nightrune It's in your best interests to read this and communicate to the rest of Schine.
No, this change is certainly dumbing it down - in fact, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. The old power system was quite simple and allowed flexibility for efficient design in virtually any hull - the baseline "efficient" 2mil e/s generation, a set of long lines of reactors in a "checkerboard" pattern (IE no line was adjacent to another) was dead simple and effortless to make. If you understood what exactly was making your power generation more efficient per block (increasing the box dimensions of a reactor group with the fewest amount of blocks possible, EG straight lines in the X Y and Z directions or one very long one in one direction) you could get your 2mil e/s in a very, very small amount of mass. I think mathematically the minimum was well under 200 mass.
This was a problem. While it supported aesthetics-focused builders by allowing you to fit basically however much power you wanted into virtually any ship, it also made meta PVP builders' lives fairly simple and fairly easily. The most efficient setups for power were grids of power lines not connected whatsoever. Such a ship is nearly impossible to hit and while its box dimensions (what you're basing your power generation on now) are extreme, often quite similar to a ship well over 10x or 20x its size, its mass was not at all comparable - I have a 5k mass ship whose box dimensions are similar if not larger than a 150k mass ship. See the mismatch? Basing your efficiency on geometry such as this is a mistake in a three dimensional game where utilized internal volume (in layman's terms, weight/mass) is far more important than the dimensions of the ship thereof. I had hoped Schine had identified this problem and the new power system would address and fix this.
It did not. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. Not only does this suffer from precisely the same problems the old system did, it exacerbates them - instead of having to worry only about the distance between two points three times per reactor group, I only have to worry about the distance between two points once. My work load for building power on ships has been decreased by 66%, which is quite sizeable. On top of that, it now punishes aesthetic builders - as mentioned, numerous examples exist now of people being unable to even utilize their old ships even with the changes to power costs.
Edymnion mentions that expecting to refit should not be a problem - it isn't, what
is a problem is having to trash ship hulls because they mathematically and geometrically cannot support their previous systems; this is called a downgrade, not an upgrade or even a sidegrade.
Contrary to popular belief here, myself and other "meta PVP" builders do care about the community - this update makes our lives vastly easier, but at the expense of everyone else, which is most certainly a problem and like any change that negatively affects the game, we are going to talk about it until your eyes get sore.
FlyingDebris was able to make a testbed ship that did 14,000,000,000 (billion - count those zeroes) damage at ~300k mass within about 30 minutes of playing the dev build. No legitimately built ship in StarMade has 14,000,000,000 shields, ion or not - regardless of size. If this is working as intended for Schine, this ship has already sank and found a comfy spot on the sea floor.
I said this before when this was merely a proposal, but if Schine is going to ignore me and people like me, we'll just utilize your system to the best of our abilities, and then perhaps instead of us you'll listen to the people who complain about us. This isn't about nuance, this is about absolutely obliterating any semblance of balance you once had in ship design. If there was a divide between meta PVP ships and RP ships, it's turned into a god damn cosmic gulf between galaxies now. I cannot emphasize how much of a mistake this is for keeping 98% of your player base satisfied and happy.
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T2607 Inner Ship Remotes not working in the Dev build