Hull Integrity

[gblnk]

First I want to say I'm  absolutely loving the game and I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows and develops in the future.

 

One thing that bothers me a little about ship design is I feel like I'm not being forced to make any difficult decisions. They're basically 100% specialty blocks encased in armor and it's never a question of whether they're going to be good or bad, but rather what level of awesomeness they'll achieve.

 

I think it would be interesting to make hull blocks an integral part of ship design. What I'm suggesting is every ship design meet a standard of hull integrity. One possible way of doing this is require that a certain portion of a ship's mass, say 50% for example, be comprised of "hull" mass. Hull blocks could contribute 100% of their mass to this stat, maybe 50% for cargo and crew quarters blocks, 20% or so for armor, and zero for specialty blocks like engines and generators. An alternative to making this an absolute requirement would be that ships with less than 50% hull mass would suffer severe performance penalties to all ship systems.

 

This could also be used to incentivize some of the less popular upgrade paths. For example, naonite hull blocks could contribute 110% of their mass to hull integrity.

 

Just a thought. 

[amimai]

quick question, do you use cargo bays?

 

my standard ship design is quite large because there are cargo bays and stuff all over the place, but if i remove them and crate a pute combat ship I can make the thing a lot smaller, like 50-75% smaller simply because cargo capacity takes up so much space on the hull.

[SageThe13th]

I don't really agree with this.  For one it makes ship building more complicated having to keep track of some hull to other block ratio.  And why?  Just so that hull blocks are more useful?  This wouldn't really even make them anymore more useful than they are now.  Just required.  Also, why care about that and not say glass blocks or mirror blocks not really being practical?

[Scorpious007]

Are mirror blocks glow blocks? Or are they a different kind of block?

[SageThe13th]

Are mirror blocks glow blocks? Or are they a different kind of block?

 

They are different.  There are glass blocks (shiny and see through), mirror blocks (shiny and refletive), glow blocks, and hologram blocks (glow and see through).

[gblnk]

I don't really agree with this.  For one it makes ship building more complicated having to keep track of some hull to other block ratio.  And why?  Just so that hull blocks are more useful?  This wouldn't really even make them anymore more useful than they are now.  Just required.  Also, why care about that and not say glass blocks or mirror blocks not really being practical?

 

Well, to clarify I was suggesting it was a way of putting a premium on the space used for specialty blocks so they serve more as modules , with the secondary effect of making the hull block actually have the purpose of providing the structure of a ship. And also to make it a little more of a necessity to focus on a specialization rather than be able to build these amazing all-rounder ships made of nothing but armor, engines, shields and generators.

 

As for the vanity blocks, I guess I just see them as variations on hull blocks.

 

Anyway it was just an idea about how to make ship design require a little more thought and compromise. There are a million different ways to do it. This was just one. I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out how to design a ship that performs a certain task well, and right now it just doesn't require much thought at all. But maybe I'm in the minority. Either way I'll still continue to enjoy the game for what it is.

[Tsunamik]

Are mirror blocks glow blocks? Or are they a different kind of block?

 

If you look at my second ship (Scarab) you can clearly see difference between glow and mirror

https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1612.0.html

Glow are the green light parts, and almost all of the rest is made of mirror (reflector ingame) blocks. It is most visible with light source in the background