Power System Overhaul Proposal

[xDEAD-LORDx]

If we are based on placing radiator blocks and such systems, we would be forced to alter the end of what we want, which is to produce energy without so many blocks.

The simplest would be to create 10 new types of energy blocks, similar to the current system, but each generate more energy than the previous one, but using more expensive and rare materials for its manufacture, increasing with its level of production, the more it produces...

And also add a bonus block, which consumes a type of cards, created from many materials, to be placed on the ship to give an extra fixed bonus to the energy production of the ship.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

aRottenKomquat Jojomo Ithirahad Since you love to cite the laws of thermodynamics, then you know there are 3 methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection and radiation. Convection and conduction do require a medium, but radiation pretty much works in vacuum. Which is exactly why the thermos mentioned above has a reflective surface as well (usually silver coating) on the inside of the outer wall on the vacuum layer, to reflect radiating heat. If space was so good of an insulator, spacesuits and capsules wouldn't require thermal insulation at all (hint: they do, very much) Radiators work, if you have a large enough surface, and you can transport heat to them through a lossless liquid coolant circuit. Hence my proposal of thermal conduits in my suggestion lost in the flamewar between RPers and PvPers earlier.

 

[Jojomo]

so let me ask a question. If most of the "PvP" community is against this, for reasons other than it being too complex, maybe there's something wrong with the update? I can't believe there are still people posting that this idea is awesome as is. Someone said that if you don't like the update, then stick to an older version of the game. I could say the same thing however, saying "if you like this proposal, go play on a custom game server for RP."

Are most of the PvP players against this? What percentage of them have posted here?

But can any of you deny that the most effective ship using this system would be a chandelier? With a core in the center and empty space surrounding, with system blocks on the outside of the debuff area.

Are you worried about "chandelier" ships? In other words, are you worried about aesthetics?

We'll need more details before being able to predict what efficiency looks like. But it's certainly possible that it won't be chandelier ships: players will want to minimise their surface area (armour), which will include all systems.

RP and PvE players would be overjoyed, however. Since they could have an interior in their ships with no negative effects, except to have more mass than a chandelier ship.

Perhaps they would.
More mass is a negative effect though.

So something needs to be said here. RP and PvE players will still play this game in it's current state, I had the displeasure of being matched with RPers in supreme commander 2 frequently.

PvPers will play it if it changes. I don't call myself a PvP player, but I min/max (with the eventual aim of PvP), and I'm not an RP player, and I will play.

If this type of update goes through however, this community will lose a large portion of PvP players, that actually have to focus on effectiveness over aesthetics.

In reality, they'll probably whine and complain, but continue to play. Even if they don't, they'll be replaced by others.

I should also mention that there is a large misconception about interiors I've recently become aware of, thanks to a silent grand master of this game. A ship with an interior has less mass than a ship of the same size, and therefor technically has a disadvantage. But it DOES have the same mass as a slightly smaller ship. As long as your ship is not filled with rooms, it is JUST as effective as a ship of comparable mass. So interiors do NOT make a ship PvP incapable.

Certainly a PvP ship can have interiors with only minimal impact on performance, but the impact isn't zero: it increases the surface area needed to enclose the system and interior, compared to only enclosing the systems. So interiors come at a mass penalty.
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aRottenKomquat Jojomo Ithirahad Since you love to cite the laws of thermodynamics, then you know there are 3 methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection and radiation. Convection and conduction do require a medium, but radiation pretty much works in vacuum. Which is exactly why the thermos mentioned above has a reflective surface as well (usually silver coating) on the inside of the outer wall on the vacuum layer, to reflect radiating heat. If space was so good of an insulator, spacesuits and capsules wouldn't require thermal insulation at all (hint: they do, very much) Radiators work, if you have a large enough surface, and you can transport heat to them through a lossless liquid coolant circuit. Hence my proposal of thermal conduits in my suggestion lost in the flamewar between RPers and PvPers earlier.

Would like to actually read my posts before imagining that you are correcting them??

And for superior radiation you'll want black, not reflective.

 

[Top 4ce]

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?

Okay, two things.

