Upgrading ships, etc?

javaslinger · #1 February 27th, 2001, 01:09 AM

Is there a way to upgrade ships/facilities/etc that you've already built without building them all over again?

Ken

DirkHowitzer · #2 February 27th, 2001, 01:21 AM

Yes, for facilities simply go the the individual construction queus, or the main colonies screen and hit "Upgrade Facilities",

As for ships, simply make a new design, take your ships to the closet ship yard facility and retrofit them. To do this find the the green recyvle icon in the ship commands menus. You can figure it out from there.

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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

raynor · #3 February 27th, 2001, 01:26 AM

You bet!

To upgrade facilities, just press the 'Upgrade' button on the colony screen. It will show you the new Version of any colony facilities you have on your planet.

To upgrade a ship, you must first design an upgraded ship. Then, you can actually upgrade the ship. To design your upgraded ship, go into the design window. Click on the ship and press Upgrade. This will leave your ship the same but upgrade, for example, Ion Engine I's to Ion Engine II's and Shield Generator I's to Shield Generator II's, etc. Or, you can just click on copy and then add/subtract as you wish.

Once you have a design you like, pick a ship that is at a spaceyard and click the Retrofit/Mothball button. It is green and looks to me like a recycle symbol. Click on the ship and press retrofit. It will then show you ship which are the same ship type--i.e. Light Cruisers.

It is possible you will get a message saying that the new design cannot differ by more than 50%. This means you are REALLY trying to upgrade the ship but the cost difference is greater than half. In this case, you can either leave the ship as it is, scrap it, or you can create an intermediate design between the old one and your desired one and retrofit it to that design first and then to your final design.

Hope that helps.

Marty Ward · #4 February 27th, 2001, 02:28 AM

You can upgrade your ship just by clicking the upgrade button in the creation window. This puts the latest Version of the current components in the ship. You can then modify it any way you want. You just have to rename it.

Codo · #5 February 27th, 2001, 03:45 AM

You may run into a couple of snafus while trying to upgrade the design of a ship though... Shield 1's are lighter than any other shield generator, and Shield Regen V's are heavier than other Regen's. This means you have to shuffle around some parts to get things to fit...

On the 'cost more than 50%' bit I've noticed this happen most often when you try to upgrade a ship with Bridge/Crew/Life Support to a computer-controlled ship. One way I've found around this is to make a ship design that's partway in cost between the ship I have and the ship I want. Then I retrofit my ship to the 'intermediate' design and then retrofit again to the new design (Which is where I noticed that in the patch before the current one, that mysetriously after retrofitting twice like that, a bunch of the components were magically fixed already!)

Codo

capnq · #6 February 27th, 2001, 07:25 AM

Is there any way to retrofit Weapons Platforms and other Units? They don't show up on the Scrap window list. Satellites in orbit can be scrapped, but not retrofitted.

I know I can transfer the older models to cargo transports to make room to build newer models, but I hate to just jettison them.

raynor · #7 February 27th, 2001, 07:35 AM

Sorry. Units cannot be retrofitted. It is the price you pay for *not* paying maintenance. Plus, units can be constructed at any planet without first building some other facility such as a space yard.

DirectorTsaarx · #8 February 27th, 2001, 04:18 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Codo:
You may run into a couple of snafus while trying to upgrade the design of a ship though... Shield 1's are lighter than any other shield generator, and Shield Regen V's are heavier than other Regen's. This means you have to shuffle around some parts to get things to fit...
<snip>
Codo

Also watch out for standard armor getting "upgraded" to Emissive Armor. And regular Shield V's (300 pts. each, IIRC) being upgraded to Phased Shield I's (75 pts. each, IIRC).

Spyder · #9 February 27th, 2001, 04:22 PM

I have also seen components randomly added when I did an upgrade....so, when you do an upgrade on an existing ship design, look it over carefully and make sure that you got what you expected.

Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

DirectorTsaarx · #10 February 27th, 2001, 09:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Spyder:
I have also seen components randomly added when I did an upgrade....so, when you do an upgrade on an existing ship design, look it over carefully and make sure that you got what you expected.

Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

They fixed a couple of those in the 1.19 patch (specifically, small armor was being upgraded to small combat sensors or vice versa). You might want to document any others you've found & send them to MM...