Hull blocks as more than decoration

[Xiphon]

I'm sure people have noticed that hull blocks are pretty useless except for making your ship look a certain way. If you are building for multiplayer, totally useless.
I spent some time playing around with block modding, and came up with some ideas on how to make hull blocks into more than just dead weight.
1. I played around with hull armor and hitpoint values, and found that for the current strength of the anti-matter cannon, a standart hull with double the hitpoints and armor around 60, and armored hull with 350 - 400 hp and armor around 80 would make them a bit more useful. Currently standard hull is barely more durable than power blocks.
2. Making power blocks explode with a small radius damage perhaps 50% of the time when destroyed would make protecting them much more important as a ship with loads of them packed close together could self destruct pretty spectacularly if a few went off at the same time.
3. Hulls should be able to absorb some damage taken by non-hull blocks next to them. Of course this destroys the hull faster, but creating bulkheads to slow damage from reaching vital systems would be strategically important as it is in real ship building.

 

[Calbiri]

The first 1 I agree with, but that\'s simply a balance issue and can be adjusted later, the second and third ideas, I love! Explody power blocks, awesome!

 

[Kwahu]

As another idea, the damage model could be changed so that instead of all weapons doing 100% damage to shields regardless of where the laser or missile hits, the armor value of the underlying block could modify the damage that the shield takes. For example, a laser blast that hits a power block does it\'s full damage to the shields health pool, whereas a laser blast that hits a hardened hull does half damage to the shield. This also adds another element of strategy/skill to combat, as hitting exposed weak points like engines would do more damage even on a ship with its shields up.
As a way of hand-waving variable shield damage away, you could say that armored blocks are designed to absorb and disperse some of the energy that strikes the shield above them.

 

[taseBAblewett]

exploding power modual coupled with the frame idea, it sounds like we are on the way to gaming greatness.

 

[Calbiri]

Nice idea kwanu!

 

[Marduk]

I concur. Exploding power blocks (with the resultant blast being proportional to the energy output of the cluster) would be awesome. Also hull blocks do need some love - the ability to absorb damage from non-hull neighbors would also be a perk to using them.