- Joined
- Mar 18, 2015
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Okay, lets be perfectly honest.
Every last one of us that builds large ships uses docked power generators. Hell, I've built MINING SHIPS in the past that required docked power generators because I wanted a big, solid beam and the power tax for that many arrays put the beam over 1m e/sec.
We like building big, and when we build big we need a *LOT* of power just for simple things like moving the ship (again, I've had multiple ships that required over 1m/sec just to move).
The current power soft cap is a bit annoying, but I can accept that its there for a good reason, but lets be honest. We're going to build these massive ships one way or another, and whatever tricks get put in to try and regulate that we'll just simply find a way around them.
The lag problems for the docked generators come from the collision detection, having all those extra cores, constantly rendering the power transfer beams, the logic running to keep those beams running, etc. Aka, most of the lag from big ships comes directly from the measures trying to stop big ships from existing in the first place.
So, why don't we just accept that people who want to build big are going to build big, and start trying to optimize for that?
If we're building docked reactors because they're more efficient than piling generators in as giant solid cubes, then why don't we just find a way to make the soft cap apply per array?
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My suggestion? Add a Power Reactor Computer. Link power generator blocks to the computer using the current linking and efficient power generation design philosophy, and call that a reactor. That reactor now has it's own soft cap of 1m e/sec. Need more than that? Plop down another reactor computer, and build another reactor.
Then to help balance it, simply put in a mechanic that says secondary reactors don't scale as well as primary ones. Maybe secondary reactors only produce power at 2/3rds the rate of a primary reactor, or whatever would end up replicating the current power cost for running the beams.
If we then say a ship's core counts as a kind of reactor computer that doesn't have the tax, then smaller ships can just build their power generators the way we do now, and no one would ever see anything different. Big builders could then plop down reactor computers and build their own secondary reactors like we do docked reactors today, only there would be no collision detection, no beam lag, no logic lag because they would all be integrated directly into the ship.
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People aren't going to stop building big for any reason short of an unchangeable server hard cap on ship sizes, so instead of fighting that, why don't we just accept it and plan around it?
Every last one of us that builds large ships uses docked power generators. Hell, I've built MINING SHIPS in the past that required docked power generators because I wanted a big, solid beam and the power tax for that many arrays put the beam over 1m e/sec.
We like building big, and when we build big we need a *LOT* of power just for simple things like moving the ship (again, I've had multiple ships that required over 1m/sec just to move).
The current power soft cap is a bit annoying, but I can accept that its there for a good reason, but lets be honest. We're going to build these massive ships one way or another, and whatever tricks get put in to try and regulate that we'll just simply find a way around them.
The lag problems for the docked generators come from the collision detection, having all those extra cores, constantly rendering the power transfer beams, the logic running to keep those beams running, etc. Aka, most of the lag from big ships comes directly from the measures trying to stop big ships from existing in the first place.
So, why don't we just accept that people who want to build big are going to build big, and start trying to optimize for that?
If we're building docked reactors because they're more efficient than piling generators in as giant solid cubes, then why don't we just find a way to make the soft cap apply per array?
---
My suggestion? Add a Power Reactor Computer. Link power generator blocks to the computer using the current linking and efficient power generation design philosophy, and call that a reactor. That reactor now has it's own soft cap of 1m e/sec. Need more than that? Plop down another reactor computer, and build another reactor.
Then to help balance it, simply put in a mechanic that says secondary reactors don't scale as well as primary ones. Maybe secondary reactors only produce power at 2/3rds the rate of a primary reactor, or whatever would end up replicating the current power cost for running the beams.
If we then say a ship's core counts as a kind of reactor computer that doesn't have the tax, then smaller ships can just build their power generators the way we do now, and no one would ever see anything different. Big builders could then plop down reactor computers and build their own secondary reactors like we do docked reactors today, only there would be no collision detection, no beam lag, no logic lag because they would all be integrated directly into the ship.
---
People aren't going to stop building big for any reason short of an unchangeable server hard cap on ship sizes, so instead of fighting that, why don't we just accept it and plan around it?
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