Power System Overhaul Proposal

[Criss]

You could create a tool in advanced build mode that would allow you to effectively and efficiently place large chunks of power caps and reactors within the hull of the ship using the exterior itself as the bounding box to make it much easier to fill every nook and cranny..

Uh. Well if there are rules to building efficient reactors, then no. Because the game would need to calculate that. And if the ship is large, that could take a while.

Second, when it comes to systems that have impact, we would like to avoid creating tools that simply place them down. The goal is to create a system that is flexible and encourages learning. If you can design a better reactor, that should be something you discover and work towards, not something that is done for you.

that is best achieved by having crew, human or NPC. Especially by REQUIRING crew on a larger ship to function properly.

Well yes, we hope to achieve that when we get to crew.

 

[Swiftstone]

Let me make this as simple as possible.

In the current system, you can make any ship into an ultra effective meta boat as long as it is even remotely wedge shaped. So you can still easily make a good looking ship that is also min-maxed.

With the proposed system, every meta ship is going to be shaped like a gigantic chandelier.

The idea that the game should be balanced around the whims of aesthetic RP builders and not around the PvP that those balance changes will actually effect is idiotic.

It's on like page 36 of this thread, but you should read my suggestion concerning tying heat dissipation largely to hull surface area in order to prevent the kind of forced design choices you see as problematic, while still providing the option of using the dev's current suggested mechanic as an enhancement, rather than the sole mechanic for ditching heat.

 

[nightrune]

It's on like page 36 of this thread, but you should read my suggestion concerning tying heat dissipation largely to hull surface area in order to prevent the kind of forced design choices you see as problematic, while still providing the option of using the dev's current suggested mechanic as an enhancement, rather than the sole mechanic for ditching heat.

I've seen many people purpose surface area. While a great idea especially for realism, its just not realistic to simulate in the game. Finding surface area of a voxel object is not as easy as it sounds. Especially given you could build structures inside with surface area as well. There would be no way to differentiate them without a massive amount of ray tracing. If there is an algorithm that does it. There is no one that has found it and posted. Its an incredibly hard problem actually. Its along the same lines as finding inside versus outside in a closed shape. Generally its a recursive search usually by flooding and walking all the block structures but its by no means performant in a 3D sense.

 

[Malacodor]

Its along the same lines as finding inside versus outside in a closed shape.

Closed shapes aren't even the real problem. That starts as soon as someone punches a small hole in the hull and turns the ship's well protected interior into fake exterior.

 

[Zekester81]

Use a C+V link from conduit to heat dissipation material, no need to have the game do that for you. Then it's up to the builder to place it appropriately. Game only has to count blocks lost when they are destroyed to calculate new efficiency.

 

[xDEAD-LORDx]

por mi conocimiento en juegos de lógica básica del estilo sanbox, les puedo decir que este tipo de sistemas suele fallar en la practica, el motivo es que para poder aplicarlo al juego requiere una enorme cantidad de espacio de la nave o de la estructura en general, ademas de que hemos retrocedido en las funciones del juego, hemos pasado de una era espacial a una era nuclear, donde se suponía que en base a la era espacial usaríamos energía mas poderosa a un mayor costo pero con la ventaja de ser de un menor tamaño.

las estimaciones de los cálculos realizados para crear estos reactores, están mal en la practica indicado por que se usara en reemplazo del sistema anterior un sistema que solo concentrara la cantidad de bloques en uno o en varios puntos, siendo igual de difícil el manejar la lógica de distribución sin afectar a la nave.

dentro del sistema se deja en claro que se utilizara en naves, la pregunta es ¿que pasara con las estructuras?, las estructuras, en especial las estructuras simples, no tienen el espacio suficiente como para tener que crear un generador que utilizar un espacio cubico regular para poder funcionar.

y ademas ¿que pasara con las estructuras múltiples? esas por ejemplo un cañón que debía tener sus propios sistemas de generadores para funcionar por que estaba sobre un tercer sistema de riel, aun cuando el nuevo sistema se aplique ese cañón o sub-sistema no tendrá energía.

la lógica que se plantea en general es buena, utiliza ciertas normas que ya he visto en otros juegos, pero esos sistemas funcionaron por que fueron introducidos de manera reducida 6-9 bloques como máximo, con la ventaja de que usaban un sistema de pantalla dentro del bloque, donde se colocaban las piezas desde un punto de vista digital.

