I’ve been doing a lot of work on Shipyard over the past few days, and although Alpha 1.0 is still a long way away, I’m making progress much faster than I expected.

First and foremost, I now have free-form versions of weapon controls, crew’s quarters, and cargo bays implemented. In the case of weapon controls, it’s still very clunky because I haven’t done anything about the crew and power interface yet. However, the visual aspect is in and working even better than expected. You can see all of the new free-form systems in this screenshot:

Second, even though it wasn’t on my official outline, I’ve begun the process of adding a greater variety of systems and weapons to play around with, including the first class 3 ship parts. I started, or course, with the class 3 bridge. At 6×6 tiles, 3000 credits, 8 mass, and a crew and power requirement of 11 and 12 respectively, it’s quite a hefty system. However, the advantage is that you can use the full 48×48 build space as well as any of the new class 3 parts currently in development.

As for weapons, I’ve been adding new weapons as well as going back and redesigning old ones. I’ve completed the gauss cannon set, with new textures for the existing small and medium variants, plus new large and “mega” versions. The mega version is 8 by 8 tiles in size, require 16 weapon control to fire, and deals 240 damage per shot. As such, it takes the crown of highest single-shot damage from the Railgun.

Additionally, I’ve added a turreted torpedo launcher. It does the same damage as the regular one, only it has a turret. In exchange, it has a higher complexity rating and it physically larger (5×5 as opposed to 3×3). It looks like this:

I’ve been spending a lot of time building ships with these new parts, but I’m quickly realizing the limitations of the current build screen. As such, the new ship-building screen is going to be high on my priority list over the next few days. I’ll also be expanding and revising the plasma cannon family, as well as adding some new weapons. One thing I’ve been considering is a set of non-turreted ballistic weapons which are smaller and less complex, in exchange for losing the turret. Far-future ships-of-the-line, anyone?