As said before, space is a vacuum and the only current ways to transfer is to release matter with the energy or through radiating inferred energy.
Two, coolant is more effective with larger temperature differences. Think of it as a valve, and higher the difference, the faster the transfer of heat. But again, space has no matter to transfer too, hence radiators work by getting rid of the heat by inferred.

 

[Mr.Steam]

Space will cool things off, but not as quickly as you would think. Even though it is very cold in space there are not a lot of cold particles to bump into to transfer energy. Kind of like standing outside naked when it is freezing vs jumping in a lake of freezing water. The water is much more dense and will cause hypothermia quickly. Whereas space is not dense at all.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Steering this back towards the new proposed reactor components, so the proposed system will overheat if your ship's systems are overpowered compared to your reactor. This could be somewhat mitigated by using an "overdrive cooling" system which uses water/ice as a "fuel source" and simply evaporates it into space to give a temporary boost to your reactor's cooling capacity. In a way, this would allow you to use a smaller reactor which probably suffices for most cases, while having a system to deal with those rarer cases when you don't have enough cooling, such as a huge alpha strike with all your weapons. Eventually you run out of water/ice and the "overdrive cooling" system does not work until it's refueled.

But perhaps that is too similar to the existing power capacitors, except it would be limited. I don't know. Just another idea to toss on the heap.

 

[Ithirahad]

aRottenKomquat Jojomo Ithirahad Since you love to cite the laws of thermodynamics, then you know there are 3 methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection and radiation. Convection and conduction do require a medium, but radiation pretty much works in vacuum. Which is exactly why the thermos mentioned above has a reflective surface as well (usually silver coating) on the inside of the outer wall on the vacuum layer, to reflect radiating heat. If space was so good of an insulator, spacesuits and capsules wouldn't require thermal insulation at all (hint: they do, very much) Radiators work, if you have a large enough surface, and you can transport heat to them through a lossless liquid coolant circuit. Hence my proposal of thermal conduits in my suggestion lost in the flamewar between RPers and PvPers earlier.

I am well aware of how radiation works. I'm more or less referring to some kind of passive 'conduction' into nowhere. IMO, this should be a consistent rate, as mentioned in the original post, except perhaps with the addition of a consumable coolant that is vented (invisibly) out into space for particularly large reactors.

Radiators would be kind of cool for the pro-realism sort of player, but if you have to put them on the outside of your ship they'll mess with people's ability to build how they want aesthetically, and if you can pack them on the inside (wat) people will spam them and not have to worry about heat mechanics. :|

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Or we could go really abstract and simple and have exhaust ports with no real consideration to what physical principle they use to cool, or what they emit. Don't worry about radiators, or sacrificial coolant, and such. And to keep the calculations simple and prevent lag, instead of trying to determine if they are interior or exterior by using the "correct" algorithm just trace a ray along the axis it's facing. If the ray intersects another block belonging to the ship or one of its docked entities before passing out of the ship's bounding box, the exhaust port has no effect. That's a simple check that will scale linearly with the ship's dimension along that axis, instead of doing a much more complex network search to determine if there's a path to the exterior from the port's location.

I guess we (or I at least, having not read this entire monster of a thread) still don't know how the proposed "cooling chambers" thing will work.

 

[Panpiper]

For those who are still following this thread (I stopped reading at page 30), I just posted my suggestions on how to revamp the build system in it's own thread. If we are going to effectively toss the whole thing out and rebuild it from the bottom up, then we should be considering several things, not just heat boxes or whatever. This is me trying to be positive and constructive.

 

[Raisinbat]

Are most of the PvP players against this? What percentage of them have posted here?

This is not how a discussion works. Schine asked for a discussion, if all they wanted was a popular vote they could've made a poll, but they didn't.

In a discussion you post arguments. The only arguments that's come out of the RP community are

• less penalty for interiors (valid, but extremely minimal and it has been demonstrated that interiors are doable on competitive pvp ships)
• less incentive for doom cubes (Debunked by people who actually know mechanics, doom cubes are made by noobs and are not efficient. Also no explanation for why noobs shouldn't be allowed to build)
• less powergap between rp and pvp ships (Minimal impact unless you remove all shipbuilding mechanics to the point where it's purely cosmetics, simplifies competitive building to the point of space engineers effectively destroying the game for PvP builders, and just downright ridiculous request)

The RP side has made ZERO arguments for their positions after these three; but because you outnumber the pvp side you get what you want no matter how detrimental it is to the game, and how poorly you understand the consequences of it. Instead you keep dismissing or ignoring our arguments.