revisen los fundamentos utilizados en el mod "INDUSTRIAL-CRAFT" (by minecraft), ahí aparece un sistema similar y compacto.

otra de las cosas es que el sistema planteado produce una cantidad similar de energía, solo reduciendo su consumo de los sistemas, dentro de la ley de la vida existe una regla "SI QUIERES ALGO MEJOR PAGA MAS" con la cual si queremos un mejor sistema de energía deberemos conseguir mas materiales y mas créditos para tener algo mas exclusivo.

el sistema que planteo, es utilizar un sistema similar al "INDUSTRIAL-CRAFT" y que ademas se pueda mejorar su rendimiento a partir de un sistema de tarjetas de bono, el cual tendrá un costo altísimo por cada tarjeta, pero que al final de cuenta no utilizara ningún espacio, y con eso se podrá reducir el sistema de sobre población de bloques generadores.

 

[Swiftstone]

I've seen many people purpose surface area. While a great idea especially for realism, its just not realistic to simulate in the game. Finding surface area of a voxel object is not as easy as it sounds. Especially given you could build structures inside with surface area as well. There would be no way to differentiate them without a massive amount of ray tracing. If there is an algorithm that does it. There is no one that has found it and posted. Its an incredibly hard problem actually. Its along the same lines as finding inside versus outside in a closed shape. Generally its a recursive search usually by flooding and walking all the block structures but its by no means performant in a 3D sense.

Then I say don't try to differentiate between interior/exterior radiating surfaces. Let people fill the interior spaces of their ships with baffling if they want, rather than put it on the outside, or decorate. The mechanic only needs to be suggestive of reality in order to provide much more immersion and realism.

Further, I need no extensive programming or coding knowledge to know that the game probably already calculates the number of joined and un-joined faces of blocks etc for the purposes of simulating damage and determining available build surfaces to join other blocks to on an entity. If this is true, then all that needs to be done is to feed the un-joined face total into a function which uses that number to create the ship's heat dissipation rating with minimal calculation, and can be updated just as continuously as damage is taken, or blocks added on.

The number of un-joined faces at any given moment on an entity determines heat dissipation rate, while total number of connected blocks determine capacity in this scenario with numbers already being calculated and generated by the game on a continual basis, placing little if any real extra load on the game or the computers running it, thereby completely working around the problem you describe, all while still providing every bit of the flexibility in ship design one could wish for and maintaining game performance.

I think...

Coincidentally, this would also allow for the design of ships with ablative armor that actually becomes more efficient at heat dissipation even as total heat-sink capacity drops due to reduction in the total number of blocks because of damage and the resulting exposure of new block facings. Offering yet more complexity with a minimal trade-off.

The reduction in block numbers, as well as complex calculations involving a large number of power block groupings this new system would provide as far as streamlining game performance goes, would still far outweigh the load created by those few calculations per second I describe above, creating a net gain to performance as desired by...well...everyone.

I think...lol

Is there someone with experience in this area, or the devs themselves who could weigh in on this little back-and-forth? I think the dissipation solution using already existent hull components augmented by their proposed active coolant system has legs, even if a bit simplistic in my conception and description of how the mechanic might work.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Instead of using the general surface area of a ship for cooling, I'd rather see dedicated "radiator blocks" with grouping mechanics that encourages placing them in 1-deep planes with no neighboring blocks. Noncombat ships could simply use radiators as the outer hull, with extra vanes sticking out here and there for more cooling capacity if needed. Combat ships will need to be more creative in order to protect them, though I guess there's no reason you couldn't put all the radiator planes inside the ship behind armor.

 

[Morrigi]

Personally, I just don't want the stupid heat boxes. Any reasonable solution without them that makes power more interesting is one I'm likely to support. The computational clusterfuck related to the surface area-based system that I proposed earlier is a fair criticism that I didn't take into account.

 

[Madman198237]

I agree with the sentiment that heat should be more logical and less forced. Changing energy into a usable form generates heat. Hello, Second Law of Thermodynamics. There is no way around this. Therefore, when you generate more energy, you generate more heat.

I want to operate on the principle that the new reactors are extremely, well, reactive, and only generates as much power as is required and change output rapidly. The more power required, the less efficient. The larger the generator/reactor, the higher the point at which generation stops having good efficiency. So, if your fighter-sized powercore is used to power a battleship's weapons, it's going to overheat fast. This is where I want to see a more reasonable model for heat.

