50%+ Power & Integrity Sacrificed for Symmetrical Power...

[MrGrey1]

Pre build as of today.
So I decided to get some numbers and see what the penalty was for wanting a symmetrical ship around a centrally located reactor as compared to the new meta, reactor one end, stabilizer the other...

Top left: 3100 e/sec 177 Integrity vs Bottom left: 6700 e/sec 434 Integrity.
Top right: 4500 e/sec 97 integrity vs Bottom right: 9700 e/sec 549 integrity.
All 100% Stabilization and all equal total dimensions. I didn't fine tune down to the last block but it's 'near as damn it' for demonstration.

Conclusion: Don't even think about building a symmetrical ship with your reactor centrally located in the ship. You will be rofl stomped by meta dong with at least twice your power and integrity. (Assuming ships of approximately equal total ship dimensions.)

I'm trying really hard, (really I am,) to see the advantages of the new system. There's some aspects of it that I love. However, I keep coming back to this one point, and all arguments for or against the new power system are frankly moot beside it. The fact is that there is now only one competitive ship shape. Dong or nothing.

As a guy who likes building flying saucers and half moon shape ships... it really sux. I thought I could maybe get away with it and continue with my flying saucers, hence my testing... but 50%+ penalty? pffffft yeah right, the numbers are worse then I had anticipated... A very sad joke.

MrG.

 

[MacThule]

It's driving me a bit nuts as well. Good experiment.

It should be possible to build a saucer and simply locate the reactor on one rim and the stabilizer on the opposite rim to recoup the max energy from the dimensions. Of course then the reactor stream will be cutting your interior in half, unless you shunt it around the inside rim of the circle, in which case you create a somewhat more vulnerable power stream (honestly not that much more vulnerable, but certainly it would make a ship a bit less robust than one with the power stream closer to the center of the ship, surrounded by more various blocks between itself and the outer hull).

 

[Raisinbat]

Conclusion: Don't even think about building a symmetrical ship with your reactor centrally located in the ship. You will be rofl stomped by meta dong with at least twice your power and integrity. (Assuming ships of approximately equal total ship dimensions.)

Also wondering why you would need a system for detecting system blocks in a ship when the two most critical systems, reactor and stabilizors, will always be in the extremities of the ship

 

[MacThule]

Wait... are we able to split the stabby stream more than once?

If so, your experiment does show how a saucer with a central reactor could work.

Two stabs yield 50% of the power a single stab would at the combined distance of both. It sounds almost like a squared falloff effect (think EM radiation/light).

So if you put the reactor center, then used 4 stabs in a cross shape instead of 2, you'd be back to full dimensional power potential.

Further, if you overlayed a cross of 4 additional stabs, making a sort of union-jack of the streams, it sounds like you could even double the dimensional value of the reactor. At the cost of making the entire outer rim of your ship a stabilizer ring, of course, and needing a central reactor deck across the middle plane of the ship to contain all the purple stab worms, excluding that whole area from use as interior (but leaving it viable for chambers).

You would take on substantial additional mass, but mass is less relevant than it used to be. It could be viable. If one reactor can have 8 stab worms.

Makes me want to give it a try anyway... when I get time later anyway. Stuck on mobile ATM.

 

[JinM]

Out of curriosit: How many system blocks are needed to use up all the power supplied? How much volume of the empty distance between stabilizers and reactor do they take in the above example?

And what's the version number of this pre-build?

 

[Scypio]

Wait... are we able to split the stabby stream more than once?

One stream for each separate group.

 

[MacThule]

Yeah, you can spread a ton of stabs around the rim of your saucer and totally pickup the reactor. You need double the stabs, but again - mass isn't what it used to be so it's not terrible. Sorry I didn't use a disc for this test, I was just doing it quick and dirty to see if it was possible.

