Ranakastrasz

I am arguing against cube ships because A, I personally find them ugly and boring, and B, because this thread is about "The Cube Meta". My personal opinion is against cube shapes. I am not a good enough scientist to be able to analyze the situation and determine whether or not I should argue for cube shapes as being the most effective setup (or even if they are currently). As a result, I chose a side based on my personal opinion, came up with some reasons to that supported my position and attacked the other side, and posted it. While asthetic considerations occur, most cars follow a pretty simple model, which is to a large extent optimized for speed, efficiency, cost, and other factors for it's functionality under the rules of physics. They vary in some aspects, but follow roughly the same model. Asthetics change, but you don't usually see a large range of extra or missing physical structures. Except for Vans, or trucks, which actually do have different shapes, but still keep streamlineing and effeciency in mind. If the current laws of physics in the game simulation of Avorium makes it so that cube shaped spaceships are more effective in general given other considerations, then more cube-like spaceships will likely be used. If the decision-maker (Game developer) wants to counter this, and encourage "More creatively shaped" or "Scifi Movie/Book inspired ship shapes" or "Car shaped Ships" or pretty much anything, then a change in the game mechanics to make shapes in that direction to be more effective. If it is fine for the current cube shape (or whatever the optimal shape, both in price, effectiveness, and ease of building is) to be used by most players instead of taking advantage of this being a spaceship building game, then that is fine too. I just prefer the alternative, and if it helps my goals, I will argue for it and try to convince people and the developer to do something about it. Same. Given that I get annoyed when people use Sentient and Sapient interchangeably, I should probably be more careful to use the right words. True enough. Flanking, and shields like, say, starsector (which totally wouldn't work here) would certainly have an effect, but as it is, I don't think it has a huge impact. God, I hate self-analysis.

Hmm. The main issue is that the simulation encourages Cube-shaped ships. Surface area is not important, because no blocks care about being on the surface, not even solar panels or thrusters. Volume cost never changes given blocks, but reducing, not surface area for armor, profile, and increasing interconnectivity to reduce damage taken, all point towards cubes. In real life, cubes alone aren't common We don't drive around cube-shaped cars. They could be seen as loosely cube shaped, but are streamlined because of air resistance. Blocky shapes reduce your speed and increase cost of operation. They have Wheels on the bottom for movement(Can't put them in the middle or on top).They have Windows and Doors. (Door on top might be good for emergencies on buses, and tanks certainly use them, but generally doors on the sides work best). They are bottom heavy, so they don't flip, so you also end up with a bit of a larger shape on the bottom, along with a lot of the components. As a result, these pressures tend to make cars that are car shaped. Admittedly, once someone tries to make a real car with dimples like the Mythbusters tried, their appearance might change significantly. After all, that would be performance over appearance, and obviously some people would want that. Airplanes need wings in specific locations to get lift, and of a certain shape (or set of shapes) for lift. Engines need to be balanced and be spread out to adjust or handle damage. It has ports and windows, and engines and fuel tanks. Ports/doors and windows are surface area based. Fuel tanks are internal, and volume based. Engines are both surface area and volume based, being large but also outside the plane, using up surface area under the wings. What we need is pressures to encourage non-cube designs. Waste heat is probably the simpliest method, where performance suffers if you don't have enough surface area. (Vents on the surface with lots of volume beneath for larger ships as well) Or just force thrusters and engines to be on the surface, along with some other things. Maybe shield generators? Ha, so if your generator can't see the shield bubble, it won't contribute. Gotta build the shield on the surface, and make sure you don't just have one giant generator, but several, spread around the surface area of your ship. Overall, I don't really know how effective this is, but I do know that if you get better performance out of a cube, then people are going to build cubes a lot of the time.