In reality, they'll probably whine and complain, but continue to play. Even if they don't, they'll be replaced by others.

I don't play empyrion or space engineers because you have no way of building good ships in those games; there is nothing to optimize in them, you just strap engines and power to them as much as you like until they go as fast as you want, no customizable weapons or stats and mechanical parts are extremely limited if they are also going to be practical.

You don't care about mechanics, we get that, but you're tiny, insignificant minority in the scope of people who play videogames. The majority of players want actual games to play, not a modeling tool or a digital dollhouse, and i'm sure schine are more interested in having a game that will draw new players in, rather than continously pandering to the shrinking leftovers.

Do you have any argument at all for why the new system should be implemented? And no, because you like it, is not an argument.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

I'm a bit puzzled by the fact that you are basically calling "power generation system" what is a waste heat management system. That's a bit confusing.

I also know that realism is not a factor but... the proposed mechanic is worse than current power system that is just alien but its basics are relatively easy to understand, and has its charm (it is self-consistent, and does not try to resemble something it cannot realistically resemble).

To me the proposed system is not intuitive in the slightest, forces limitations out of thin air (heat boxes make no sense, I can't place there systems but I can place there crew quarters? WAT?) and the fact that I can fill the empty parts of the ship (do I really need to have large empty spaces?) with dummy blocks again makes no sense.

I also agree that this will heavily favor designs that put power plants on towers, as at the end of the day it's still shield power that decides if you live or die.

I think the current capacity/regen are fine (there are builds that can only be done with capacitors like missile ships), I'm all for adding heat mechanics, but I don't see how dropping the capacity/regen and getting a weird "heat" mechanic is good.

I 1000% agree with Panpiper's post Power System Overhaul Proposal

If space was so good of an insulator, spacesuits and capsules wouldn't require thermal insulation at all (hint: they do, very much)

The insulation there is to counter the Sun's power output because the vacuum does not stop that. Consider that it's 3x the output you get on the planet surface, and with more energetic radiations (UV). Capsules and spacesuits don't have decent radiators because of their size, so they resort to isolation and limit their exposure as much as possible (if you stay out too long without radiators you get cooked).
For example the Space Shuttle when in space always opened the cargo bay doors as they had heat radiators on them, or the ISS has radiator panels that cover more surface than its solar panels.

If you were out in the outer system (Jupiter and beyond) you would not have any of these issues.

(also this would be cool to have in a "heat" mechanic even if the power scales of ship systems are very likely dozens of orders of magnitude more than that)

 

[Zylofan]

Would it be better to remove the heat box from reactors and instead make ships need wiring? So for your weapons to work you need to run wiring from the reactor to the weapons. Yes this adds more blocks but not as many as the 1000,000 power blocks you would have needed before. You can even add diminishing returns the farther a system is from the reactor so you have to decide if you want smaller rectors to handle farther away systems or not.

Just tossing it out there.

 

[Lecic]

Schine wants to take StarMade forward, and to do that, power has to change.

How does this power system move the game forward?

Doomcubes will die,

Doomcubes are already dead.

along with "soft" doomcubes (ships that have SOME shape but are made of a solid clump of systems with a thin skin).

So "soft" "doomcubes" are anything that doesn't have a massive interior or isn't an armor tank? What a ridiculous idea. You're just calling ships that you don't like doomcubes to try and pretend you're not wrong about doomcubes being dead.

Interior space will have a purpose.

No, interior space will continue to be a downside in this system. As others have already explained, interior is actually not as much of a downside as people think, but it is still a downside.
In the new system, why would I make an interior when I could just fill the heatbox with a filler block, like the new dedicated filler block, or another light block like rocks, mesh, or composites as sponge armor to absorb some extra weaponsfire?
And this is where you say "crew will make the interior have a purpose," but if that's the case, why do we even need the forced heatboxes or even a new power system?