At 0% heat, your reactor's built-in cooling systems (And built-on, I suppose. Since I would like to see a coolant system. I'll cover it in a minute) are dissipating all heat created.
At 1%, they're falling behind. You'll slowly generate heat, accumulating more and more detrimental effects, until you reach 100% and complete meltdown occurs. As the heat increases, it affects first functions of blocks (Shield caps give less shields, for instance), then damages them, then destroys them in a rapidly expanding area as the reactor casing itself visibly takes damage before either exploding or simply continuing to burn at faster and faster rates.

As for coolant, these "heat conduits" should just be "coolant conduits". Space is very, very, very flipping cold. As in, 3* above absolute zero cold. So, expose these conduits to space. How can this be detected? Perhaps as a function of approaching the bounding box of a ship? Perhaps instead simply length of tubing? As in, the more coolant you have in the system, the longer you can hold off an overheat.


****Sidenote: Does anybody know for sure about this: Do most coolants become more or less effective the greater the temperature difference between what they're cooling and what they're being cooled by?

 

[Ithirahad]

I agree with the sentiment that heat should be more logical and less forced. Changing energy into a usable form generates heat. Hello, Second Law of Thermodynamics. There is no way around this. Therefore, when you generate more energy, you generate more heat.

I want to operate on the principle that the new reactors are extremely, well, reactive, and only generates as much power as is required and change output rapidly. The more power required, the less efficient. The larger the generator/reactor, the higher the point at which generation stops having good efficiency. So, if your fighter-sized powercore is used to power a battleship's weapons, it's going to overheat fast. This is where I want to see a more reasonable model for heat.

At 0% heat, your reactor's built-in cooling systems (And built-on, I suppose. Since I would like to see a coolant system. I'll cover it in a minute) are dissipating all heat created.
At 1%, they're falling behind. You'll slowly generate heat, accumulating more and more detrimental effects, until you reach 100% and complete meltdown occurs. As the heat increases, it affects first functions of blocks (Shield caps give less shields, for instance), then damages them, then destroys them in a rapidly expanding area as the reactor casing itself visibly takes damage before either exploding or simply continuing to burn at faster and faster rates.

As for coolant, these "heat conduits" should just be "coolant conduits". Space is very, very, very flipping cold. As in, 3* above absolute zero cold. So, expose these conduits to space. How can this be detected? Perhaps as a function of approaching the bounding box of a ship? Perhaps instead simply length of tubing? As in, the more coolant you have in the system, the longer you can hold off an overheat.


****Sidenote: Does anybody know for sure about this: Do most coolants become more or less effective the greater the temperature difference between what they're cooling and what they're being cooled by?

This is EXACTLY how I want to see the system work. Also, I'd imagine that a coolant would by definition be becoming more effective if the temperature difference is greater - that means that your cooling apparatus is removing more heat from the coolant.

 

[Madman198237]

No, as in the mechanism itself is heating up, the coolant is falling behind. I suspect that, if the coolant works properly, it will be able to get rid of heat faster (Newton's Law of Cooling and all), not to mention collecting it from the apparatus it's cooling faster.

In other words, my suspicion is that a higher difference in temperatures=more effective coolant, but I want to be sure, so I'm asking.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Calling space "cold" isn't terribly useful. Space is actually an extremely good insulator. For example, the insulator in a thermos is just vacuum. Even deep in interstellar space where the average particle temperature is just a few Kelvin, it would not feel cold to you if you were exposed to the raw vacuum.

But heat can be radiated as electromagnetic radiation rather than through conduction to a colder material. You can't really conduct thermal energy to space, there's just not enough matter there for it to work.

One interesting thing we could move towards is sensors which detect thermal radiation. The hotter your ship's radiators are, the more visible your ship will be on sensors. It's been a while since I took a physics class but I think radiation power scales to the fourth exponent of the object's temperature, or something like that.

 

[Madman198237]

Well, er, hate to disappoint, but space cools pretty well. As in the rapidly-turning-you-into-an-icecube well. It's fast enough to be useful, whether through radiation or interaction with the limited amount of ambient matter hardly matters. Regardless, you're getting colder fast, so, be careful.

As to the radiation, a while back I proposed a system that was based on the emission of EM radiation and was basically a complete revamp of scanning, cloaking, jamming, and all related mechanics. It's buried in some thread relating to the topic on the FSM, if you want to find it. But, yes, I do like the idea of tracking radiation to determine the ease of finding you.