This is why I wanted integrity fields to be local shield generators. Let you cover fragile details, but still let local damage occur. A compromise. Without throwing out all aspects of a physics simulation, Anything but a cube is going to be less effective without some advantage to counter it. On this subject, my thoughts on surface area based scaling, but requring LOS seems like it might contribute to a solution. Essentially I wanted solar panels and thrusters to have only surfaces with LOS out of the ship to be effective. This was to make stacking less effective, while still using surface area for calculations. However, making more surface area better might counter this meta. After all, if you need more surface area for faster movement (or manuverability), or can use it for cheap power (as in, more power per mass and price, if not exactly volume) then suddenly, the death-cube would lose out to ships with higher surface area. Still, that would optimize towards relatively flat planes or circles (flattened cylinders) so I am not sure. Still, if you are already stuck in the middle of two extremes, where something between solid shapes and flat shapes, you might end up with a solid body with your volume-based components and large relatively flat wings or antenna or other details which provide surface-area based effects. Just make sure that both sides compete with each other, or you will go to far the other way.

Pretty sure shields ignore collisions, so they will do nothing. Integrity fields on the other hand.... Its there to make sure you don't just have heavy shields and no armor. After all, who knows when a lunatic is going to be going at top speed while eating lunch and crash into you. Gotta at least have some armor...

Ogonite armor has around twice the weight and durability of the same volume of avorium hull, and avorium can't make armor. As such, it makes *OK* armor, with the main advantage being that it uses a less valuable resource and, I think, less credits. Plus thinner armor means less chance of block loss (since each block is tougher) and a smaller hitbox, for the same mass. Also, I think some weapons pierce through until they hit armor or exit the other side of the ship, so Ogonite is really useful there. Titanium and trinium are pretty lightweight, so using them for anything that doesn't need to be that durable makes sense. Trinium can be used to build any block, but it is still inferior to higher level blocks. Making materials sidegrade makes sense. Something like this. 4 Tiers, with two materials in each, one is high tech, one is low tech. Iron is standalone, terrible in most aspects. 51 Weight, 4 durability Titanium has 25 weight, 8 durability. Naonite has 35 weight, 8 durability, but also supports more components like shield and so on. Tier 2, but found in different sectors. Trinium, 21 Weight, 13 durability. Extreme Flexability, lowest weight. Best generalist material. Xanion. 27 weight, 20 durability. High flexability, but no armor, again. Ogonite, 45 weight, 40 durability. Heavy, armor is only block type, but best armor in the game, save none. Avorion, 36 weight, 45 durability, supports all but armor. could also make materials key in certain blocks. Like computer cores or hyperdrives REQUIRE Xanion, or Trinium (which is generalist and found in small amounts everywhere) Avorion can retain it's omnifunction, being that it is extremely rare and hard to get (Core containing, presumably, the happy fun stuff like Dwarf Fortress) Iron is just garbage material, as a starting point. I would prefer it be useful, but not really sure. Keeping two options per tier, approximately, might make things more interesting, and reducing the gap in performance might help too. Also, making certain materials required for some blocks could have interesting effects. Just a few thoughts.

This is several thoughts, so its a bit hard to answer. Maybe you are a hive-mind made up of each of the aliens flying the ship you built, and you are still doing everything. You just have multiple bodies. The gunners might be misnamed, and are more along the lines of technicians or something, ensuring the weapons don't fall out of alignment, or overheat or something, and if you have enough of them, optimize the performance on the fly to keep them at 130% effectiveness. Automatic turrets should use gunners, normal turrets should not. The automatic turrets have the behavior of automatically aiming like you think gunners should be able to do. Currently weapons are nonfunctional until you hire the gunners, so changing it to be manual, and then automatic could make more sense. Have spinal weapons be manual anyway, and gunners just speed up reloading or something. Yep, but in most space games, automation on weapons are extremely lacking. You usually control all parts of a ship and have to do everything yourself, even when theoretically you have a large crew. Given this game has crew data which influences stuff like weapons, it might make more sense if gunners worked this way.

