Make decorative blocks useful

At the moment, decorative blocks look pretty, and that is it. This does not have to be the case.

For example: if you make a "barracks" above a key subsystem, and make the "beds" out of advanced armor blocks, you are not decorating your ship, but are adding a layer of armor.

I propose allowing the decorative blocks to either have a purpose, or to be given armor values that can be upgraded by hardeners. That way our ships can be pretty, and be rewarded for looking pretty in a subtle ways.

Another option is to give the decorative blocks some purpose, like giving a power efficiency bonus to systems connected to a power block via a conduit block, and a cool down bonus to having fans around the weapons.

Panpiper said:

It is very worth while adding such purely decorative blocks to your ship. They are not in fact purely decorative. Decorative blocks currently increase the 'system' hit points of your ship, some of them by quite a bit, and therefor allow you to soak more damage than your ship could otherwise. In fact for their mass, they technically soak more than hull blocks soak in terms of armor hit points.

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Really? is there a chart for this? i am very interested in the numbers. does this mean i do not need to rip up my carved tekt halls and replace them with hull blocks?

Is there a means to tell how much hp a block will add before i place it?

Panpiper said:

In the inventory menu at the bottom is a button that reads "Show Block Information". There you can see precisely how much of everything any given block needs. As a glaring example, girders mass 0.01 mass as opposed to hull which masses five times as much, so you could have five girders for a single hull. Meanwhile, while the hull gives you 5 system HP, 50 armor HP and 75 block HP, the five girders would give you 50 system HP and a total of 375 block HP. Girders and scaffolding and the like make great damage sponges for their mass.

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This is great news. I have a lot of redesigning to do now.