While spaghetti is theoreticaly an issue, I nor most players have ever built nor encoutered one.
Sure it shouldn't be encouraged, but neither should the integrity system be solely balanced around it.
Spaghetti comes in a wide range of variants from low density ships all the way to the retarded levels of such ships as the "Fair-and-Balanced", and not all players agree on where that threshold is. I've personally faced at least 3 true spaghettis (single wide string systems significantly spaced out), plus several similar ships designed out of 3-5 block strands. Also, many players use spaghetti tactics that they do a good job of hiding. For example, the MagicTech 65k destroyer looks like a solid ship, but almost all the systems where actual long skinny strands running along the flanks so that any shot strong enough to break the docked armor that landed center mass would just pass through causing very little harm. The Dominion also had that 2k wide halo ship that capitalized on spaghetti mechanics which was actually fairly strong despite being VERY poorly designed in many other respects. Then there are ships like the Licorp Baal Berith that are not true spaghetti, so you can still land hits just fine, but they are so low density that everything just over-pens it or wastes a bunch of explosive potential on thin air.
It is likely you did not attract enough attention to make ppl feel justified in sending spaghetti your way, but in general, any player who won a few fights in a row could pretty much expect someone to throw a revenge spaghetti their way.
The biggest problem with spaghetti was not that it was powerful, but that it was OP and VERY easy for any noob to make. Docked armor, by contrast, took a lot more patience, technical understanding, experimentation, and time to implement well; so, even though everyone knew about it, most people didn't know all the tricks necessary to make a particularly better ship with it. Even if you know the idea behind it, there were at least 13 different tricks involved it making it better than just "make the enemy hit my docka", so even if some new player came along and said, "I'm gonna go shank some people with a docked armor ship", chances are they'd be sorely disappointed to find out that what they have is nothing compared to the docked armor made by more seasoned builders.
There is also the matter of scale of advantage. The high end meta ships could stack 20-30 best building practices and other exploits to make a ship that could generally hit like ships 3-10 times their mass. A spaghetti ship, build with very limited understand of the game could face those same meta ships at 10 times THEIR mass.
... So yeah... I'd say they are actually a very toxic element and the sole reason why the game needed an integrity element to begin with.
[doublepost=1519318660,1519318529][/doublepost]Also, this OP is very similar to
How to fix Integrity - Yeay Math Again!, excpet it does not address the additional concern of integrity currently not scalling well with smaller ships.
