The Exploration Continues: Blueprint Projector, Theodore Begins, Captured Ship

Given that I plan to build a great number of small satellites within close proximity to Ms. Frizzle, I decided to attach a projector block to the side of the ship. Normally, you can't attach small ship blocks to large ships or stations outside of careful placement of landing gear. The "rotor trick," as the community likes to call it, is currently an effective work-around that also allows your ship's energy to flow through the connection.

Ms. Frizzle's very own blueprint projector.

The trick itself sounds deceptively simple. You build a large ship rotor - the standard kind, not the advanced rotor - wherever you want to make the connection. Once the base is completed, you go into the console and tell the rotor to release its head, which you're now safe to grind away. Start constructing a small ship nearby - preferably in a direct vertical line over where you built the rotor. Attach a small ship rotor to the unfinished landing gear and weld its head to completion. Remove the bottom and the landing gear and give the cap the gentlest nudge. When it's in range of the large rotor's base, get back into the console and tell it to attach.

Now you're free to place small ship blocks on the head of this new hybrid rotor. Once I had oriented the projector block correctly, and got the rotor itself to lock into place and stop spinning, I was set. The keypad I added to the side was simply for convenience's sake, as it allows quick access so I can adjust the blueprint schematic being constructed. I simply build a line of small ship blocks out from the projector and I'm good to go.

With this I was able to construct the front half of my Theodore ship. I decided to hold off on construction the auxiliary engine pod primarily because the first asteroid, which I named Palmer's End, is primarily made of iron and stone. The smaller asteroids that accompanied it - the "fingers" to the "palm" - were where the more valuable ore was located, and I feared those would run dry before I finished. My new plan was to build a second satellite marker and fly it over to another asteroid in the hopes of finding some of the more rare ores, or perhaps something more interesting.

My first captured ship since I started this map!

With the newly updated zoom function that camera blocks were given, I had spent a bit of time peering out into the distance in the hopes of finding any hint of something that wasn't another asteroid. Picking a likely direction, I throttled up.. but within a few thousand meters I realized that it was just a distant chunk of rock. While trying to find a more interesting target, a mining carriage drifted over. By the time I noticed it was there, the ship had skirted within a hundred meters of the turret's kill-zone.

At first I was content to count my blessings and watch it slip away. Then I remembered that mining carriages only have a single turret, and that it was placed in such a way that offered gaping blind spots. Deciding the risk was worth it, I cut my inertial dampeners and gave chase. After a great deal of grinding, I was able to cut the power, disable the turret and assume control of the vessel. By then I was nearly 20km away from Palmer's End, and I was sorely glad I had installed the safety beacon on my ship.

The contents of my new haul were fairly standard - a handful of different kinds of ore and a few extra mining drills and handheld grinders. An extra twenty uranium ingots got stuffed into my ship's reactor, which helped give me some peace of mind - every time I had the ship's refinery, arc furnace, assembler, collector and gravity generator running at once, I would get nervous that I was going to run low on power.

Perhaps the best part of the capture was that I now have a great deal of extra large ship components for my own designs. I've already popped back into my creative world to throw some designs together for a long-haul cargo ship, as the storage space on Ms. Frizzle was getting a bit low.