in a feature like this as a compromise.

I would rather have a feature or mod that makes something like this possible for a high cost/investment than having Research Stations/Ruins spit out more of these "ultra rare" Blueprints or no duplicates.


Just to clarify again: I enjoy the current blueprint system but i think that something like this is needed, even if it is a secret blueprint black market where you can exchange blueprints that you dont want/need for others for extremely high prices.
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Sutopia

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #11 on: December 14, 2018, 06:10:32 AM »

There have been many cases of reverse engineering in the first and second world war as an example if you want to go down that route.
Chemicals and Hardware are entirely different things.

Additionally we are already able to restore a basically completely wrecked ships(several D-Mods) to pristine Quality, even if it is from a different faction.
How is this possible without any knowledge on how the ship is build and how the technology works??

As an example take a Paragon with Compromised Armor · Compromised Hull · Faulty Power Grid · Glitched Sensor Array · Unreliable Subsystems fly it to a Hegemony Station and restore it there to pristine quality.
This ships is basically falling apart and this seems to be no issue at all.

The D-mods can be common errors on common modules. The real core part can be a black box that cannot possibly be analyzed because any analyzing attempt would change the thing itself, causing the result not credible. This is some real quantum physics.

A large system is composed with a lot of small ones and every part is linked by interface, not direct implementation. This is called dependency inversion principal. Every part of the ships are manufactured independently with independent knowledge but as long as they strictly follow the interface protocol it will work perfectly after assembled. We can assume most parts of a hull but some of it's core technology, for instance, it's ship system, are already well known since they're just trivial, and that's the reason why we can restore D-mod ships to full function. However, once the black box parts are heavily damaged, it can no longer function even if you put on every other part, rendering it nothing but a giant scrap, that's a death of a ship.

A very good example indicating this is what's going on, Wolf(P), getting a non-restorable degraded phase skimmer. The phase skimmer system itself is the core technology of such hull and a degraded one cannot be restored to full function simply because people don't have the ability to repair a damaged black-box but only use it while it's still "working".

Quote
Just to clarify again: I enjoy the current blueprint system but i think that something like this is needed, even if it is a secret blueprint black market where you can exchange blueprints that you dont want/need for others for extremely high prices.
For vanilla I'd just say a big no. Starsector have the taste of a roguelike game where you make decisions based on "what you get", not making decisions to "get everything". If you need it, ask for a mod to make your life easier. It's just like pre-0.9 ppl use prism free port to get whatever ship they need.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2018, 06:18:19 AM by Sutopia »
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XazoTak

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #12 on: December 17, 2018, 04:53:09 PM »

As an example take a Paragon with Compromised Armor · Compromised Hull · Faulty Power Grid · Glitched Sensor Array · Unreliable Subsystems fly it to a Hegemony Station and restore it there to pristine quality.
This ships is basically falling apart and this seems to be no issue at all.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I've lived on a ship that's been allowed to fall apart for some years, and it can be restored simply by analysis and hard work, enough information has been pieced together from looking at it and old documents/photographs that with enough time it could be restored to pristine condition.
However, fully reverse-engineering it so a copy could be constructed would require far, far deeper analysis. It would require figuring out how parts were created, the exact specifications for those parts, and how they were put together. It would be easier to just design and construct an entirely new ship imitating it.
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Troika

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #13 on: December 18, 2018, 03:24:48 AM »

Reverse engineering a tank or a plane that was made by hand in a factory is just a tad different than reverse engineering a spaceship that is so complex it needs a nanoforge (which no one knows how to build) to make.
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Lolpingu

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Re: Reverse Engineering
« Reply #14 on: December 19, 2018, 07:36:15 AM »

I think that the bigger obstacle is not lore itself, but premise of the game - sector is kinda falling apart. If the player could just get access to everything and fix every problem, it would make all the existing factions look like fools. I think that while not impossible, it shouldn't be something you can do just like that.


It's worth mentioning how inconceivable it is that the core is surrounded by so many habitable planets (requiring minimal if any terraforming) and that they can be colonized and populated by billions of people and fully industrialized in the span of less than two decades.
I could suspend my disbelief here if it was theoretically possible but economically impossible, yet I have done it with ease and the collective population of my faction outnumbers that of every other faction combined at least 10:1. This isn't even biologically possible given the relatively long reproductive cycles of humans, unless you dedicate half of each planet to mass-cloning facilities. If it was this easy or even remotely practical, nearly every habitable planet and most resource-rich planets would have been colonized by the sector powers long before you showed up. 

Furthermore, even if you completely ignore the colonization aspect, I find it impossible that you're pretty much the only one going around exploring the outer sector (excepting a few independent fleets). Given the relative abundance of blueprints found all over the sector, something that wouldn't be lost on any of the factions in-game, it makes no sense that A. they haven't been picked clean long before you showed up and B. the existing powers (minus ludds and pathers) aren't already utilizing those blueprints (except for what they had pre-collapse), especially the Hegemony who definitely have the manpower and ships to spare for mass-exploration.

And lastly, you the player are a god even if you play on ironman mode. You're the smartest, most powerful admiral in the sector and within a few years you can amass an armada that can crush even Chicomoztoc with ease.

What I'm trying to say is that this game is a game. The lore exists to supplement the gameplay by setting the stage and suspending disbelief somewhat, not the other way around. Perhaps reverse-engineering conflicts with the lore somewhat, but then again it would be far from the most lore-breaking and logic-breaking thing the game allows you to do.
« Last Edit: December 19, 2018, 11:27:52 AM by Lolpingu »
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