Interior functions, no forced design.

[Krade]

So i know this a long dead horse, but im gona beat it a little more.

The new power reactor system is going to force us to leave room in the interior of ships, Schema is hoping that this will force the design of interior space in ships and mitigate noobcubes.
However, i think this is not the right time to do this, noobcubes will start to look like tumorous geometric salt crystals and reactors are going to float inside large undecorated hollows. And elegant and wispy ships will also be forced to have large cubic reactor holds.
If a large cubic area inside a ship cannot be filled with systems then for efficiencys sake every single space outside the heat zone will be packed, forcing interior space to fill only the cubic heat zone. Every ship ever will have a cubic interior, if this isnt a bad example of forced design i dont know what is.

Unless the new reactors heat zone is made more fluid and recognizes hallways and other connecting rooms instead of a huge cubic area around its self, then ship design will suffer.

I think this is the wrong time to try and force interior design because one day the Npc Crew Members will have some functionality, and then and only then will players find that having an interior space is worth more than not.
We need the Npc Crew to have some uses before we even start to think about interior design, Or later we will have a bunch of refitted ships with Crew wandering around in boxes. And much more work will have to be done to make ship system computers and other terminals accessible by the crew.

If Schema is going to roll this thing out, then my suggestion is that the reactors "heat zone" is fluid and not limited to a cubic airspace, but to a total breathable interior space that can be stretched throughout the ship.
In this way, we will have flexibility to make interior space as we desire for the eventual coming of Npc Crew.

 

[jayman38]

Also, based on spaceships' need to radiate heat out into space, exposed surface area could contribute significantly to the "heat dissipation" formula. That way, ships with lots of fins, spikes, and other things that increase surface area might not even need internal heat-disssipation zones, or at least needs less of them.

Unfortunately, this idea would lead to lots of "triforce armoring", where the builder places lots of non-cube shapes where they would normally place square blocks, to take advantage of a surface-area calculation. This would be unfortunate, because the game would try to render the extra triangles, without actually being able to see them. This would lead to performance drop.

 

[Valiant70]

If Schema is going to roll this thing out, then my suggestion is that the reactors "heat zone" is fluid and not limited to a cubic airspace, but to a total breathable interior space that can be stretched throughout the ship.
In this way, we will have flexibility to make interior space as we desire for the eventual coming of Npc Crew.

It will likely be semi-fluid and able to be reshaped. We don't even know if Schine is still considering such a solution at all.

 

[Krade]

Also, based on spaceships' need to radiate heat out into space, exposed surface area could contribute significantly to the "heat dissipation" formula. That way, ships with lots of fins, spikes, and other things that increase surface area might not even need internal heat-disssipation zones, or at least needs less of them.

Unfortunately, this idea would lead to lots of "triforce armoring", where the builder places lots of non-cube shapes where they would normally place square blocks, to take advantage of a surface-area calculation. This would be unfortunate, because the game would try to render the extra triangles, without actually being able to see them. This would lead to performance drop.

For simplification purposes, i doubt it would take into account each face of a polygon, the surface area would likely be calculated in squares to be performance conscious.

Edit; The term "Heat Zone" is rather misleading, while it would seem logical in the that ships would have radiators to dissipate heat. However, Schema is using it as way to force players to make interior space in ships in hopes that interiors will become more widely seen as a basic part of ship building