Hi Tarkhans,

u/althowd and I are excited to present our highfleet shipyard, with cogitator backend!

https://hfopt.jodavaho.io

We’ve been working on it for about a year, and current the site provides two things:

• A free ship hosting / sharing service (Upload requires registering, downloads do not)
• A free “cogitator” to help you rapidly test designs and check in-game statistics

Check it out, or see more details here! Since we’re self “hosting” (paying), we wanted to limit useage to those who really are using it, so an email-based registration is required, but we send zero emails and don’t use it for anything other than logins.

Please note this is a beta test! Give us a little slack, and clear cookies for jodavaho.io if anything starts getting weird.

How to use Ship hosting / sharing

To share a ship file:

1. Login or create account
2. Select “Upload”
3. Upload your .seria file
4. The uploaded file will be verified (to make sure it’s a highfleet ship and not a naughty picture), then will be available for download.
5. Check “Shipyard” to see the status and to get your shareable link. Verification may take up to 10 minutes for very large files. I tested with Castle Doctorine, and it took 3 minutes.

How to use Cogitator / ship design support

To test the cogitator:

1. Login or create account
2. Go to the main page, or click “Cogitator”
3. Select the modules from the drop downs (and their quantities) that you know you want the ship to have. These are the “required” modules.
4. Select the in-game statistics (min and if required, max) that you know you want the ship to have. These are the “constraints”.
5. Press “Send”.
6. The cogitator will receive your required modules and statistics, and “Fill in” all missing modules until the statistics line up correctly. It will do so while minimizing the total cost. This can take up to 15 minutes, but usually takes less than a minute.
7. When done, the page will be populated with all the ship modules. You can use this as a “bill of materials” reference when building the ship in the highfleet shipyard.
8. To start over, refresh the page, or clear the module list

I use the cogitator to ask questions like:

• “What is the cheapest ship that can carry four d80 molots at least 1000 km with speed at least 200”
• “I just designed this ship with 2x 180-6, massive range, and a speed of 100. I’m pretty sure I could have done it cheaper by changing the engines, let me put in the in-game stats and guns and see what the cogitator chooses”
• What is the cheapest scout ship that can carry a MK-800 radar at least 2000km, with speed at least 350
• I want a fuel tanker, what would it cost to have 4x Large Fuel tanks and a speed of 250?
• What’s the cheapest / smallest IRST scout ship?

… and so on.

Unfortunately, since we started work, 1.61 has changed the balance and cost of modules, so I will have to update this to reflect the new stats. Still, try it out and see if you like the idea, while I work to do so.

Feedback

Please give us feedback and suggestions. You can post here, send us messages, or email me at hfopt-support@jodavaho.io

If you want to help out with the non-zero hosting cost, or buy us a coffee, you can here:

• Hosting, Backend, cogitator optimizer, data: jodavaho, https://patreon.com/jodavaho
• Frontend, design: Altho, https://github.com/sponsors/altho

Other credits

• Much thanks to the /r/highfleet community for discussions, ship files to test with, and some early prototypes of code (esp /u/d0d0b1rd for helping with stats early on)

Next

We’re working to build:

• A way to “preview” ships before you download. It might be module list at first, but eventually we’d like to render the ship
• “Stars” or saving ships to lists, and so on
• A way to “save” the cogitator input and output, so that you can resume progress.
• Performance improvements to the cogitator and shipyard verifier.

Please don’t hesitate to suggest other things! We really have loved building this.