This ... is true. I still like the idea of pipes and stuff, but you just reminded me of the many, many, many times I've been frustrated in Space Engineers by the conveyor system forcing me to chose between form and function; there's a reason that mods adding blocks that function as both conveyors and something else are so popular for SE. Plus, ship-level energy balance is easier on performance, I imagine.Amazigh wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:49 amSomething to note on the subject of this whole fuel pipes idea:tsunamayo wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:13 am
- You guys will ask for linking and such, but I was not going for that. The main reason is that I wanted to have the energy balance logic at the level of the ship, for simplification purpose. I want something simple, I dont see much added value in term of possibility by having to link systems, and it doesnt sounds fun to do for me...
But that dont work well for ground structure (could have a energy distance, and have to use relay) - so I am still hesitating.
That's not really true, though. The reason spaghetti is a problem isn't because empty space gets abnormal bonuses. Even if your ship's systems work identically, regardless of whether they're surrounded by empty space or the rest of your ship, surrounding them with empty space is still the best choice because it's hard to hit. StarMade's runaway power mechanics didn't help, of course, but they weren't the root cause. And, as schlid points out, while the current power system in Skywanderers has taken steps to discourage gigantism (which is great, BTW), it doesn't really do anything to discourage the spaghetti meta. To prevent spaghettification, the increased risk of compact, realistic ships getting hit needs to be outweighed by the cost of a heavily strung out ship.
Even in a game like Space Engineers, where block configuration doesn't change performance at all, spaghetti ships could be viable; the only things preventing them from being so are the fact that all pieces have to be connected, and that turrets have very accurate AI targeting, making the likelihood that a spaghetti ship would fall to pieces very high. If that weren't a concern, and the turrets weren't so accurate, it would make a lot of sense to spread the components out as much as possible.
Actually, people already do spread them out as much as possible in SE; if a ship has reactors and gyros placed all over it, it ends up being a "zombie ship." Many SE players consider system redundancy to be more important than armor. The only reason people don't strip most or all the armor off them to increase maneuverability is because in SE ships can fall apart; but that's not an issue in SM or Skywanderers.
Of course, as noted most recently by Amazigh, this needs to be balanced to still allow people to build aesthetically pleasing ships as well. But as a core point to start from, schlid's idea is very sound.