Well. The label is wrong then in the game stats. I didn't have anywhere to work from aside from the information given, which was nonsense. When you get around to it, change the measurement label from cm^3 to m^3. That will fix it, and give a proper scale. So, each block is 10 meters cubed? hmm. well, 950 cubic meters is plenty of space for a crew member. By which I mean that is the given value. doing some quick research, A person needs 100-400 square feet of floorspace to feel comfortable, but houses tend to have up to 1300 sqrt ft per person. Ceilings are around 8 feet tall, but we can skew that to 10 for sanity. so, 100 to 1300 sqr feet. 1000 to 13000 square feet. ~0.3 meters per foot, so 0.3^3, or 0.0283168, Skew 0.03 for sanity. 30 m^3 to 390 m^3 minimalist of 1/32 to ~1/3rd for excessive. I am going to assume, then, that we are going to use 400 sqr feet, so 120 m^3. The remaining 830 cubic meters are used for life support equipment. Or something, no idea. Just how the math and research turned out. If 10 meters cubed is the value given, then, a few other details. Any crew quarters with any dimension smaller than 2.m, or 0.2 scaleon one dimension, and 1.5 meter (0.15) on the other should probably be assumed as nonfunctional, since a person couldn't fit/walk in that area. Could just use a wall thickness of 1 meter (0.1) for the calculation. As such. block x, y, z Useful volume x,y,z, all -(0.1*2) (Two walls) So, multiply the three after subtracting the offset value, get actual volume. Then scale it. Probably use 300 meters cubed then. Still can't figure out the Cargo container equation....

This is why I wanted localized shield mechanic integrity fields. Lets you make details durable, but lets blocks break off later once it all depletes. When everything was one solid lump of HP, did Holograms also function like that? and now, do they just break and block one shot, or do shots go through them, or what? And what about Scaffolding? How does overkill get mananged... Thats a bit off topic, I suppose.

The material names are so weird that I am not surprised. The data is on the wiki, so can be edited there by anyone. Will fix eventually if someone else doesn't. Yea, block durability for special components is pathetic. It explains how Kane Hart Got ?Naonite? So easily from those wrecks in one of his videos. I think. The wall thing for cargo has to do with capacity. If anything it should have diminishing returns on durability based on size. That said, the equation is not simply volume based on each side's durability minus some amount. Hence why I havn't put it into the wiki, unlike crew. (Which I totally expected the same thing from) I was surprised about stone too. I was the one who added it to the wiki. Already reported as a bug. At least it still is (Presumabily) immune to Electricity. Also, Stone armor takes bonus damage from Mining lasers. Kinda amusing, and makes sense. Wonder if rich stone drops the ore too. Ogonite armor is stronger than avorion hull. Avorium doesn't support armor. So volume wise, Ogonite is better. Mass-wise, they are about equal, assuming I mathed it correctly.

I would love to, I was just reluctant because It isn't official material. The rest of the stuff I added was the result of around two hours of research (build mode creative, just adding stuff and calculating stats) But this is very much made up flavor stuff, which might not match game lore. Should I do so?

Titanium Generators are the main power generators. If you are limited to iron, use solar panels. Lots of solar panels. As thin as possible, since they scale with surface area.

Using mass is probably a bad idea. Mass of materials and components vary a lot, and it would be too easy to manpulate. The Interface can be changed to show volume in both places, and the Building interface can have volume added. No reason to change the mechanics unless it is actually a problem.

Huh. If the tooltip were correct, that would make computer cores trivial to calulate the effectiveness of. Unfortunately they arn't so it isn't.

How do they get off the ship when they quit? What? No Money? Guess I gotta jump out this airlock. That sounds like a great idea.

Well, just for the sake of confusion, the claim in the module tab that you need 128cm^3 for the second slot turns out to be incorrect, instead only requiring 48k. Given that, I decided to avoid investigating Computer cores for the time being, since they are clearly bugged at this time.