Day 5 (Customisation)

I don't actually think this was day 5 but I don't care. It's going in here as day 5.

Today I decided to have a better look into my ship. Although I had an X4 shield booster and C5 cannon I was still getting a bit beat up by fighter missions in Olympus. Not enough to fail but it was time to look into upgrades.

So I docked at a spaceport and clicked Enter Spaceport. There's a Shipyard button down on the left that allows you to customise your ship.

There's a video somewhere that explains this screen in detail but I'll give the important points here.

Firstly, you have a frame, on the right. By default you'll be given the top one, regardless of class, and the lower frames will unlock as you gain military rank and explore new systems. So, to go to the next level is.. 500k additional to what I already have. Great. Ignoring that for now as I only have 150k.

Basically you have an assembly capacity, which amounts to how much stuff you can bolt on to the base ship. The remainder is shown up the top and won't let you build if you go into negative values. If you're not sure what you've got equipped you can check your ship stats in the top left, so for example wings, it gives you the name of the wings and then a number. Have a look at the available wings, you'll notice they're numbered too. The number in the top left is what you have equipped, same for engine and shield. Cargo hold and fuel tank give you the actual figures.

A neat feature is you can allocate points on what your ship can be used for, the lowest button just above your ship. I removed my secondary weapon points as I'd already used my missiles and didn't intend on buying more, and put one in crew and one in equipment hardpoints. Later found this was silly, leave a point in countermeasures and drop the rest into hardpoints. Taxi missions are a pain anyway and maybe we'll get around to hiring additional crew later.

That's about it for what you can do for the time being. If you have the cash you can downgrade your fuel tank from 1200 to 800, which gives you enough for another cargo hold or whatever you want. See what you can do. I don't understand how wings can make a different in SPACE but anyway, if agility is your thing. The Sell cost of your ship is subtracted from the cost of the new ship to give you Total, at the top. Make sure you have enough funds for the upgrade! Funds are shown above Total.

Once that's done you can use the sliders to customise each part and give your ship a unique look. Click Highlight to see the bit you're modifying. I trust you all to work the rest out by clicking stuff.

Once that's done by some more equipment to fill your hardpoints, I recommend having a tractor beam, cannon relay (doubles up your cannons), your usual shields and warp drive, etc. Whatever you think you would need. Remember the sell cost is usually reasonable so even if you can't reload a save before buying something you can get most of your cash back.