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Nabaal - Tech Demonstrator

The Nabaal was designed for long range exploration and mining operations. It's also my most recent technology demonstrator and features a number of very polished and handy subsystems. The ship's job is to identify deposits of rare ressources while traveling between a large number of asteroids and mine them in an easy and efficient way. As the hunt for certain deposits can be a tedious and very time consuming, this ship has been equipped with a very powerfull, but reliable(!) gravity drive. Despite it's variety of subsystems and the mining/refining equipment, it's still a fairly compact and user friendly design that was build in a modular way to ensure easy upgrades and repairs.


All systems on board can be operated by crew of 1 as they are highly automated. The ship is equipped with a compact GravGatherer to support mining operations and a multi purpose GravCore that safely(!) serves as both, a fully automated gravity burst drive (travel speed of about 500 m/s) and a small ship boost gate.
The airlocks are automated and offer a maximum of comfort and safety at a very small size. The small ships are can be docked to the Nabaal and can reliably deal with the high acceleration that occurs when using the gravity drive.

The ship weights about 3,5 million kg and is fully survival ready. The only mod required does nothing else aside from increasing the game's speed limit to a little over 500 m/s. It's available over here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=372138648
The gravity drive won't work correctly without it.

As you probably know, most GravDrives are big, buggy and cause more problems than they solve. Don't worry about this one. I put a huge amount of time and effort into making it the safest and most comfortable device I ever created or saw anywhere on the workshop. A jump only requires you to orientate the ship towards the target and press 2 buttons during the jump. That's it!
The first one will accelerate you to roughly 500 m/s, the second one will get you back to 0m/s (press it roughly 2km before you reach the target).
No messing around with inertia dampers, reverting gravity, breaking manually or anything else. It's as fool proof and reliable as I can possibly design it (and I've been designing those things since the very begining of the alpha). I've been using this drive on a dedicated server which is why it also has a safety mechanism integrated that automatically deaccelerates the ship after 30 km if nobody did it yet, assuming the pilot had a disconnect or accidentally left his seat and can't get back in. It's also specifically designed to ignore potentially dangerous orders from the pilot. It's quite hard to make it malfunction without specifically trying to do so. Aside from docking ships correctly, it rly takes care of everything. I did more than 50 jumps and never had any problems due to bugs or malfunctions.
Just make yourself comfortable at the left pilot seat on the bridge and use the buttons 5 (start) and 7 (stop) in the second toolbar group. Small ships need to be secured by attaching both, the connectors AND the landing gears in order to prevent any issues, as rare as they might be by now. Both can be done from the bridge by using control groups.

If you want to, you can also use the regular jump drive (boring!). The GravDrive however doesn't need to recharge and requires less energy which makes it better for medium range exploration and travel.
The secondary pilot seat can be used to undock the entire gravity jump drive and remote control it as a seperate ship. It has sensors and timer blocks onboard to work as a boost gate for small ships and will accelerate them to 300 m/s when needed. The 'muli' (small ship docked to the nabaal) is equipped with artificial mass blocks and was designed to be boosted like this so it can do long range transport.



For mining operatios the gravity gatherer can assist by collecting lose objects. You can activate it either from the very front of the ship by using the button panel or at the primary pilot seat (left one) with pre-set controös in the first toolbar group. It's devided into the gatherer field and an additional generator that balances the gravitation inside the Nabaal and enables you to move inside the ship without getting pulled against a wall. The gatherer will suck in any rock at medium proximity of the ship and directly transfer them to the 2 refineries. The range at which ore is affected can be adjusted via the spherical gravity generators in the front section of the ship.
If you are as lazy as I am, you can set the small mining ship to just throw out all the rocks out of it's connector and let the Nabaal suck them in. So you don't even need to use the connector at the right side of the nabaal (which is specifically designed to automatically suck in the ores out of any small ship attached to it).

Stone inside the conveyor system will be seperated automatically and stored in it's own container at the belly of the Nabasl. If not needed, it can be dumped with a connector into open space. Both of the small ships automatically refill their oxygen when connected to the Nabaal without any manual tasks (this wall of text is long enough already; if you're interested in how it works, ask me).

The whole ship has automated doors (I'm lazy and willing to automate everything :D ). The 3 very compact airlocks work by simply walking into them and press the button that's closest to the door through which you want to exit. It will automatically adjust the pressure and close/open the doors as needed. No air will be wasted or dumped.
Only issue here (that I still wasn't able to resolve) is that server restarts or loading the map will mess with the sensors. Airlock doors might not open automatically on some occasions if used for the first time which might require you to actually do that manually for once :P Anything else like pressure or O2 preservation is not affected by this.




This is a fairly complex ship and it can be super hard to dig through all the subsystems and mechanisms. Just ask if something doesn't work as advertised or if you want to know more details on anything particular. I've been designing, building and polishing this ship for almost a year now and did that over 100 hours while playing in survival mode. It's the first ship of mine that I actually consider truely finished and polished.

The GravCore is fully modular and could be used on any ship of yours withou major redesigns. It has all the necessary timer blocks integrated and with it's current settings it's not even close to running at max power so you could easily use it to go even faster or use it on a bigger ship. For the Nabaal I activated/deactivated the mass blocks asymetric to fine tune the drive for a perfectly straight jump.
If you want more details on this beast, just ask. It was so complex that I failed to design it right away. I literally had to design it's timer block setup by using pen and paper, so it might take you a while to explain the details :P


I hope you enjoy more ambitious creations as much as I do :)