Shuttle (New): Stubjack

[wendyribstonpippin]

About the PR

This adds the Stubjack to the catalogue of buyable shuttles.

Why / Balance

The Stubjack is a shuttle for mercs on a budget who want to be able to do dogfights and flybys of the caves and derelicts that spawn across the map.
I based it off of my experiences playing jack of all trade fighters in NF, and wanting to have a cheap ship that's a bit of a blank slate, with room to place the specific lathes I feel like using that day, while also making for a fun ship to shoot things from. One of the uses I hope to see it get is as a cheap smuggling vessel, for those who want to give NFSD a fun fight should they ever get caught.
But even if you don't plan on being a lil' stinker, this is also just a very viable low budget salvage option that will also diversify our skies with a more unique look.

How to test

Fly it from the yard! Try to shoot things from it! Get into some fun salvaging action!

Media

Changelog

🆑

• add: Stubjack-Class Mercenary Carrier from Wyvern Shypyards

[dvir001]

Guidebook.

Please use the right folders to save your files

[Tych0theSynth]

Downloaded the map file so I could take a look at it today. Standby for a wall of text...

[Tych0theSynth]

So, I've done a walk-around a gone beneath the surface with your shuttle. There's quite a lot to address here. I'm sorry in advance if my tone feels blunt or harsh, this is never done out of malice, but more due to how I always type things out when I do this. I really like to see people improve, so please take this with the intended energy (which is one of encouragement!).
Another caveat: I'm not a maptainer. I don't get a say on whether your ship is added or isn't, but I am a mapper with plenty of ships and some POIs under my belt on this fork, and I do want to help you here! Of course, you are completely entitled to just ignore everything I say here and tell me to go away! :D
Anyway, without further ado...

Two docking doors. Not a dealbreaker but it does mean that you can't always dock super cleanly at docks like these. Again, not a dealbreaker. I'd LOVE a light in here! It has TWO emergency lights! Why? If the light at the dock is broken, I can't see anything and I'm scared of the dark :(
I think glass docking airlocks would be better here.

Loosely mapped uranium for your generator. You have the locker, so you don't need that. Please don't map loose fuel!

Doesn't use much power. A little more than what's required to get 100% efficiency with a plasma, so I guess a uranium is warranted here. I do recommend setting the power within the ship file itself so it spawns in with the power set optimally.
To do this, find the generator in the ship file and add the targetpower component - for example:

- proto: PortableGeneratorSuperPacmanShuttle
  entities:
  - uid: 334
    components:
    - type: Transform
      pos: -0.5,-10.5
      parent: 2
    - type: FuelGenerator
      targetPower: 21000
      on: False

This HV setup definitely isn't numberwang. In fact, it doesn't actually do anything with the SMES as the cable terminal doesn't work without an HV under the SMES. Right now all the SMES does is make the shuttle more expensive! You can very easily streamline this into this, and it'll work perfectly:

Also...random white decal under the SMES?

This atmos setup makes me a bit sad. No decals on the connector ports make swapping out less convenient. Add some decals so people know at a glance which tank goes where. The piping here is a bit larger than it really needs to be, also. With the mixer a tile further from the canisters, it doesn't really 'flow' very nicely. Bring it up a tile so it's next to the ports and you'll have neater piping and a better look.

These fire alarms don't actually do anything! They aren't connected to any of your firelocks. Ideally, don't use fire alarms. Have an air alarm instead and connect it up to all of your atmos devices so people can set scrubbers to widenet and have proper firelock control.

Firelocks under your airlock doors. Not needed.

These glass tiles feel really out of place to me, and the hazard decal just over the left hand ones feels pretty goofy. I feel like this detracts to the overall feel of this room as opposed to adding anything.

Overall, this room feels really lifeless to me. Compared to the tiling and decal work you've done in the other spaces, this room just doesn't feel like it fits with what you've done elsewhere. In short: it feels boring.

Tables in front of the EVA lockers...why? Having these here blocks my ease of movement out of the blast doors next to them and makes the space feel unnecessarily cramped. I suggest using benches instead (see how the Broadhead does this as an example) for more of a 'get ready' feel.

Design of the bridge overall is good. As someone who quite obviously enjoys spiky ship frontends, this is really nice and the brass glass is a good look!
I feel like the door placement could be improved, however. Having them on the outer edges of the space means you lose use of the tiles directly in front of them, which means you can't do anything at all with the bottom four tiles. If you moved those two doors and paired them in the middle, you could use the tiles down from the charger and fax for other things! These might be better spaces for suit lockers and such.

