As most of you probably know, the matter manipulator is being changed in the next update from the tool you use to mine some stone and wood and then forget about into your main mid-and-late-game tool. Because of this, it'd probably be smart to decide in our own little canon exactly what the matter manipulators do, and their limits. Personally, I imagine the matter manipulator as using forcefields of some kind to move building materials about through the air, used mostly for construction by those that can afford it. This would mean a high power consumption, of course, and they would need to be recharged regularly -- say, eight hours of charging for every hour of use, or something like that. I'd like to see opinions on this, as I think up until now the things just haven't been acknowledged due to their limited ingame use.
Oddly the Matter Manipulator hasn't been addressed, at least not as far as I can remember. Despite its prevalent use for moving furniture, building and mining a few blocks and some wood, no one has really every talked about it, and rarely, if-ever, have I seen one used in character. This probably has something to do with the realism kick the server's still in the wake of, as matter manipulators would decrease building time, labor cost, and labor skill. I can imagine for many characters it's a question of whether or not they'd actually have access to such a tool, and most seem to settle on 'no'. But with the coming improvements, Matter Manipulators could see their use raised up in fields like mining, scavenging, etc. etc. Really, I don't think it's something that should be ignored. They are present in the universe, and while I know we are rather picky and most of us rather selective about what lore we use (See: My favorite race is the best because x. Forget y.), I think we can make good use out of Matter Manipulators.
Omg mater manpulator not conform 2 my ubr gritty world war 2 era plus spaceships seting. Or alternatively, Applied Energistics.
Eh, I think it's not entirely impossible for something like this to exist in the future, I mean, we have already created tractor beams, though they are quite weak. " Physicists from the Australian National University successfully built a reversible tractor beam, capable of transporting particles "one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20 centimetres, around 100 times further than previous experiments." According to Professor Wieslaw Krolikowski, of the Research School of Physics and Engineering, “demonstration of a large scale laser beam like this is a kind of holy grail for laser physicists.” "
You know what is impossible? Faster than light classical communication and travel, macro teleportation, floating taverns, expecting rocket launchers to be rare and expensive (one RPG-7 is 200 USD), and a low casualty rate when a hostile walks into a filled room with an automatic weapon. Since it's demonstratable that what is "possible" and "impossible" is neglected on this server when convenient and most people are completely incapable or unwilling to research using Google or Wikipedia, lets talk about what is consistent and sensical instead of what is possible and impossible.
Sen why haven't you learned that arguing logic and realism gets you nowhere? Hugbox>Reality. I wouldn't try to explain the matter manipulator if I were you, charging rate sounds fine, but really there's no need to explain it if most people won't adhere to the basic rules behind physics to begin with. I wouldn't argue what is possible on the server when people have a hard time understanding tried and true concepts of common sense and/or simple googling, bullet proof vests, bone density, basic spatial reasoning, etc. Expecting those same people to follow something like this is a little... much. Yeah, nice idea though.
If matter manipulators are a thing that exist in-game and are going to soon have a large in-game role, you can't just ignore it. Hell, at least the things would explain how colonies are built in a week.
Can't we just say large scale construction? Plus, if mechanics wise they're going to be limited, I'd just say construction mechs/future stuff. Better than forcing an increasingly obsolete in-game item as the excuse as to why people can't stagger out their colony creation, that or create some rules against insta-colonies.
I don't see why more colonies can't just start with a single building, and have people move in one by one, with the colony growing organically. Why does the entire place need to be complete before it opens?
Honeydew Prior was the poster child for "everyone do your own thing" style of building. In its three or four incarnations it was a monstrocity of a colony that looked vaguely like something from a particularly ungifted child's finger painting. While it did have some decent builders, projects by them were overshadowed by clashing wood constructs with people's names scrawled inside them and floating railways to nowhere. If people want to free form buildings in a colony around a theme, that is fine. There needs to be a happy median between total freestyle and aesthetic Nazi building we sometimes see in the build yourself colonies of the past.
This seems to be a considerable issue. A colony tends to need at least a few key buildings, or it won't get traffic. Let's face it, people like three things: bars, clinics/hospitals and... and... uh... Yeah. So those three things are usually necessary before people will 'populate' a colony. But colony population is an issue as it stands. Most people play loner characters who don't actually populate a colony, they just provide it with patronage. Very few people want their characters to connect to a colony (and that sense of pseudo-nationalism tends to be what makes colonies long-lasting. Dedicated people have to prop the place up.) As far as just saying 'we had construction robots do it' or 'space mechs that build', I believe we do have rules about that. Or at the very least, everyone would scream you down about it, wanting to know where you got the money, how could you afford high-tech space mechs. So, with or without the matter manipulator, things are likely to be the same every time a new colony rears its head. Which is to say, everyone will freak out for the first couple weeks to figure out where people go their money, there will be a bunch of name-calling and flaming threads, and things will settle down. Eventually the colony will become the flavor of the month, or be forgotten by everyone, because the people who built it didn't really care about the colony, just that it was their colony.
Well, a possible in-between is that there could be a character that is a skilled builder/carpenter/whatever on the planet, who builds the buildings themselves for people who decide to move in, therefore meaning the building will fit the theme of the colony. Then the person who bought this new building could decorate the interior for themselves.
[Local] Venus: ((Starbound is not a logical game, so I don't seen the necessity to play it that way))
That would be how we handled Alioth for the brief time it was open. Several other colonies and factions have done the same and it tends to work out fine. Liberty Mills handled creative freedom well for those who asked to build.
This realism kick has been going on long enough. If people want real they got to find a better life simulator like the Sims, or better yet. This is Starbound, where we have talking birds, monkeys, and talking plants that can wield flaming swords, teleport using blink tech, turn into Samus when using morphball tech. Leave the Matter Manipulator alone, whatever CF decides it does it what its suppose to do. On that note, let the Nova kids be also. This communities trying way to hard to turn a game into a better version of their "real life", its a game. These kids are dense.
