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Presumably that 'extra space' would be taken up by more armor and better energy/supply systems for the increased weaponry the bigger ships field. Warships vs Cargo ships and all that. You also have skills to double the amount of cargo a ship can carry. It also makes ships like the stingray(mk2) and freighter have a use/point.

If you are going to do an Arena type thing, looking at star control's melee mode would be a good start.

Hmm after a quick test these are some pretty good changes. The numbers are a lot closer and I can definitely see, depending on the character skill levels where the new cooling module would be useful and even where a mix of them would be useful depending on how much efficiency you'd need to get that one extra Serizonite for example.

That said it looks like there is still about a 30% raw value advantage mining blue ore over red ore. This is still much MUCH better than previously where it was over 7 times that.

If you want to make the two even, a small change like having red ore mine more Cyactite per cycle (say around 10 times as much since it's very low as it is) should even it out somewhat but as it is at least a player wont be shooting himself completely in the foot by going to mine Red ore anymore.

Now as to the standard vs Industrial I'm seeing interesting numbers. The industrial is now a lot closer to the standard but still just that tiny bit behind. If you're limited to device slots, like for example on a freighter I can actually see industrial winning over standard. I can also see why someone would want to mine in a freighter in the first place, a LOT more cargo, almost double that of a Stinger MK2 and with the cargo bonus that equates to a LOT of extra ore. Basically it looks like when mining in a freighter you'd want to use industrial but mining in a stinger Mk2 you're better off with Standards.

Not sure if that's a good enough differentiator but it's at least an interesting one 

Still in my opinion I think this is now in a good place where you can perhaps see if something more interesting is possible. An easy thing that might make for an interesting change is to give the industrial 30% base bonus ore mined on red ores. The standard can then be left as is. The end result should be that if you try to mine red ores (normally in dangerous non station systems) in a stingray with standards you'll make 30% less than what you'd make mining blue ores but if you mine with a freighter using industrials you should be making more than what a Stingray Mk2 would make mining blue ores in a slightly safer area in a stronger ship; Risk vs Reward. On the upside, because the freighter has more cargo space, it can stay in a non station system longer and bring back more ore so it'd be more efficient than a stingray.

But yea I'll do a much more thorough analysis of the numbers and do a proper spreadsheet with different skill levels etc. over the week.

Ok wow, so tested this out and it is soooooo much better! Thanks!

Awesome! I'll test this out first thing soon as I get in front of my PC. Thanks for the quick turn around. You guys have a great base game here and there's a TON of potential here!

With the way energy regen and energy usage from just using things like using maneuvering thrusters work you can still have cases where you might have enough energy at the start of a cycle but because you rotated your ship (say because you have auto turn on) the cycle could still fail.

Maybe an alternative would be if possible to just mine the % of the ore the cycle was at when it stopped. So if you normally mine 10 units of ore and the mining laser runs out of energy at 40% done you get 4 units of ore.

But yea, whatever is easiest to implement at the end of the day 

Actually if I may a much better way to visualize prices and if they are above or below the average price would be to color code them. By using red and green (or any hot/cold color contrast for color blind assist) you can immediately see at a glance what items are above or below default price.

In the market inventory have anything below default be green and anything above default be red. In the player station inventory have anything that is above default be green and below default be red.

Additionally you can have instead of say +. ++. +++ you can just increase or decrease the intensity of the color, or go from deep red to orange to yellow (for when the price is the same as default price) to green to bright green for very good prices.

This is very powerful though so I would highly recommend you tie this to a skill in the cargo skill branch or even have trader characters start with it.

I think that the amount of different wares is not enough yet to really implement proper supply and demand trading yet. The econemy needs to be both a lot more complex and a lot less random for it to have th depth for things like semi fixed trade routes. However it does feel like certain stations have a tendency to have certain things for cheap (usually). I do tend to make a LOT of money from trading in between mining however.

There are some modules that change the outward appearance of your ship including (but probably not limited to) Engines, Shields, Weapons (turrets) and Hull.

I can see how some people might misunderstand. I think in this case 'design' means perhaps more 'customize' than what a lot of people associate with 'design' although it is not technically wrong

However, you CAN design your own ship through mods and it sounds easy enough. I might dust off my very rusty and very old modeling skills and give it a go at some point. I would absolutely LOVE to fly around in an Intrepid firing phasers and quantum torpedoes!