Evil, nasty rogue pipes! Hisses.

Your waste exhaust passive vent is un-anchored.

All of your emergency lights (save for a couple) are inside the walls.

I'm not an enormous fan of this, though I'm not an enormous fan of the thruster setup in general. They feel 'tacked on', and having the reverse thrusters towards the stern (like the one with the passive vent under it) looks a bit strange to me. You have all that free real estate up near the bow of the ship for things like that, and I feel like it'll look much better that way. Have a play and see how you can integrate your thrusters into the hull lines of the ship. Building around thrusters is often better ;)

The flooring and decal work in this room is much more interesting. It does, however, suffer from the 'hallway problem', in that it just feels like a hallway and doesn't really do much more than that. Many hallways on ships have extra stuff for the crew to utilise, so they feel functional. This is something that is honestly far more important than many people realise and can add an enormous amount of flavour to a ship.

This LV cabling overall is really problematic. The mapping guidelines encourage minimising cabling under walls. This is kinda the opposite :x
I recommend giving your power and atmos infrastructure another pass so as to truly minimise pipes and cables under walls so that players can easily modify and fix things if stuff goes wrong. On a ship intended for combat, this is even more important as she's more likely to sustain damage than other ships! In the mapping channel on the discord there are various helpful wiring guides that explain how cabling works and the power range of LV cables. This should help you improve things there!
The best bits of advice I can give for mapping cables and pipes: Less is best and keep it simple, stupid.

Overall: This thing has a fair few problems. I can quite easily see that you're inexperienced (it does show), but this isn't the end of the world and is something which can be fixed with time and plenty of practice. Have you made a PR for this too soon? Perhaps. I think it's best kept as a draft for now while you take the time to address the issues and give it plenty of time in the oven. You can never spend too long mapping! ;3

A little bit of PR advice, too: Your PR description feels lacking. Give some really good thought and time into explaining why you think there's space for your shuttle and where it fits! I strongly recommend looking at some of the PRs for ships which have been merged as examples of good ship PRs. Sell, sell, sell your ship!

[wendyribstonpippin]

Thanks for the insights!! this is all very helpful! I'll think on the design more :D

[github-actions]

RSI Diff Bot; head commit dd0639f merging into 334f5c7
This PR makes changes to 1 or more RSIs. Here is a summary of all changes:

Resources/Textures/_NF/Guidebook/shuttle_maps/128x96.rsi

State	Old	New	Status
stubjack			Added

Edit: diff updated after dd0639f

[dustylens]

First impressions.

Nice profile! I'm already feeling pretty excited. That's a good start.

Engineering:

Pt1. Power

• Uh oh, unpowered airlocks. Looks like something has gone awry in engineering and some wiring isn't behaving properly. This configuration might work a bit better for you:

• The next challenge you may be facing is that your uranium fuel is now unreachable behind your generator. So it seems as though you may be looking at some challenges regarding the overall layout of your engineering space.

• Your port/starboard thrusters by the main hall are not currently pulling power. The cables need to be connected.
  

Pt2. Gas

• Your shuttle's gas mixture should be at 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. To demonstrate the primary and secondary port in your configuration.
  

• The air alarm(s) aren't currently linked to anything. By grabbing a network configurator or multitool you can click on vents, scrubbers, emergency airlocks and other pieces and then link them to the air alarm.

• These fellows don't work this way sadly.
  
  They take two inputs and do not allow gas to pass through them. As such the rest of your system is now offline. As a general rule we avoid this buggy vent.

• Your waste system should end in a "passive vent", which will allow your gasses to leave the system naturally as they attempt to pressurize space.

Main hall:

• Small thing, but the water cooler might have a better home over the air vent, as it's placed next to the EVA suit locker and can make for some awkward interactions. Other thoughts to be dropped in the general vibe reflection.

• But why is there a machine frame here? I presume to be turned into a lathe later on. But given the availability of flatpacks vs circuit boards this may be somewhat challenging to put into use.

Cockpit:

• Nice chairs. I didn't know they rotated. I never see these.

• While it might impact the overall profile in a way that you don't desire I thought it might be helpful to inform that you can place the lights over the thrusters as such. If you were not in love with the catwalks.