 

[Haalon]

Well, after some days of thinking and accidential posting I want to share my thoughts. Some of them already was mentioned here, i just combined everything with my vision of the future of starmade.

1) Reactors​

While I disagree with some aspects of proposed system, I agree that power system needs changes. As well as other systems. Currently, as already was said, power system is the MOST complex and creative, while being highly absurd and without much possibilites for further development. Current system is blamed for forced design choises, but proposed system, with all its heat boxes, penalties for multiple reactores and unability for those heat boxes to go over ship's dimension box - proposed system looks like it forces even more this design choises. But, unlike the current system, it has great, no, GREAT potential if implemented correctly, just think about complex reactors with various ways of generating energy, or even shields, thrust reactors, and dealing with heat. Personally, when i think about it, i remember old IndustrialCraft reactors in all its complexity and glory. There were many ways of working with them. You was able build highly dangerous but very effective reactor, which generates LOTS of energy in seconds, but then cools down a lot, or classic non-stop working reactors, which can get rid of heat on its own, while loosing efficiency, or those who store this heat in capacity elements, which must then be replaced or cooled down, etc, etc. Designing those was fun, creative and not easy process with various absolutely different results. It would be great to see something like this in starmade, just imagine how different reactors layouts would significantly change tactics and design choises. As for regen-based power system, i agree with this problem, if you make capacity MORE powerful, it would create place for interesting concept - small ships with highly powerful weapons, but with limited amount of shots.​

2) Cooling system​

I like the idea of heat, but instead of horrifying heat boxes of intergalactic terror and somewhat strange replacement of energy with heat, lets have independent energy and cooling systems. To do so, let other systems generate heat too, for example shield reactors, this literally means replacing shield capacity with amount of heat you can store in your cooling system, and shield regen with your cooling speed. Quality of the shield reactor affects amount of heat generated after a hit taken, or give some special effects. The same can be done for thrusters, jump drives, and so on. You can handle with heat locally - near your systems, or transfer it ( probably via isolated conduits) to a more efficient central cooling system(or systems, if you have many), you can just store it in some heat capacitors until some limit, or slowly radiate heat into space via radiator blocks. For the sake of not making learning curve too hard, small ships should be satisfied with inherent cooling of those reactors.​

3) Weapon systems​

In a way how I see cooling and energy system, weapons can't be kept fully unchanged. Linear dependence of damage on weapon's block count, should be replaced with linear dependence on energy supplied, while block count will increase efficency of used energy, and decrease heat generated. In detail, weapon groups will be able to request some amount of energy, this amount CAN BE SET BY PLAYER manually or through weapon panel. Each shot consumes all supplied energy (supplied <= requested) and deal damage linear to this energy. Block count can increase damage per energy point in logarithmic fashion or even not increase it at all, and, what's more important, decrease heat production, if weapon group block count is too small for amount of supplied energy, weapon group can generate too many heat and shut down until reboot or even explode. This mechanics can solve the "Too many sys blocks" problem without any restrictions
(because of logarithmic curve of blocks/damage and linear curve of energy/damage, which means the damage is only a matter of QUALITY of your reactor and cooling systems), and bring a lot of tactical oppotunities to the game - such as energy distribution (all energy to warp-drive/cannons/shields thing), and small capacity-based suicide drones, which deals one extremely powerful shot from a small weapon, and then explodes because of exessive amount of heat.
​

4) Power and heat transfer?​

Obviously, energy consuming systems must somehow recieve energy, just as cooling systems must recieve heat. There are two polar solutions of this.
First way, is how Starmade transfers everything now - nohow. Really, there is no transfer, all systems can instantly and through vacuum get energy wherever they are. N. Tesla would be certanly pleased.
Second way - transfer energy, heat, maybe even shields through wires and power zones. Again, small ships can be easly freed from this problems - instead of heat influence area, reactors could have power influence area, aka power zone - zone in which reactor can wirelessly transfer energy to systems. For small ships, reactor will have enough power zone size to deliver energy wirelessly without any complexity.
Problem is - I cant choose which solution is better, while wires add more ways of working with all systems and they are major weak points (so you want wire connections to be duplicated) in pvp on big ships, all this wire mess can be too complicated and boring.
I just felt that I cannot not to mention this idea, even if i find it wrong in many ways . So in conclusion i wouldn't talk about this.​

Conclusion​

So, in short, how this system solves problems, stated in the original post, what can it offer and its flaws.
Indeed it can offer a lot -
Huge diversity in ship design and roles.
Generalization of ship effectivness - power and cooling systems are literally everything for your ship, since every system consume energy and\or generate heat, and block count of thouse systems only determines how much energy you can feed them without consequences and a small logarithmic coefficient - so effectivness of EVERY system depends on how good are your power and cooling systems.
More tactical combat with energy distribution.
End of current "more blocks == better system" paradigm.