 

[kurosawa]

8 power beams 8 times as ugly

 

[MacThule]

8 power beams 8 times as ugly

Yep. Like I said, you'd have to contain them on a Reactor Level (keep them on one plane and wall them off), but by approaching you reactor dimensions as a plane instead of a rod, you can substantially offset design changes. The engine of my car is ugly too. I assume that is why it is in a separate compartment from where I sit.

Not a fan of the stabby mechanic, just saying that it can be done, there are solutions; just turn your reactor into a giant pancake slab, lol...

 

[kurosawa]

you should perhaps clean your engine, they can look quite nice

The engine is separated from the passenger cabin by a simple metal wall with some sound and heat insulation, it's not located 100 meters away connected by a string to the rest of the car

 

[MacThule]

you should perhaps clean your engine, they can look quite nice

The engine is separated from the passenger cabin by a simple metal wall with some sound and heat insulation, it's not located 100 meters away connected by a string to the rest of the car

Right, but the driveshaft runs almost the length of the beast (although that isn't a generator, and I am very much in favor of using other systems to create complexity and keeping basic power simple.

I guess my point is that there may be a value to not conceiving of the reactor as a hyper-elongated barbell that forces gross distortion of ship dimensions. If you instead design your ship planning to install a slab or 2D plane reactor (ie a closed, flat rectangle or disc containing the reactor and a surround of stabilizers safely closed out of sight) instead, you can totally pull down better power supply for a given ship at the cost of additional mass.

It is far from ideal, but in attempting to best exploit thw given mechanic it seems superior to only conceiving & designing the reactor in 1 dinension. The effect from the mass gain of double or quadruple stabilizers is marginal.

 

[MrGrey1]

Yeah, you can spread a ton of stabs around the rim of your saucer and totally pickup the reactor. You need double the stabs, but again - mass isn't what it used to be so it's not terrible. Sorry I didn't use a disc for this test, I was just doing it quick and dirty to see if it was possible.
View attachment 47301

This only emphasis my point as spreading the stabilizers to 4 directions makes it approximately 4 times less efficient.... depending on how much time you are prepared to sink into it to optimize it...

135 power 3360 stabs @ 13500 e/sec Vs 317 power 2538 stabs @ 31 700 e/sec... I didn't fine tune it but you get the picture.
The math only gets worse with every plain you take the stabs out on. If you did a sphere/cube, if I'm not mistaken, it'll be approx 6x worse...

V2 is a one dimensional power system. If you want v2 optimized you build it in one plain, stabs one end, reactors the other end. No argument. No if's ands or buts. Mathematical fact. Period.
v2 does not work for a 3 dimensional building game and power v1 is without question, superior in this regard. This is why I consider V2 as bork bork bork...ed.

EDIT: Also interesting to note that if you surround the power with stabs it borks out the power beam and you don't have an ugly purple tube pulsing through your ship... so that's a plus.... I guess. /s

 

[MacThule]

Brilliant find. May want to report that as a bug - be fun to see them try to fix that!

Also, more bugs = more work. Wonder if it's worth it.

And yeah, the one-dimensional stream blows. It may be a strong suggestion - since they seem set on using these damn thing - to change the way stabs work so that they can be more multi-dimensional. Because really the giant schlong effect is by far the worst thing about them. As an element of engineering complexity they are passable, but so far we aren't finding any real ways to offset the way they incentivize one-dimensional extremes in building.

 

[nulitor]

I like those purple tubes.(looks like a death beam)
I wonder how weird looking would be a ship made of ugly purple tubes but that could be a way to obfuscate a ship with minimal mass.

 

[Scypio]

EDIT: Also interesting to note that if you surround the power with stabs it borks out the power beam and you don't have an ugly purple tube pulsing through your ship... so that's a plus.... I guess. /s

The power dildos goes to the center of each stabilizer group, so if the center of your group goes inside the main reactor, there is no stream.

Also it is to note that if you shoot at your stabilizer group and cut it in half, the reactor still see it as one group and won't produce more streams than needed (might have changed since last tests). Also i'd like to point out that stabs doesn't count for the reactors HP.