I can see problems with this for the way the game runs at the moment, mainly the fact that the Player's initial spawn point is outside a Trading Guild Space station, in a vacuum. If you give the helmet a short enough oxygen reserve to make decompression during spaceflight a problem (e.g. 5 minutes), then you limit the time a new player has to build a sealed ship with a breathable atmosphere before they choke to death. Not a great intro to the gaming experience. The only way around this I could see would be for the game to limit spawn points to inside Trading Guild Space Stations or on green planets.
Also, all additional structures would have to be built in an atmosphere too. No more spawning a Core in space and spending several hours building a Titan without having to jump back into your ship every 5mins for a quick "breather".
I'm all in favour of realism, to the point it doesn't stop the game being fun to play. I'm also in favour of making combat more varied and exciting. If breathable atmosphere can add these to the gameplay dynamic without making other aspects such as ship design too frustrating, then I'm in favour of it. At the moment I don't' really see it doing that. I'm still hopeful of being convinced though
Air blocks might be a good way to go. Are people thinking we could place them during build mode, and they'd supply atmosphere to Players stood inside them provided they are surrounded on all sides by other blocks?
OK, So we could make it so as long as you're in a core you're fine, that works for that part and for new ships, but if you're outside of your core or in build mode you have an issue. The trading guild stations *COULD* be changed so that they're indoors with the empty spaces being plex doors, and the helmet would be plenty of time to spawn a ship core and zip around, build in build mode. By the time the ship is big enough so that it requires more time to get to the center, EG a cruiser or mother ship, then you should need life support as you most likely have an interior or some form of passageway. Build mode and shipyards would be in their element here.
My main point on this is that small ships should be fine, you can jump in and out of core simply, but larger ships have more to loose, it takes time to get from the airlock to the core room, it's designed that way to deter boarders and so you'd need a life support to make it around your ship.
Air blocks, how I imagine them, wouldn't be blocks in and of themselves, they'd be a flag that says something along the lines of "There's oxygen here, no damage being dealt without helmet. That flag would be an effect that filled an entire sealed room with either a life support system (distributor) or piping in the walls to distribute oxygen, could be wireless but make it so that a sealed door or isolated sealed room doesn't get oxygen from another area of the ship it's not connected to. Every minute on the minute the system makes a check to see if a room with life support is sealed. Maybe have the check configurable in the server files. If the room is sealed the room or sealed area (sealed by blocks and shut doors) would inherit the flags (I know that's prob. not the best term but it's all I got.) and the user could be helmet-free in the room without damage to them. If the room is NOT sealed, EG has a door open to space (airlocks), or holes in the wall not covered by solid blocks (sorry fauna), the room does not have the flag and is like space, you are dealt damage so that one minute later you are dead. The area of the oxygen dispersal would be the sealed room, or a maximum cap (you can't have one little block power an entire ship, you can't have one life support block seal an entire ship), so that you can't just have one block and no doors, the block won't generate enough O2 for the entire ship, no safe flag. It'd be a thing that it can seal a max of, let's say, 20x20x20 (8000 blocks) and if the area before a full seal is greater than that, no seal. Some ships would need a lot of O2 generators and distributors and some would just need one generator and one distributor per sealed room. Also on to Pipes: You can connect rooms in a one-way flow path that would make it so oxygen can flow through but the deadly space that is space can't flow back. This would link the two rooms so that one distributor would suffice and can be more discreet, and if one bulkhead is blown out into the deadly nothingness that is space the other room, with the distributor, doesn't loose it's seal.
[DOUBLEPOST=1443737644,1443736106][/DOUBLEPOST]How I'm kinda thinking of this is how the core produces limited energy and thrust, it could produce limited oxygen but a separate system is needed for larger ships. The larger the ship the more you need.
Also on a similar (ish) note, you could have two options, one that seals the entire spaceship (more effective for ships, more power friendly, OR a bubble that will create a bubble in space, allowing for the TG shops to be almost entirely unchanged, just pop in a bubble generator and you have a bubble of O2 with a visible edge, maybe a small haze where the O2 ends and the evil deadly nothingness of space begins. The only stipulation on that would be it's less efficant and requires more power draw to keep the O2 at a set distance. The more bubble blocks you have the bigger the sphere of life.
