When I deleted the police station in my colony, the client crashed to desktop.  
I deleted the building via the construction menu.
I was able to log back in immediately.
I was standing at my capitol at the time.  
I don't believe I had the police station selected in the list of buildings in the capital's building menu when I deleted the station, but I'm not certain.  That  menu was docked under the construction menu at the time.

We have the option to use empire colors in designs, so that the design uses colors specified as the empire's theme colors.

I modeled a cute little gas station building, and I decided to use the "Empire Secondary" color. Mostly because I wanted it to be different for other empires, and I used the secondary because I felt that it would be more suited than using the empire's main color.

My questions are:

• How do you guys use these empire colors? A lot? Not at all?
  
• What colors did you pick for your empire? And how did you order them? Darkest to lightest?
  
• What differences do you use for exterior and interior colors?
  

Street Light Tweaks
In old cities, street lights gave off dim candle light when there was no power.

Street lights got several tweaks.

• Street lights now give off candle light when there is no power. Attenuation distance is 5m, unless that is brighter than the light bulb was configured.
  
• The size of the glow sprite is based on the attenuation distance of the light.
  
• Maximum attenuation distance increased to 250m.
  
• Road highlight increment was changed to 10m, to make street light spacing easier. 40m is a good spacing.
  
• Light color presets updated. UI changed to a combo box, ordered by Kelvin value.
  

Currently the new-style buildings generally only require their primary construction material, this means that the old version of city progression is broken. The best example of this is the Airport Terminal, it only cost stone to build so you can build it right away.

With the old-style city progression you had to aquire metal before you could build a capitol or a bank, this gave a clear goal of what to start out building first. An airport terminal required electronics production, which meant that it was the end goal of a first city before going to the moon.

List of affected building:

• Capitol used to require metal
  
• Bank used to require metal
  
• Apartment used to require hammers, but could use textiles
  (See Merge House and Apartment for discussion)
  
• Well used to require shovels
  
• Airport Terminal used to require electronics
  
• Airport Repair Shop used to require electronics
  
• Casino used to require electronics and gen rings
  
• Many other buildings used to simply require hammers
  

I started making a kilometre long ship, with some big rooms.

I hadn't noticed it on my smaller ships, but even with 39 crew it feels pretty empty. If you try to distribute crewmen to different rooms, you might easily have a bridge the size of a large boardroom with only three or four people on it.

How hard would it be to add citizen posts to ships? So that NPCs sit in front of screen textures or stand around by machinery and control panels, without actually doing anything. If it's a problem of AI calculations, they could be more or less entirely static, not reacting to threats or doing anything except swivel a bit and look busy. Or, if it's no worse than on planets, they could walk up and down corridors like the citizens who appear near you. Unlike real crew, they would only have to exist when someone can see them.

A nod in that direction would go a long way to making big ships feel less lonely.

Currently, your new battleship has to travel, perhaps many parsecs and at considerable fuel cost, to pick up its commanding officer from wherever he lives. How about a Starfleet HQ building which allows officers to be deployed from any world at a central location? The officer is still tied to his actual homeworld with all the usual restrictions.

I have a relative who used to command a submarine - now, I never actually saw him going aboard, but I have a vague assumption that they would order him to report to Portsmouth, rather than trying to send the submarine up the tiny river to his house in Chichester.

A thought for the vehicle designer.

The ordnance menu for vehicles is quite slick and intuitive to use. It sits oddly with the cargo/fuel system: physically dropping a crate of stuff into a nearby seat. I like the tangibility of that system: no reason to get rid of it. But when we update vehicles, could they also have tabs for cargo holds and fuel cells the way ships do, volume allocated in the designer? It would be nice for a dropship or an APC to carry a good and well-organized table of equipment for its attached squad. Boats especially need this, I think.

Would go nicely with my deployable defences idea, too. Easy for trucks and shuttles to move stuff between sites.

