DJ Pete talked about modeling ships in "The Calculator" can you tell more about it?asked by Archilele
TL;DRThe Calculator speeds up setting ships' technical specs; the tool itself may never be released, but they want the underlying data to be visible to players.
Yeah. So, Pete does some amazing work and one of the biggest things that he's been working on is this aforementioned "Calculator". It just lets us set up ships so much faster. It was instrumental on why we were able to get the Reliant out so early on Friday the week of its sale, because the tools that he's building for us works with John's physics info and we give it the numbers that we have for... so it's like... the ship's this big, we're looking at this much weight, and now we quickly crunch... okay, there's the thrusters it needs, this is the kind of power we're going to be looking at. And so it's just this great one-stop shop to let us start planning out the actual technical data-driven side of these ships which is a huge win for us.
It's also kind of nice to be able to try stuff out in the numbers... You're like, "Oh, what happens if this is 300 times that number." Like... taking on the cargo of the Hull series, that was a big element in bringing on "The Calculator". It's nice to get a little bit of the guess work out of there and have the numbers line up.
Yeah, and for the modder part of this question, I don't know if the exact calculator will ever be released but a lot of the data it's going to be working off, we absolutely want to be able to get in front of you guys. Because, I mean, one of the old stretch goals for the Jane's style manuals - this is going to be a lot of that data that's going to inform those manuals. And so we don't want it to be a hidden unknown aspect to you guys that you have to theorycraft yourselves. We want you to be able to see what we're seeing when we spec these things out.
The Reliant came out not because we got better at this but because we had a calculator. laughterMS: [laughing] That was actually a huge part of it...
Oh I know, I know...
It was like... we've got this surface area (mimes firing off data to the calculator)... but then we've got every flyable ship's surface area now... and now we all have the new health.
New health!
Yay! Yeah, no gun can kill a ship before it overheats anymore with the new health changes... but that also doesn't have new weapons.