Besides, the penalty from suboptimal builds comes mostly from the increased mass cost of passive effects; solving THAT is the much more sensible solution.
...and thrust, I mean, passive effects "only" amounts to 5~15% of a ship's mass depending on how many you're running, thrust however amounts to 15~35% of a ship's mass... otherwise, agreed.
By the way, I'm not convinced by them trying to address this issue by making passive effects depend on the reactor size. Not only passive effects' mass is often negligible compared to thrusters' mass (so the difference is likely to be nearly anecdotic), but if they applied the same "solution" to thrusters they'd run into the problem of costless armour (or ablative armour if they manage to take into account hull/armour/etc...). Not to mention reactor size is likely to grow with the thruster size to provide them with enough power... so if the chambers' size depends on the reactor size which in turn depends on thrusters' size which grows with that extra useless vanity mass... well, that's merely replacing a direct dependency by an indirect one.
Current system punishes empty space by <3% efficiency.
New system punishes full systems by 80%+
While I'd agree on the order of magnitude of the 3%, those are completely arbitrary numbers. And whether that proposal will "punish full systems" or not is highly dependent on the numbers they'll choose.
There is literally no performance difference between having empty space inside your ship or having it outside. It doesn't matter if you have some empty space unless its like 80% of a small ship[...]
I wouldn't say literally, but yup agreed.
How is a ship with 1% of it's mass in power generation going to function? Power generation needs to be spread further and further away but needs to stay the same % of mass for the ship to be functional; this wont work because the space between the ships grow faster than the space the reactor takes up = you're forced to have empty space on your ship.
Well, it's true that if we assume all power costs to be linear, since a ship's volume tend to grow as a cubic function of its largest dimension, you'll need power proportional to a cubic function of its largest dimension, therefore, your reactor will be within a constant factor of a cubic function as well (since the yields are said to be linear). However, I don't think they said anything about the distance formula, maybe it's something like C*n^(1/3) where C is an arbitrary constant, and n is the largest reactor's number of blocks (I think that's what Lecic is referring to). Maybe I missed a part where they suggested the distance function would be linear though (in which case, yeah, you're right).
Or you can welcome the new meta ships that's going to be two seperate hulls floating a few hundred meters apart and able to have as much power generation as they like.
That indeed seems like a possible way to abuse their reactor/stabilizer mechanic, whether that'll actually be interesting depends on the numbers though.
Honestly, this proposal doesn't sound to me like something which inherently punishes system-heavy ships.
That said, I still am quite skeptical about it as I don't see it really improving things that much either.
[edit: removed a leftover half-finished parenthesis]
