Then you should also be okay with removing all weapons. Because without any rules to building ship systems fighting the ships would be more or less impossible without destroying most of the blocks on the ship. You'll need to hunt them down like you do now while salvaging asteroids, only it will dodge and fire back.
Past the basic game you can turn the game into anything you like.
What I am kicking against here for over two years now. Is the ever more complex base game. The base game should be super simple. Since even in a super simple base game people will fly pretty much the same kind of ships you see today. Only the inside the bit that gets them to work will be far more easy to learn. That will get you players. Because right now there are way to few people on this game.
After that you can add in another layer of more complex rules. That layer are the servers and the admins that run them. You do not add that stuff to the base game!
Power 2.0 should be a mod at the most. Make power like shields. Each individual power reactor has a set power recharge and each power capacitor has a set power storage with a max power limit. It does not matter how you place them or where. That is something new players can understand with ease and every ship ever made currently on the dock will once again function. Realism is a second level addition and even then it is just made up rules! Everyone has another idea of what that should be so leave it out of the base game.
The big mistake/view point currently by the people who build really integrate complex ships. Is that a simple base game would remove there way of doing things. They even say that they are okay with StarMade being a niece game. Then that shows just how self centered people are/have become. A simple base game will not remove complex builds. But it will level the playing field so that the gap between simple and complex is not as wide as it is today.
Wake up! There is no game without players. And those players will not stay if there lovely build ships and stations become useless after every X updates. Because all of a sudden things that were done one way now have to be done another way.
A simple base is also way way more easy to maintain and debug. Just look at the amount of recoding and debugging this power update throws up. For something that currently works to how silly is that. Like this game has no other really pressing problems. All it does is make even bigger ships possible. If and only if those ships are hollow. Because it is all about a CPU's block count.
And these Spaghetti ships that for short even no one had heard about. Let alone seen one on any server. They are still ultra rare. I flat out ignore them. What are you going to do when I am in my Home Base.
1. would it be possible to fly around inside the spaced out ship with a small one permanently pulsing ship, doing damage?
2. would it not just help to create a bigger blast radius on missles?
Well maybe add a weapon with a burn mechanic. The explosive effect lends it self perfect for that. When ever it hits a block the next block burns. Unless it has four other blocks next to it. A string ship would then burn like a torch just from a single shot. As the fire rages from block to block.