Aesthetic vibe:

• Generally unique approach that manages for some unique pieces without being obnoxious about it. I appreciate that when I step onto the shuttle that it feels like a departure from the norm. I can't entirely make up my mind on if the brass theme needs to be leaned into more, maybe it's because most of the lovely windows are up in the cockpit? It's not a criticism but it did stick in my craw.

• The tile work is very uniform across the shuttle. Different spaces could benefit from different tile types. Sticking with the darker steel approach is fine. But considering walk ways, where cargo will be dragged, where atmosphere canisters are being mounted, etc. There are a lot of options and ways to visually inform people of a space's function. I think that you might find that the presentation of the shuttle is elevated by differentiating those visual cues by some differentiation.

• Your poster is beautiful and it should be mounted front and center!

Functional vibe and role:

This is where things get a little more abstract and I do apologize for that.

• You don't need to map firelocks beneath the external airlocks. One less thing to worry about!

• For pulling in cargo X O X layouts of the blast doors may make moving boxes tricky. Double or triple wide blast doors are going to make moving boxes far less troublesome in my view.

• The hallways as laid out mean you come in through the blast doors and then navigate an obstacle course of benches to reach the cargo bay. Maybe double blast doors on the south side and the double benches on the north side? My view is primarily one of "How do I facilitate moving things between the main hall and the cargo space quickly and efficiently?

• I find myself humming over the separation of the cargo spaces and the main bay. I do feel confident that 8 benches can be trimmed down to 4 without too much issue to better facilitate the movement of goods. That'd still leave seating for 6 mercs which is a pretty ambitious number of crew. I guess part of me is like "let's open the shuttle up more" but, really, it does help organize and keep things clean?

HUMMMMMMS.

General thoughts:

1. Emergency lights: I'd love to hear your thoughts on the emergency lights. You have a LOT and many of them are outside. I feel like someone may be critical of this choice, but I can see some interesting utility in letting people know who are approaching your shuttle that the power is currently dead and you're in a place of distress. Which strikes me as interesting. However the sheer number of internal lights may be leaning a bit on the heavy side.

2. Internal lights: You might get a bwoink for having too many lights. Four per hall is getting a bit heavy and that number could likely be cut in half. A point for reflection is, maybe this is just me, your shuttle always looks a lot darker while mapping than it does while walking through it.

Closing thoughts:

I think this is a good place to pause for now. I appreciate your artistic vision and I think there's a lot of promise here. I believe that my review has a mixture of things that may be seen as a personal preference, but there are some pieces that will help from a mechanical standpoint and probably should be taken into consideration. If there is anything I can clarify please let me know : )

Thank you for sharing your shuttle and vision with us! I'm excited to fly it.

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts, please resolve those before we can evaluate the pull request.

[dustylens]

Hi!

I just did a quick stop through!

• The power room seems like it's functioning nicely now. However I noticed two things.

1. There seem to be 3 stacked LV cables at the intersection. Those could probably be cleaned up.
2. It looks like there are some power woes due to an LV cable being broken by the cable terminal. Which interrupts cables. You could try running your wires like this to make sure the thrusters/lights all get juice?
   

• It looks like the blast doors could use some directional fans! Opening the blast doors in the main hall could really suck the atmosphere out of any parties behind held there.

• You didn't need to remove the exterior lights over the catwalks by the way! I was wondering why the cockpit felt a little more gloomy, was that the reason?

• In mapping mode you need to anchor your tanks with a wrench. That'll make sure they're actually plumbed in to the system when it's up and running!

• How are you feeling about the shuttle?

• I like the sidenotes in the guidebook ; )

[wendyribstonpippin]

hey thanks!
yeah a lot of stuff (lights, fans) was forgotten when I remodelled, teehee, bimbird moment. i'll fix the thingies later today.
i'm feeling pretty fuckin' good about this shuttle to be perfectly honest :3
i'll look into those merge conflicts now

[dvir001]

Fix your changelog, its broken

[wendyribstonpippin]

I know the freeze is unlikely to be lifted just yet, but I think this ship is spaceworthy, and so i'm opening for review so that should the freeze thaw, the ship can be smoothly integrated.

[dustylens]

It looks like you removed the posters but left one on the shuttle, which I believe is why you're having difficulty spawning it.

Open the stubjack.yml file in Resources\Maps_NF\Shuttles

Cruise to line 1535 and remove:

- proto: NFPosterContrabandWyvernShipyards
  entities:
  - uid: 178
    components:
    - type: Transform
      pos: 2.5,-3.5
      parent: 1

And you should be good to go!