For an actual ship (rather than theoretical designs for no practical value other than design challenge), attempting to use a \"pattern\" is just plain silly.
For a simple example, at the moment I\'m rebuilding my carrier. It\'s got a a large array of salvage cannons at the top (for eating enitre asteroids/stations/planets). Because I want a 2*130 grid of beams I end up with long lines of cannons that can\'t/don\'t touch, which means lots of long gaps to fill in. About half of these gaps I\'ve filled with power generators (the rest are shields and thrusters); and this gave me well over 1 million e/sec power regen.
For another example, yesterday I built a small repair ship. It\'s another grid (of astrotechnobeams this time) with another bunch of gaps to fill in.
For another example, to get good thrust out of my previous carrier I had long lines of thrusters, that couldn\'t touch.
Basically, the best way to design a power generator is to forget about designing a power generator and just slap generators in to fill in gaps. The space consumed by power tanks, weapons, shields, thrusters, etc will far exceed the space consumed by power generators; therefore space consumed by power generators is mostly irrelevant and can be treated as an afterthought.
Note 1: Gaps (especially for larger ships) can cause major graphics performance issues; because the game renders all the hidden/inner textures. This is actually the reason why I\'m rebuilding my carrier - for the old carrier, whenever the camera was pointing in the direction of that huge array of salvage cannons the frame rate would drop to about 5 frames per second because I didn\'t fill in the gaps.
Note 2: Once you get to the magic \"about 1 million e/sec\" regen rate you stop getting any bonus from special layouts. This means that once you\'ve filled in your gaps and got well over 1 million e/sec anyway; a solid cube of power generators is as good as anything else if you need more regen.
Note 3:You should have more capacity than regen. If you\'ve got 1 million e/sec regen, then you need enough \"SD pc1.3 Power Tanks\" to store 1 million power or more and if you\'ve got no power tanks most of your regen will be wasted.