- Cargo holds should display cargo capacity increase (see http://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=936)
- Reactors should display power output, efficiency, and fuel level restrictions (Edit: and maybe fuel capacity)
- Drives should display top speed and thrust increase
- Maybe fuel should display how much energy it contains?

arkheias 26 Jun 2015:

I've seen someone say on the forums that the reason for this is that leaving the details of an item to be discovered by the player is a main theme of rogue-likes.

In my opinion however, given that this is a science fiction game, set in the future, we should take a way more science-y approach to this. In the real world nearly every piece of industrial machinery has equipment specification forms for describing every minute detail regarding it construction, its purpose and even its eventual operating environment.

We should have a researched tag for items to act as a counterpart to unidentified items. An unresearched item would be the same as an identified item, but if an item was explicitly marked as researched then whenever we viewed it in a station or the ship's inventory there would be an additional action to view the item's specification sheet. This screen would be like the new dock services screen that shows the ship and most of its specifications. It would show us nearly all of the details listed for the item in its .xml file. It could even show the value listed in the .xml files as the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

We already have the Rowena's Weapons and Armor series of roms that were removed from the game when it was decided that most standard weapons and armor should be identified by default. We could add those back in and make it so that when they are used they would mark the items as researched instead.

That said, I still think that the above devices listed by nms should have more details shown by default. For the fuels I think they would be fine with just having their mass listed. We sell gasoline by the gallon/liter after all, not by its chemical potential energy (or whatever).

nms 26 Jun 2015:

I agree that basic stats for most items (at least ones manufactured by the Commonwealth and its allies) should be public knowledge. I'm not sure there are enough additional stats beyond what I've listed (that should be displayed to the player) to justify a new mechanic for obtaining that information.

Shields and (especially) armor are the best cases for a detailed stats page. It could show the resistances to all damage types and inherent status effect immunities, making comparison of different level armors less confusing.

The details of how weapons work could be useful, but it would be hard to parse the XML into a standardized readable format. And you don't want to take away all the thrill of trying new things. You can imagine that that kind of information could be proprietary.

In reality, we don't have a large number of different fuel options with substantially different energy densities for a given vehicle. And car manufacturers at least tell us the volume of fuel our cars can hold and their approximate fuel efficiency in miles per gallon (in the US) or liters per kilometer (in more sensible countries). Similarly, in Transcendence it would be nice to be able to judge how much fuel consumption a device is going to cause, how much fuel it will take to fill up a reactor, and what the cheapest and most energy dense fuel options are.

I don't especially like the way unidentified items are handled now, particularly the way everyone in the universe knows exactly what the player knows about them. But I live with it as a throwback to old rogue-likes, and take advantage of it when it causes vendors to underprice items.

arkheias 27 Jun 2015:

There are already plans to have the next version of the wiki automatically create some of the pages for items and ships and whatnot by reading directly from the .xml files. What I'm suggesting is basically an in-game version that becomes accessible whenever you use an item like the Rowena's Weapons and Armor series of roms.

Edit, list of similar ideas:
https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=4965 - display firerate with more precision
https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?t=7231&p=64309 - display range of weapons

george moromisato 29 Jun 2015:

These are great ideas.

george moromisato 15 Jan 2016:

Fixed in 1.7 Alpha 1. Added the following:

Cargo Holds

  • Cargo capacity

Drive Upgrades

  • Max speed
  • Thrust (in some arbitrary units)
  • "Inertialess" display attribute.

Reactors

  • Max power output
  • Compatible fuel levels
  • Fuel efficiency (if not standard).