Big ships won't need logic based docked reactors or the horrible clickfest based "auxillary" reactors.

Docked reactors are already gone, so I'm not sure why you even brought them up.

How are auxes "horrible clickfests"? You press one button on the hotbar to turn them on, and they're incredibly easy to install with advanced build mode.

In a discussion you post arguments. The only arguments that's come out of the RP community are

• less penalty for interiors (valid, but extremely minimal and it has been demonstrated that interiors are doable on competitive pvp ships)
• less incentive for doom cubes (Debunked by people who actually know mechanics, doom cubes are made by noobs and are not efficient. Also no explanation for why noobs shouldn't be allowed to build)
• less powergap between rp and pvp ships (Minimal impact unless you remove all shipbuilding mechanics to the point where it's purely cosmetics, simplifies competitive building to the point of space engineers effectively destroying the game for PvP builders, and just downright ridiculous request)

The RP side has made ZERO arguments for their positions after these three; but because you outnumber the pvp side you get what you want no matter how detrimental it is to the game, and how poorly you understand the consequences of it. Instead you keep dismissing or ignoring our arguments.

Excellent analysis, thank you very much.

 

[Gasboy]

How does this power system move the game forward?

I didn't say that this particular proposal moves the game forward.

However, this does not invalidate my original statement. Schine wants to take StarMade forward, and to do that, power has to change. They've opened this up to us to discuss, argue over, and offer up suggestions for improvement. Let's work with them and each other, yes?

As I've posted somewhere in this thread, I don't think that the current power system, and the proposed one, are much different at all. You could, essentially, accomplish giving us more power in less room by simply adjusting the amount of power the generators give. Or you could make it a sliding scale of some sort, so that all ships could have manageable power in a manageable space.

I'd prefer something more interesting, perhaps using the C + V mechanic that weapons and other systems have. So we have to build a reactor core, and we have to manage heat. But we could add slave systems to the main reactor core for more power (with more heat gen.), and so on.

 

[Valiant70]

All of this pandering to RP players could be alleviated with a simple NPC and computer effect system that grants bonuses to those who would rather have an interior that could give them the same output as a ship with no interior.. The NPC would require a bed room. dining area..etc to fulfill its needs. But would provide a bonus in proportion with the ships size

I wish it were that simple! If you just do that, many players will min-max crew space as well. The result will be doom cubes with a few holes cut in them for crew to wiggle around in, probably with walls made of shield capacitators. You'd still have to implement a lot of special conditions to keep empty spaces from being more efficient than decorated ones.

 

[Lecic]

Schine wants to take StarMade forward, and to do that, power has to change.

Why is that?

I wish it were that simple! If you just do that, many players will min-max crew space as well. The result will be doom cubes with a few holes cut in them for crew to wiggle around in, probably with walls made of shield capacitators. You'd still have to implement a lot of special conditions to keep empty spaces from being more efficient than decorated ones.

Players will always mixmax. The result will not be doomcubes, because doomcubes are already dead. The simple solution is that crew are happier and do work more efficiently when they have larger and better interiors, and that crew become unhappy if their living spaces are made of systems instead of interior hull and furniture. People will find a good ratio between interior and systems at some point, but why is that a bad thing?

 

[Gasboy]

Why is that?

Are you saying you really enjoy the current power system as it is?

It's difficult to get adequate power into small ships, at least, small ships you want to have some pewpewpew on. And due to the limitations of power, it's difficult to get enough power into larger ships if you want the huge weapons to go with it. Docked power was a (very laggy) solution that was unintended, and the auxilliary power system has its own drawbacks.

If their intended purpose is to overhaul the power system, giving us a system that gives us more power in less space, or at least the same power in less space, it will improve all sorts of things.

Does it really sit well with you that in order to build a good, working cloaking vessel, you have to use motherboard circuits and leave systems exposed, basically giving you a ship that looks like arse? Basically you leave it perma-cloaked because it looks terrible? More power in less space means you might actually be able to build a nicer looking, better performing cloaked vessel.

