Modular Shipbuilding

[Nosajimiki]

I personally don't like the idea of going back to docked power, regardless of whether they detach when disconnected. The reason being that you can then take 10 ships of the same size and give them vastly different amounts of power, which is true in both power 1.0 and 2.0.

1.0 was obvious: soft cap. By adding docked power you could bypass the soft cap in a pretty broken/exploitable manner.
2.0 is a little less easy to see but still pretty obvious: reactor-stabilizer interactions. There are two ways in which this plays out:
-With the maximum reactor blocks needed before stabilizers are needed being 10, the player could then take a bunch of cookie-cutter docks with 10 reactor blocks and dock them to a single ship, giving the player limitless power with no need for stabilizers
-This is a little strange, but it works in theory. By taking entities, giving them a big reactor group and putting a big group of stabilizers across from it with a bunch of empty space in between, the player can then link them together in succession occupying the empty space between reactor and stabilizer group with the next entity in line, creating a gummy worm-style ship (with alternating segments of reactors and stabilizers), which pretty much bypasses and exploits the required distance between stabilizers and reactors.

In either scenario, docked power gets pretty ugly. I think the intent of the docked entities patch is not for the purpose of reintroducing docked power, but for preventing server lag that would come when a turret is blown to bits and half the ship, which was composed of 20 different docked entities, floats away as a result.

1.0 actually addressed docked power in a very ballened way, where docking it was more regen efficient, but limited as to how you could use it. If you centralized your power you got less total regen, but a much more efficient capacitor, such that a well designed ship could re-allocate power to be more efficient. For example, the same power center could power your jammer as you sneak up on someone, then your Ion Lances as you take down their shields, then Block Damage weapons at the tail end of the fight. This meant you could do the same work with 1/2 the regen, but it took better piloting to maintain power stability. Docked power was 100% dedicated to the turrets that were mounted to it; so, it traded of versatility for raw power.

The only thing that was really "broken" with docked power was beam/cannon/od and cannon/cannon/od weapons because they did not need large dedicated capacitors like more alpha turrets did, but even these could be easily countered by a good range control focused ship. (and boy did I smoke my fair share of those :D)

In 2.0, offloading docked power to your turrets could be seen as exploitative, but it is not. It would just be another possible trade-off.

Drawbacks would include:

1. Less reactor HP on your main ship
2. Less versatility of power allocation means you need way more total reactors
3. More mass in your turrets = more rail mass enhancement needed.

The gains would be:

1. Power stable turrets regardless of what the rest of your ships is doing
2. Give you something to put in all those now useless turret bases. (prevents stupid looking turrets)
3. Main ship needs fewer chamber blocks

This is not an exploit so much as it is a design trade-off and this is the exact kind of thing veteran builders keep complaining about there not being in power 2.0. Chambers are not a DESIGN tradeoff.

 

[Skwidz]

What about docking a ship to one for making larger ship things instead of turrets/whatever? I've been wanting to make a "splitter ship" but the main ship has to have a very large reactor to support the systems of the docked one. With the current docking system the largest reactor gets to power everything. Because battle damage happens and docked entities don't exactly produce their own thrust a way to turn off the docked power distribution for one and/or all docks would be nice. This way the main ship would still have to have a stronger reactor and can inherit the dock's thrusters so the thing can move and the dock can provide power to its own systems with its own reactor like what Edymnion mentioned in post #20.

I'm not sure why I mentioned the thruster inheritance. Maybe that could be used for balancing or something.