There might be little need for this with other players, but I would personally find it very convenient... 

The option to retrain personnel.
By this I mean changing the status of personnel on board ships/stations/planetary modules from civilian to military and vice versa.
I my opinion this is just as realistic as taking on POW: since they can be trained as civies or soldiers within seconds;
I don't see why we shouldn't be able to give our 'civies' some basic training on how to hold a gun or teach or soldiers how to keep an engine running... 

I understand that this option would blurr the lines somewhat between the two types of modules (the ones that work with civies and the ones that work with 'millies'), especially between the Living Quarters and the Marines Assault Unit, but I'm not asking to make either of these obsolete. I'm also not asking to make this option free, since marines cost 3x civilian, retraining should cost money, either way.

What I'd suggest is that we keep the LVQ and MAU being able to only transfer personnel to and from their respective type of modules,
but that we add the option to transfer personnel between them. Transfering marines from a LVQ to a MAU would make them civies and cost you a little money (lets say 5 solar/pers) and the other way around would turn civies in marines and cost a lot more (like $20/pers).

I have no idea how difficult this is to code (or what kind of implications this might have) within the current framework,
I am not a programmer, nor am I a game designer, I'm just a player (pun intended)

I have my reasons for wanting this, but I won't bother you with it, unless you really want to know 
and I do understand that these kind of options are not high on the priority list, but can't hurt to ask, right 

I have an extra "legacy" ship as well as 25 extra QP. I don't think this was the intended behavior.

It looks like it only happened to you. Please keep the extra QP and ship for reporting it.

  Fair play! 

This is why mmorpg pvp games generally don't allow free-for-all mechanics because it's so easy for a high-level player to kill you if you're just beginning to climb the ladder. Generally, there're limitations on the skill/level range, the reward, where and when.

This game, however, is very selective on its limits: it limits economics, but not module mk, for example,
so new players have a very hard time to catch up.


The only things that I can think of that keep high-level players from whiping us all out are:

- they're just really friendly people that prefer to play nice 
- they got bored with trying to find our stuff 
- they got bored with the way to easy victories 
- they prefer to have at least one or two other players around 
- some other reason(s) I haven't thought of yet 

Personally, I welcome any idea that brings more balance to the game...

new ships hulls

 

Good to hear!   

Since I've been away for a while, I'm not always sure I've picked up on all of the new updates and shortcuts yet... 

Just a minor add-on:

We have auto-engage for a two click job (interstellar travel);
why not for a three click job (interplanetary travel)?

I for one spend more time in my scout ship jumping from planet to planet than from star to star...
and atm I have to 'enter astral view', 'set course' and 'engage engines'; at least one of those steps seems redundant

or am I missing something here? 

<receiving message <<BRUIN ALERT>>  send on all NHC frequencies >

This i…ptain Ha…te of th…periment…paceship…t -
Fir…esults o…oject Du…re negat…
…ormhole …vior unp…ctable -
…se to st…ll resea…on dimen… drive i…iately -
… has sus…ed heavy…age – Jumpd… disable…returnin… known s… on impu…
…arest ba…s resear…tation i…ctor 3,3…lease re…d

<end of message>

...ay, may... ...ayday...

...re outer sec... ...las...op... ... through re... st... ...tor 3,3...

...cr... ...down... ...jured...

I sometimes have this too.

If I take a WHG or FTL offline (putting the number of personnel to 0% can be enough),
it sometimes doesn't show the other timers in the SITREP if the ship with the offline module is the active one...

Not sure what triggers it; it doesn't always happen! 

First let me say, welcome back to the game.   
...
I myself would play on both servers.

ditto

There is no link between those mining and those doing the significantly more profitable com missions. This needs to be rectified.

Agreed. Mining is a lot of hard work and virtually no profit. I only do it on the side for fun; although the fun is somewhat fading lately.

There is ofcourse the problem of newbies.... where will they get stuff to build modules? The solution make SOL corp a real CORP. Newbies start as members and the trading hub at earth could be set to corp only. It could be made so that it allways has a supply of the resources needed for tech 1 modules... or even simpler just sells all the tech 1 mark 1 modules.

This is a very good idea indeed!

Unfortunately fixing this now would be problematic, it would freeze the power disparities between players, making it nigh on impossible for lower powered players to ever catch up. Rather it would probably have to be associated with a full reset.... or a relauch in a different shard. But doing so would be a dramatic improvement to the balance of the game.

This doesn't have to be true. Most players belong to a corp; corps have various types of players. I imagine trade being big between corp members, not so much between different corps, since most corps would want to keep scarce resources to themselves. Big corp members would help out their newbies, I would think...

A true miner corp could however want to make a profit by selling resources (as anyone should be able to do anyway).
The danger in this would be if the players with the big bucks clean out the market constantly,
so perhaps the selling system could be refined in a way to allow sellers to define more accurately to whom they want to sell their stuff.
This could leave the bigger players fending for themselves, with the little guys having prime access to the resources...

I'm not saying this would solve all problems related to this problem, but it could have a shot at working...
Frankly, I think the universe could use a reset for various reasons anyway!
Of course this wouldn't go over well with most players that were here from the start, I imagine,
so setting up a second server might be the safest way to go in any case.

May I be the first to say: woohoo! 

oh and thank you, Sir! 

Emi announced recently that the limit on ships is going to be removed soon.  That said though, the time it takes to visit every single system, search every single planet, moon and asteroid for someone is just too much. Even if you brought in fast small ships like that, it is still taking a long amount of time. Not just from searching the system planet by planet but also by visiting the systems themselves as well.  

Although I usually agree with you on most things, most of the time; I have to disagree on this one... 
I actually like the somewhat painstakingly way of exploring one has to do in this game! Call me a masochist 

In the end considering the odds of finding who you are looking for is so low, you will just end up wasting a bunch of fuel and time.  The probe idea is a way to help save a little on both time and fuel. Not to mention using probes for stuff like this wouldn't be unrealistic. It would also still take up some time and fuel but it would save you some of that as well. This issue of finding people is going to only become worse as well as more stuff is added to the 5th ring and beyond in the future.

I do agree that one should be able to monitor the universe better in some way.
But perhaps only if a system has already been visited; sort of like: leave a 'commsat' behind that detects changes, both to planetary conditions (read: resource deposits and occupation by other players) and system activity (ships jumping in and out).

The idea of a probe is however, as you point out, not unrealistic, but long distance probes would either require massive amounts of fuel or (or perhaps and) take a very long time to reach destination. So my suggestion would be to have short range probes that you launch from ships (call them 'carrier' if you want). The idea would be you jump a ship into a system; launch probes (from the safe spot) to all bodies (planets, moons, asteroids); the probes crash into their targets and relay you the intel they gathered (resource deposits, occupation, etc.).
The intel could be presented as a report, much like the battle reports; reports could be then saved and added to a personal database, perhaps linked to the personal starmap, etc.

The 'commsat' could be a standard station with a class I hull and the 'probes' hull class I ships.
Both equipped with a new module type (comm module or detector module or whatever) or just with the already exsisting WHD.

This also implies 'commsat stations' should be visible by other players, who can of course destroy them.
Drones might also have a failure rate (chance of not getting any data due to malfunction).
Level of intel accuracy might vary with installed module level then.

Ok, you can take that last comment in my previous post with a grain of salt...

Saw the "Unlimited ship & station licenses for all" topic just after I posted it 

I might stick around a bit longer to see how this game evolves after all... 

Very good idea! 

This will go a long way towards keeping the game playable (maybe even fun) for everyone.
(Not all the way though, so keep those good ideas coming!)