I can understand that they want to limitations on power, since the game (and servers) can't handle gigantism all that well. No one loves it when a fight happens between giant ships, and the game slows to a powerpoint presentation as turrets start to come off. (this sort of thing needs to be worked on as well)

FAKEEDIT: And if they can make a better working power system, we can use this to get better working everything else. Smaller weapons. Which means smaller turrets. Maybe cloak can be reworked so it doesn't need the death star's power core to run a decent sized, decent looking stealth ship.

 

[Valiant70]

The result will not be doomcubes, because doomcubes are already dead.

Doomcube has become a byword for any ship that is designed for perfect, meta-only function with absolutely no aesthetic value. That is what I meant.

The simple solution is that crew are happier and do work more efficiently when they have larger and better interiors, and that crew become unhappy if their living spaces are made of systems instead of interior hull and furniture. People will find a good ratio between interior and systems at some point, but why is that a bad thing?

I'm a little iffy about that since people like to decorate with some system blocks (and it often looks good), but perhaps there is another way to facilitate that.
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Are you saying you really enjoy the current power system as it is?

It's difficult to get adequate power into small ships, at least, small ships you want to have some pewpewpew on. And due to the limitations of power, it's difficult to get enough power into larger ships if you want the huge weapons to go with it. Docked power was a (very laggy) solution that was unintended, and the auxilliary power system has its own drawbacks.

If their intended purpose is to overhaul the power system, giving us a system that gives us more power in less space, or at least the same power in less space, it will improve all sorts of things.

Does it really sit well with you that in order to build a good, working cloaking vessel, you have to use motherboard circuits and leave systems exposed, basically giving you a ship that looks like arse? Basically you leave it perma-cloaked because it looks terrible? More power in less space means you might actually be able to build a nicer looking, better performing cloaked vessel.

I can understand that they want to limitations on power, since the game (and servers) can't handle gigantism all that well. No one loves it when a fight happens between giant ships, and the game slows to a powerpoint presentation as turrets start to come off. (this sort of thing needs to be worked on as well)

FAKEEDIT: And if they can make a better working power system, we can use this to get better working everything else. Smaller weapons. Which means smaller turrets. Maybe cloak can be reworked so it doesn't need the death star's power core to run a decent sized, decent looking stealth ship.

Well, there's that. There's also the fact that the new system looks a lot more fun to work with. The long lines are fun for a while, but they don't have any science fiction value at all. It's more like a crossword puzzle in space.

 

[Raisinbat]

If their intended purpose is to overhaul the power system, giving us a system that gives us more power in less space, or at least the same power in less space, it will improve all sorts of things.

Again with these made up issues.

LRSF-1 Orion (800 mass, 230k power regen)
RAI Valkyrie (4000 mass, 1mil + power regen)

I've seen smaller but don't remember the links, i know there is an x-shaped fighter at around 300 mass with 100k+ regen. Unless you're talking about ultrasmall fighters which aren't practical for player use, and even then that's more due to weapon designs being impractical rather than power generation, this problem just isn't there.

Also not seeing any arguments from the RP side again, so i guess i'll post another one against the suggestion, one that's completely gamebreaking:

The heat boundary will turn every ship into a carrier.

All that empty space can be used on pointless interior, or you can fill your ship with fighters. So what if the heat boxes intersect, that won't matter after you launch them, and you don't need those systems out of combat anyway. Come to think of it, this totally enables docked entity spam, you just have to launch all the entities; nevermind chandeliers you can fill your ship completely with systems as long as it's fighters docked to fighters docked to fighters. The suggestion is literally completely broken, but hey let's have another 10 pages about how great it is and how mean pvpers are...

 

[Gasboy]

Again with these made up issues.

LRSF-1 Orion (800 mass, 230k power regen)
RAI Valkyrie (4000 mass, 1mil + power regen)

Made up issues? Try building a big ship. Those are medium sized vessels, where the all the systems work out pretty well.

Make a ship with a regen above the soft cap. Then tell me it's "a made up issue"?

WTF do you think docked reactors were used for?

EDIT: Also, make a sexy looking stealth fighter that doesn't use decorative blocks as hull. Use regular hull. Lemme know how many seconds it'll stay cloaked for.