Actually it's around 8x to 4x reduced, depending on the size of your reactor, but a minimum distance size for smaller ships was also imposed. It's something like 5 blocks, so it's negligible. The "cross-bonus" was also reduced by 75% since it's much easier to have 100% stability at short distances. Oh and thanks for the recommendation!
Since these values are moddable by admins, we have done exactly as you request on the LvD server to change them. I'll go into some detail as to what changes we made, and why.
Essentially the differences between default settings and are roughly:
A power reactor on default settings, which would require a distance of something like 200 block distance only requires around 25 blocks worth of distance on LvD. A reactor that would have required 1,600 space only requires about 400. So as you scale up, the distance requirement still goes up, but not to the ridiculous amounts that the default is set to. One of the biggest things we were unhappy with was how QUICKLY the distance would scale up with the default settings. Even rather small ships would have to have a large distance to be 100% efficient. Maybe players don't want to build their 10k weight ship to be 250 blocks long, right? So I changed the curve to favor smaller ships over large ships The the default settings really favored larger ships over smaller ships (but still had enormous space requirements for all ships regardless).
The devs then made it so power reactors would still produce 100% power even at 25% stability. They also released the cross-style bonuses, which I think definitely helped alleviate much of the stability concerns and add some variability. This would allow building stabilizers at shorter distances, but with different risks and benefits. However, I think the effects were still too extreme during combat. It was also a bit more constricting on ship style than I would have liked. If a player relies on the cross-bonus, then their ship will become highly destabilized the moment the stabilizers start to take any damage at all, because the bonus gets destroyed rather easily. This then renders the ship inoperable due to no power. So on LvD, you get a much more stable amount of power. You can still optimize your ship with the cross-bonuses to either get a greater stability buffer OR to make the ship lighter (but riskier), but the cross-effect is exactly 25% of default settings are. I feel this is a fair compromise and it retains the intended use of the bonuses while making shipbuilding much easier on our server. We want players to focus more on their PvP experiences, not have to choose between efficient ships that are dumbells and which do not turn, or ships that are shorter, heavier, and too risky (or somewhere in between).
We hope that our settings allow more freedom in builds and still maintains a balance, but it's really up to the players to decide if we've succeeded. So if you'd like to come test out our settings, please be my guest.