And some words about shema's stated problems:

• Forsed design choices. I think this problem isnt fully understood by many folks. It's perfectly ok if game has some designs that are better than others. What is not ok - when there is ONE design choice that is better than everything else, and that's literally starmade current power reactors. Yes, it's a complex task to fit them in difficult shapes and gain close to maximum output, but seriously, their mechanics is very one-sided - the larger is dimension box, the better is your power output - all my medium ships and turrets have waffle of those reactors through entire ship. While the main idea of my thoughts is too make systems as diverse as possible.
• Complexity - as i already said, the system I describe is easier than current on small ships, but shines on the large scales.
• Focuse on regen and Excesive amount of blocks already was nicely described before, so lets talk about the main flaw of my system:

I dont have a clear vision on reactor mechanics. I just took shema's not fully described idea of such reactors, that encourage quality but not the block count, and combined it with my thoughts. Shortly, that theoretical reactor must have some major characteristics based on it's design, some of them are - energy production, heat generation, power capacity, efficiency per block(or even per fuel point, i personally like idea of consumable fuel) and safety - and while you want to max them all out(except heat generation ofc) you cannot do that - you can find a balance between, or trend to some characteristics, while sacrificing others, or make an extremely one-sided or two-sided reactor - for example capacity/efficiency-based-reactor for those suicide drones i mentioned before. That's good on theory, but I dont have a clear idea how to make such reactor, that cant be easily abused.
​

 

[Ithirahad]

Calling space "cold" isn't terribly useful. Space is actually an extremely good insulator. For example, the insulator in a thermos is just vacuum. Even deep in interstellar space where the average particle temperature is just a few Kelvin, it would not feel cold to you if you were exposed to the raw vacuum.

But heat can be radiated as electromagnetic radiation rather than through conduction to a colder material. You can't really conduct thermal energy to space, there's just not enough matter there for it to work.

One interesting thing we could move towards is sensors which detect thermal radiation. The hotter your ship's radiators are, the more visible your ship will be on sensors. It's been a while since I took a physics class but I think radiation power scales to the fourth exponent of the object's temperature, or something like that.

Yeah, realistically you can't just shunt heat into space unless you come up with a way to pack a TON of energy into passing hydrogen atoms and the like and then send them on their way... However, for game purposes, having heat dissipate into the æther is acceptable. Remember, it's just a balancing mechanic in this case.

 

[xDEAD-LORDx]

ths is the basic in mi proposal

 

[Morrigi]

Heat can be radiated into space IRL, it just takes massive radiators to do it. Most of the big panels sticking out of the International Space Station are not solar panels, but radiators. However, the hotter your radiators can run, the more heat they can dissipate for the same surface area and therefore the smaller your radiator can be for a given amount of heat output. Very compact and efficient radiators could be built with high-temperature materials and the appropriate coolant, such as liquid sodium.

 

[Jojomo]

Well, er, hate to disappoint, but space cools pretty well. As in the rapidly-turning-you-into-an-icecube well.

That's just the moisture in your skin evaporating.

In cases where evaporation isn't happening, radiation is effectively the only way to dump heat into space.
[doublepost=1487193355,1487193295][/doublepost]

Yeah, realistically you can't just shunt heat into space unless you come up with a way to pack a TON of energy into passing hydrogen atoms and the like and then send them on their way... However, for game purposes, having heat dissipate into the æther is acceptable. Remember, it's just a balancing mechanic in this case.

Radiator fins would do the trick (I don't know at what rate).

 

[aRottenKomquat]

That's just the moisture in your skin evaporating.

In cases where evaporation isn't happening, radiation is effectively the only way to dump heat into space.

We might be getting into quite a tangent here. But yes, evaporating is an extremely effective way of removing heat in a vacuum. There could be a cooling system that just boils ice, and finally we have a use for all those useless ice blocks!