That might be a good idea, have special restock merchants spawn every now and then. If you want to get new stock, you have to make sure they get tot he station alive

Yea I flew the freighter for a long time, it was a pretty good combat ship with the right equipment  but man that Stingray Mk2 is soooo good! I have a heavy cruiser bought, I'm just missing the heavy ACs for it.

I think when I beat the game and start again I'll go all out for a energy weapon and armor build

Well I'm glad I wasn't just chasing my tail there

However, the industrial laser doesn't necessarily have to be better than a standard laser in every way. I think there is a lot of room for both to be useful. For example if you take the idea of the Industrial mining laser being better at high end ores (Red) while the standard is better at low end ores (Browns) and they kind of meet in the middle (blue ores)

An idea could be to have the standard mining laser mine fast when mining Brown ores but mine slow when mining Red ores (Like it is now). However, switch the Industrial miner to mine red ores fast but mine brown ores slow. Then of course have them mine Blue ores at around the same speed OR introduce a 3rd mining laser that is good at mining blue ores.

Another option for a 3rd special mining laser would be one that can mine both brown and red ores fast but blue ores slow. This 'experimental' mining laser you can only get from the science guys by spending science points. Or have boosters that you get from the science guys that improve the speed of mining brown, blue or red ores.

Basically the idea is that more items in the game are useful. Give the player more meaningful choices like you already have with all the different weapon systems that are similar but act different. This way the skill that increases your inventory slots actually becomes more important as you'd want to have a set of each mining laser.

Something else I noticed that I touched on but didn't really state clearly was that it looks like energy capacity and speed of mining is much, much better than efficiency. This is because you have limited cargo space and because asteroids have limited ore. High energy capacity allows you to mine all the ore  while efficiency/low energy capacity does not. If you have high energy capacity you will spend more time flying from one asteroid to another or back to station because you can quickly mine all the ore by using 2 or 3 mining lasers at once and quickly fill up your cargo hold and then regen energy as you fly around.

Anyways, I really think the mining in this game is very rewarding. It feels like a very viable alternative -without being too strong- to shooting things like in every other game so great job on that! There might be some odd elements in the mining system here and there that can be sorted out to make it more engaging by giving the player more choices so I hope this helps 

It's pretty easy to check, especially with the capacitor boosters since they each add 150 or 300 capacitor and you can see your total energy in the fitting screen. Same with shield capacity boosters and Hull boosters.

Are you mining the blue ores? They're great for money. Grab a Stingrey Mk2, 3 standard mining lasers and 4 Mk1 capacitor boosters. For weapons grab heavy ACs or Gauss and a tracking missile (or missile swarm)

I've been using this to both get money and kill alien battlehsips/hives.

The red ores mine a lot slower on the industrial 2's, and you can't at all on the standard drills.

My first mod was a mining laser that zaps all the ores in one cycle. 

Actually no the standard laser can mine red ores.

OK, so I went back and got some actual numbers for you so you can see what the problem is with a) the Industrial Miner b) the Mining Coolant Booster and c) The Red/Serizonite ore (highest end ore right?)

My current skills for reference:

Mining Proficiency 5/5
Ore Processing 4/10
Advanced mining operations 0/10

First off the industrial miner vs the standard miner. Now apart from the longer cycle time and higher energy usage it has a much too small bonus over the standard laser. Effectively the standard mining laser can mine the same amount of ore 30% faster than the industrial and use less energy. This actually includes The red and blue ores. Using the Blue ores as an example, with my skills I mine 9 instead of 7 units of Seralucite using the industrial but again, at a far worse energy and time efficiency than using the standard. To mine all the Seralucite out of a blue ore (the one with 200 units) it takes me 1 minute using 3 standard with 4 capacitor boosters while it takes me 1:30 with industrial miners with the same setup.

Now the Red ore vs the blue ore. With a standard laser it takes 3 seconds to mine 7 units of Seralucite (5 seconds for 9 units with an industrial miner). It takes 21 seconds to mine a SINGLE unit of Serizonite with standard lasers (35 seconds for 2 units with an industrial but that's with 4 cooling boosters). The problem here is that Serizonite is worth only 150% more than Seralucite but takes 3500%+ more time to mine.

So far in every way I could swing it the standard mining laser is better than the industrial, the capacitor booster is better than the cooling booster and the blue ore is better (and safer mind you) to mine than red ore.

Is it supposed to be this way? Am I missing something?