This is the placeholder OP for this mod. There is no download yet.
A mildly-inebriated space veteran beckons you to his table...
Spoiler
You've got the look of one of those folks who wants to know everything there is to know, or maybe build everything there is to build. I think I can help you there.
Everyone wants to find those Blueprints for their Autofactories, right? One of the more powerful 'factions' in the Sector mounts an expedition to go digging for a Domain Data Vault or Research Lab, or scurry through the mud of a planet with ruins on it, hoping that among the wreckage they'll find one of those little chips that holds all the ins-and-outs of creating a brand-new spaceship or kick-ass gun. Everyone, by this point, has the chip for a Buffalo, or a Hound; those bloody things are everywhere. Everyone's HOPING to find their own personal XIV Battlegroup hull blueprint, or a chip to manufacture Mjolnir Cannons in their own industry.
But what if I told you about another way to get these magical little doodads? I heard from a friend of a friend of a... well, you get the idea... that the Domain DID bring the tech that created Blueprints out here to the sector with them. They're still hidden out there, buried deep within some planets. The rumor goes something like this: you stick in almost anything, the facility tears it down atom-by-atom, and creates a chip that tells an Autofac how to recreate the thing piece-by-piece... in other words, what we know today as a Blueprint.
Does such a thing exist? Eh, who knows? It's a rumor that's been running in spacer circles for years. It's probably a load of bollocks, another one of those comforting delusions we've created ever since the Gates collapsed. But, who knows? I'm past my prime, and my days of exploring are long gone. If you happen to find one of these things out there, remember your pal here, eh?
Domain Blueprint Encoder
Everyone knows what Blueprints are, but how did Blueprints come to be? Enter the Domain Blueprint Encoder. DBEs were, for lack of a better explanation, 3D scanners on steroids that systematically catalogued everything about how a piece of technology was built, be it the meanest Light Mortar to the astounding technological marvel of the Astral. Using the "Blueprint" thus created, one could program the ubiquitous Autofactory to produce the item in question.
With the collapse of the Gate Network, the Domain became a distant memory in the Persean Sector, and the people reverted to a sort of techno-barbarism, having all of the technology but none of the knowledge. For some two centuries these disparate colonies grew in strength and number once again, and using the power of the Autofacs and Blueprints, were able to create massive space fleets to protect their interests and attack their enemies. However, while the primary means of acquiring blueprints is finding them out in abandoned Domain facilities out in the empty star systems of the Sector, or simply stealing them from your opponents, there is a path of less resistance -- to simply create your own.
Scope of the Mod
The goal of this mod is to create a new, RARE planetary condition, called "Intact DBE", with a guaranteed appearance on at least two or three planets per sector generation. It will function much like Ruins do, allowing the construction of a new Structure, tentatively planned to be called a "DBE Lab". The lore-y explanation here of why you need a specific facility will be that the DBE must be excavated out of whatever ruins it's within, powered up, and then a sterile environment must be maintained for cleaning the to-be-scanned piece of technology; this is to minimize the possibility of corruption of the Blueprint production from even so small a thing as a chunk of dirt.
As is to be expected with providing power for such a colossal thing (imagine how large the 'workspace' must be to fit a Capital Ship inside!) and all the other logistical issues, it will cost a pretty penny to build, and have a ridiculous upkeep. Of course, use an AI Core and price AND demand goes down... and of course, there will probably be upgrades possible to the owning faction's prep facility to ensure higher success rates and a quicker preparation process...
However, the process is not perfect: technology has diminished over the years and true sterility is difficult to achieve, and the DBE has suffered from its dormancy and lack of maintenance. Therefore, between errant contamination of the DBE, or through glitches in the system, it is unfortunately NOT guaranteed that you will get a blueprint. Obviously, the simpler and smaller the object is, the more likely the process will succeed, as it takes less time for the DBE to break down the object, and it's easier for the prep teams to clean it up to prevent contamination.
Practical gameplay effects translation of the lore spiel (and other notes):
- The less the OP/DP or fitting size/hull class of the weapon/ship, respectively, the less time the scan takes and the more likely it is that it will succeed.
- Both success and failure result in loss of the item (read above re: complete deconstruction of the item), but at least with success you get a BP out of it. You must be willing to part with the thing to be prototyped, so don't give it your one and only Light Needler and panic when it fails...
- The structure will cost a lot to build, and a lot to upkeep, so it's really only practical for mid- to end-game, so that you either have a fortune amassed or other colonies that can 'eat' the financial shortcoming.
- The current roadmap is to use the 'unique submarket' concept you may have seen in other mods to produce a new, specific-to-DBE-structure submarket that will allow for you to input items to await the results of the Encoding. This is so that the UI of this process will be relatively graceful, and also to force the player to have to travel to the colony with the DBE to physically drop off an item (not so easy when you think you're gonna be clever and fly a mothballed Onslaught with 5 D-Mods halfway across the Sector)
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- Since it would be impractical (and pointless) to have a mod that just played with your heart with an RNG curse, you'll be able to upgrade it a tier or two to increase probabilities.
- There will be technology that can't be properly recreated because it contains advanced materials the DBE can't make heads nor tails from, which JUST SO HAPPENS to be things you can't otherwise find blueprints for anyways. Basically, there will be an allowed whitelist of replicable gear, just normal stuff you can find in markets for example; and things like [redacted] gear will be unreproducible, as only the whitelisted things can be turned in.
- I would like to incorporate modded factions, but (to make perfectly clear) I will not do so without explicit permission and input from the mod author. This is to allow them the chance to set a whitelist of their choosing for what equipment they would like to be replicable, or indeed whether they wish to be party to the mod in the first place.
Credits and Acknowledgements
- So far, just SCC (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=3577) for giving me the idea of doing 'discovering some archaic Domain tech' during chatter on Discord, rather than my original alien technology (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5893faa1ebbd1a8f680352a1/5adce39a1ae6cfbd0c6f539a/5b465ab6562fa747af1b2ba6/1531421469181/ORIGINAL.jpg?format=1500w) idea.
Stay tuned for all the inevitable name drops of folks I'm hoping for help in the more fiddly bits of code and scripting...[/list]