The Orbital update has introduced the notion of starship construction. For those who haven’t explored this aspect of the game yet (or are still waiting for the Xbox update), the new space stations have a construction terminal where you can build a fighter, explorer, or hauler (no solars, exotics, shuttles, or interceptors at this time).

The way it works is, each ship is constructed from base components that you obtain by salvaging a starship, and a reactor core that you purchase from the starship tech merchant at the station (the class of the reactor core determines the class of the ship).

For a hauler you need: cockpit, wings, and engine. For a fighter, it’s: fuselage, thruster, and wings. For an explorer, you have hull, left wing and right wing. Note that each component can (and for wings, typically is) a set of multiple of components, which is how you get all the variations.

To obtain a component, you have to scrap a ship that has the configuration you want. The ship scapper has a new option to let you salvage one component. So if you want to make a ship, you have to scrap three ships total to get each component: cockpi+wing+engine for hauler, fuselage+wing+thruster for fighter, and left+right+hull for explorer.

Testing has shown that supercharged slot arrangement is procedural. The same components (including the reactor core, so S-class vs A-class etc. matters) at the same space station will result in the same SC slot configuration. Color is irrelevant.

So what does this mean for the Glyph Exchange?

It means we can publish glyphs to space stations that result in favorable SC slot arrangements for a given starship configuration. The question is, how best to do that?

Since the subject lines here are intended to serve as an index, I’d like to suggest using this form:

Fabricated Starship/Galaxy

Then we have to name the parts and provide a photo of the SC slot configuration that you get from that space station with that configuration.

As for part naming, though it’s tempting to use the game’s “language” for the parts, there are a lot of component names because they are describing combinations of parts rather than the parts themselves, and those names have a lot of potentially confusing redundancies. I think it’s better for us to stick with the standard part names we always use, as people are already familiar with those and it’s pretty easy to figure out which ships you need to scrap to get what you want.