Cosmoteer Plus v0.27.5
Atarlost I looked into the symmetry issues you mentioned with the Tac Center. What I discovered from looking at both the 1x1 and 1x2 armor wedges is that the mirror mode isn't actually mirroring sprites at all. Walt has a predefined rotation matrix for the 1x1 wedge that simply rotates the part as appropriate when mirroring is on. The 1x2 wedge, which appears to be mirroring, is actually just using part substitution. When you place a 1x2 L in mirror mode, it substitutes a 1x2 R on the other side.
As there doesn't appear to be support for true mirroring at this time, it's not a change I can make. For the parts I have with asymmetrical door placement, like the Tac Center, I'm just going to leave them as-is. I consider it a design challenge in-game to make asymmetrical parts work with your ship layout. It encourages more interesting design. FWIW, there's no reason you'd need more than one Tac Center anyway, so the issue is somewhat moot.
- Edited
Jared http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
I feel the need to point out that Photoshop itself isn't a magic silver bullet. I've been using Photoshop for something like 18 years, so I've learned a lot. You can accomplish the same results as I have with free software like Gimp. It's just not what I use.
Holy Crap! I think this is the best mod I've seen! I love the way the parts look stock alike and the tech tree idea is awesome. Are you still looking for build submissions? I'd love to build some ships for it.
- Edited
jfjohnny5 Nice, but you do realize the Death Star Lasers are just for having fun with, not meant to be taken seriously, right? I don't encourage people using it for anything more than a novelty.
Sprites are well done.
Xeridan Thanks! Yup, there's a thread in the Ship Design section of the forums. I welcome any and all submissions!
@ClassicJam Ha, of course I know they're just for fun! This whole thing is just a game afterall. 
Just trying to be clear about my goals so people know what to expect from the mod.
I tried using your mod (version 0.23.0) and I got the same error as it seems @Jesus3747 had.
Halfling.Serialization.DeserializeException: Deserialization from source "<D:\Cosmoteer\Data\rules.txt>" failed. ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> Halfling.Serialization.DeserializeException: Deserialization from source "<D:\Cosmoteer\Data\Ships\Terran\terran.txt>/Terran" failed. ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: pixelSizeIt seems to be caused by the the Warp_Core_Engineering part having more OperationalDoodad AnimationFiles images than Cosmoteer can handle.
Note: There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the images. The error occurs if there are more than 25 of the images in the AnimationFiles list. Removing any 5 of the images from the AnimationFiles list fixed the error for me.
Re: door symmetry: It's not that it's a challenge, it's that it actually bugs out using mirror mode. It won't let you place doors on asymmetrically placed parts. And I know about part substitution. To fix the bug, you need to make a second copy of the part with mirrored orientation and set up part substitution like the 1:2 armor slopes do.
I'm also running into practicality issues with LFCs. They do basically nothing to shieldeds and as such are only useful within the range of weapons that can drop shields. The longest ranged weapons that can potentially focus down a shield have only 2/3 the range of the LFC and 30% the range of the Mk2. There's just no point to having a dedicated anti-armor weapon that outranges the longest ranged general purpose weapon.
Atarlost I hear you. I just struggle with the necessity of adding a mirrored version of a part for which you only ever need one on a ship. I feel it would just add unnecessary clutter to the parts menu in the editor. Maybe in the future when Walt adds more functionality options, and the Tac Center can be more than just a resource sink as part of a tech tree...
As for the LFCs, you make some valid points. I can give them another once over. and I'm open to ideas. I just don't want it to be a matter of them being an auto-win button, so to speak. I'm trying to design my parts to have an upside and a downside. Trade-offs are an important design philosophy for me. I found a combined arms approach to be a lot of fun. Check the ship catalog I've included with the mod for the Blorg Kube. It's just a defensive test dummy. I found that straight LFCs could NOT take down the shields. Get in there with another ship fielding even just an array of Electro-bolts though... All I needed was for them to get one good hole in the shields and the LFC would rip through the hull. It was awesome to watch, and I enjoyed the challenge of coordinating attacks. Again, I'm open to ideas, but try giving them a shot (no pun intended) in some new ways. They might surprise you.
Equalizer Interesting, would be nice to get more info on this error so I can send it to Walt.
I think you've generally overdone the drawbacks.
Just as an example, I built this ship to see if I could make mixed lasers work:
Then I "downgraded" it to stock:
The stock version is 9% cheaper and wins decisively. The expensive and power hungry mixed armament simply doesn't match up to stock laser blasters. And that's with the handicap of having the strictly superior plasma reactors.
Okay,maybe the IR lasers are just bad. Let's swap them for more UVs to drop shields for the plasma blasters.
Nope, The cheaper stock version still wipes the floor with it.
The higher tech weapons tend to not be worth carrying a very expensive waste of space bridge. The iridium lasers are worth the frigate bridge, but above that? The PP1 has an iffy niche even if you're already mounting the tech buildings for other reasons and the PP2 isn't worth the bridge upgrade. The Ion Missiles don't turn out to be all that good in practice because standard missile explosions damage parts behind shields and they don't. The LFC1 costs an extra 18 tiles of very expensive waste space and I'm not convinced they're really better than large cannons for finishing ships with broken shields. The battleship stuff is just too big for shields. Here's a comparison of shielding a large cannon wall or a Vulcan wall:
The stock cannon side has 50% more shields. At this length it does 11952 dps against shields and components and 5976 against structure. It has penetration 5 and starts fires. The Vulcan side does 12000 dps against shields and components and 9600 against structure. But in a fight between the two walls it's not the structure damage that would matter. It's the nearly equal shield damage and the 50% cannon wall advantage in shield HP. And even that doesn't tell the whole story. Because of their deeper hitbox the centers of the Vulcans are only covered by a single layer of shield while the entirety of the cannon wall is covered by a minimum of three layers. The cannon wall at this length is 343,600 credits. The Vulcan wall, excluding the cost of the battleship bridge, is 500,100 credits. The cannon wall is 2 tiles thicker and weighs more than twice as much, but the example thruster block is only 60,050 credits so the cannon wall can afford more than four more of them per 24 tiles of wall.
The Vulcans are stronger, but they're only significantly stronger against armor and the inability to stack shields effectively really hurts them. LABs would fare slightly better in this sort of comparison, but require even more large and expensive tech rooms. And I'm not sure you get enough power for them through just two doors. They might have to drop in density, which would put them at approximately the same damage as the large cannons again with more range, but weaker shielding and a smaller budget for engines.
I think this mod just needs better propulsion and shielding (longer radius, not more efficient) teched off of the main engineering and warp core to offset the bulk of the battleship guns and the internal volume tax of the tech rooms themselves.