You can't build on enemy worlds, and that's perhaps as it should be. Instead, I'd welcome a system for defences, containers and other useful objects which can be deployed in the field. These could mesh well with the item designer. The possible ranges for their attributes would have to be limited, and they would use volume inefficiently compared to buildings of similar size. Some examples to think about:

Earthworks: Defensive trenches or parapets. Must be dug personally with a shovel, so harder work than just grading with the F11 menu. 
Electro-Barb Wire: A length of wire which slows movement speed and inflicts damage on avatars moving through its area (defined like a room void). 
Czech Hedgehog: Puts down a barrier of limited max size. Immune to collision damage, so unlike tents and other objects cannot be run over by vehicles.
Barracks Tent: Allows troops or pilots (in the future) to be garrisoned on a hostile world when their mothership departs orbit. 
Field Hospital: Carries a surgery station.
Storage Chest/Tank: Holds ammunition, med kits, fuel etc. Whatever is needed. Can be accessed by vehicles and troops within a certain range.
Power generator: Portable generator, draws from storage tank. Charges weapons and shields, etc.
Deployable shield: Creates a bubble shield of limited max strength. Protects against transporters while active. 
Sandbags: Provide cover. You would have to design them for your race's specific height.
Bunker: Sturdier than sandbags, provides all-round cover. 
Field Artillery: Ultra low-yield weapons bays mounted on gun models. Stationary but with more punch than vehicle weapons; operator is vulnerable to small-arms fire. Can target other field encampments and defences.
MG Nest/AA gun: Like a guard tower, but lower hp and must be physically accessed by a vulnerable troop.

These would presumably be balanced so that a well-aimed fighter's bomb could take out a whole camp, unless it's shot done first, but weapons bays couldn't target them. They would durable enough to become familiar little enclaves to dueling players, but nowhere near as strong as a captured city. Defenders could also build them, of course.

Deployables are neutral, so they don't count as an enemy presence on your world, and if you have physical access to them you can use them, regardless of your empire. Push forward and take an artillery park; it's yours instantly to use against them. Can be cleaned up from a claimed planet if there are no enemy units present.

The way I see it, defences like these could lead to immersive situations: you log in to your space house, hear the guns in the morning, just as you've done every morning for the past three weeks. You can see flashes in the distance as the enemy's forward camp exchanges fire with the city walls, smoking craters around their wire walls. Supply shuttles come and go in the distance, occasionally harrassed by your friendly fighters. It would give ground combat a more definite sense of place: you might actually remember famous battlefields like Monte Cassino, Caporetto, D-Day...

Looking to Found a republic civilization with other players, the race would be human, and it would be RPish styled, if your interested let me know ::) peace

Street Lights
Street lights remain unfinished in new style cities.

Street lights can now be created in the designer.

• To design a street light, change structure to Street Light on the design properties window. Unimplemented structures were removed from the Structure combo box, until they are ready.
  
• Street light can have one light bulb that emits light, similar to the headlight on a spacecraft.
  
• The number of street lights, headlights, vehicles, and other lights that illuminate the scene is controlled by a scene setting. Light sources are demanding. Only the nearest light sources to you emit light, up to the number configured in your settings.
  
• Street light can have multiple light lens parts. Lenses do not emit light but each of them gets a light glow sprite, centered on the lens geometry. This sprite is visible even if the light limit prevents the light bulb from emitting light.
  
• A simple street light blueprint was added to the blueprint exchange.
  
• Street lights switch on automatically in the dark, if they have power.
  
• Street lights do not consume power; they simply require it to be present.
  
• Light bulb properties can be configured on the Properties menu. Headlight bulbs of spacecraft and street light bulbs can be configured. they are the same kind of object.
  
• Light lens properties can be configured on the Properties menu. Light lenses in spacecraft and street lights can be configured. They are the same kind of object.
  
• Headlight lenses in spacecraft designs made prior to this update do not store light color. They are identified as "Headlight Lens" where the new lens is identified as "Light Lens". Select a headlight lens and run the Make Light Lens command on it to turn it into a light lens, if a different color than carbon arc light is desired.
  
• Street lights do not count against the 500 building limit on worlds. Their volume does count toward the building volume limit.
  
• Street lights can be placed on existing sites and new sites can be placed that overlap them. When placed on an existing site, you might not be able to access the construction window due to ambiguity of which site you are in.
  
• Street light designs will report commodity storage space, because that is the default for unused volume. Nothing will store anything there.