@ElevatorEnthusiast488 I don't understand...?

@SledDriver That's a memetic kill agent.

@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Very much so.

Fractals are cool.

What have YOU DONE

@SledDriver, ok

@Brendorkus Go ahead. Nothing I like better than answering (intelligent) questions.

I have so many questions...

Thanks, @Alex2262. I'm going to start on actual fractals pretty soon.

@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Oh ok, but in future could you just use plain English? The point of communication is to be understood with the minimum of fuss.

@F4f879

Glowing materials

At present, if you want to make a custom shape that acts as a light (for instance, formation light strips on military aircraft, a light bar for a truck, or an abstract sculpted shape that acts like a light), you only have one option: make the shape out of beacon lights. This is very limiting, because the beacon lights' fixed shape and useless base make it impossible to make a number of shapes. If the developers simply gave us the ability to set a material's ambient property to 1, so that it would always glow at full brightness, you could turn any subassembly built out of any kind of parts into a light. A halo is not required, so it should be easy to program. So you could build light strips, spirals, globes, hemispheres, abstract sculptures, whatever.

@F4f879

Cosmetic movers

Sometimes you just want to animate stuff, without affecting physics. The current "mover" parts like pistons and rotators don't allow this. Want a dial for your cockpit? Simple, use a rotator. But if your build is heavy, the dial's rotation is going to impart angular momentum to the entire aircraft (or tank, or whatever). You can override this with diffuseInertiaTensors="false", but that can cause terrible lag on large/complex builds. Or say you want a sliding door for an ejection port on an automatic weapon. Right now, you can only do this with pistons, which add a horrible sound effect, and the movement can't be customized -- you can only control the speed. Pistons also break quite easily. And last but not least, all those moving parts require additional physics calculations, which cause unnecessary lag.

What I'd like is a generic, ideal "mover" part, that can be programmed to rotate or translate a subassembly in any way, without affecting physics. I'd like to be able to specify "from time 0 to 0.5 seconds, slide 0.5 units along the Z-axis at a constant speed V; from 0.5 to 0.6 seconds, rotate outwards around the Y-axis with an ease-in and ease-out for the speed;" and so on. This would allow players to build completely custom animated stuff like variable-nozzle "turkey feathers," muzzle brakes, gun recoil mechanisms, gun loading mechanisms, rotating radars on Star Wars builds, sliding and rotating doors, moving eyes in robot heads, and so on. They should also come with a library of sound effects to choose from, and the ability to make them completely silent as well. Few things set my teeth on edge like activating a piston or rotator in SP and hearing that awful whirring noise that can completely break immmersion, as when you use pistons to simulate recoil -- firing the weapon makes them go "whirrrrr".

@F4f879

Configurable rotators

I'm not talking about just speed. I want to specify the axes of rotation, the rotation speed in RPM instead of a number that behaves in an unexplained way, and whether the rotation speed is constant or accelerates. I want to be able to build a ball-and socket joint. This part should be an "ideal" physics abstraction, in the sense that it doesn't need a fancy 3D mesh to look cool, or have an offset for the rotating bit. If I configure it as a single-axis rotator, it should have an axis and a collar that spins around it, and nothing else. Save the extra polygons, most builds hide the rotators anyway. If I configure it as a ball-and-socket joint, it should be a just a sphere with a socket around it, and each of them with an attachment point.

Explosive bolts

The only way to separate subassemblies from a build, at present, is to use detachers. But they're terribly wobbly, causing your multistage rocket or bomb-carrying aircraft to look like it was put together using rubber bands. I'd like an explosive bolt part that holds things together as securely as a vice, until you activate it. Just like explosive bolts in real life.

@SledDriver such as?

Gorgeous. Reminds me of a fractal.

@SledDriver, That's the contraction for "en".

@SledDriver hahaha that doesn’t surprise me

@Mustang51 Oh, I have a bunch of parts I feel the severe lack of, that if added to the game would take it to a whole other level.

@SledDriver everyone has their specific part or ability they want to SP and that’s a pretty good one. I would love if they had that too

@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Thanks. Did you mean ⠉⠕⠝⠞⠑⠝⠞, though?

@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Last time I checked, braille and computer screen doesn't mix well...

⠠⠊⠀⠇⠊⠅⠑⠀⠽⠕⠥⠗⠀⠉⠕⠝⠞⠢⠞⠲

⠠⠉⠕⠕⠇⠀⠯⠀⠛⠕⠕⠙⠲

@asteroidbook345 You mean airbrakes...

@tylerdeveneuxmusic I'm not sure what it is either :) I just thought it looked fascinating.