Option to designate various parts of the ship as its own

[Snk]

(Sorry for all the suggestions, guys. I've been traveling so I had a lot of time to think.)
It would be nice if you could designate a part of the ship as it's own. Technically, it's the same vessel, but the area selected would be cut off-however, you could choose to keep the shielding and you could link weapons from other parts of the ship. This wouldn't affect current builds, as it would be completely optional. This way, you could design separate power designs for a certain weapon or engine, or have people/AI run around and zap things with power pistols.
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tl;dr: Giving parts of the ship it's own power, while allowing it to keep shielding and part of your ships weapon systems

 

[FunnyBunny14]

That would basically make the soft-cap useless. Seperate systems OK, but they will all share the power.

 

[Snk]

What is a soft cap?

 

[Megacrafter127]

What is a soft cap?

A soft cap is a measurement taken to limit the growth of a certain value. It is still possible to grow beyond that limit, but it gets harder with every unit.

 

[Snk]

Thank you. It wouldn't make the soft cap useless at all, because the all the power of the segments would be added together to determine whether or not it would hit the cap.

 

[jayman38]

Now that we have chained docking, it would be great if the dock had a series of selectable options on what to share and in what direction.

Power Example: a power generation system docked deep inside the host ship is set to not share shields, but shares energy to the mothership. The direction is important, because if all the energy blocks in this system is destroyed, we don't want it to suck energy from the rest of the ship. It would need to simply shut down.

Hull example: A hull section docked on the surface is set to share shields, but not energy. This is pretty much the only use case for sharing shields with the host, but you could share shields with an internal system that contains the ship core for a second layer of shields under the first. The second set of shields would be important if there is an enemy ship or astronaut boarding marine that has somehow penetrated the ship, such as activating a plex door, traveling inside, and shutting the plex door behind them again. On second thought, don't the primary shields basically cover all ship surfaces, inside and out? In that case, shield sharing would be on by default. You might turn off shield-sharing in role-play circumstances. Or maybe in a pirate "boss" ship, where you have to dig down with your weapons until you reach the unshielded core. Or maybe a death-star type ship, where if you hit a 2-meter wamp-rat-sized hole, you can hit the unshielded core, bypassing shields.

Weapon example: A weapon system is set to share weapons and energy. Then when docked to a place where its weapon blocks are next to the host ship's weapon blocks of the same type, they become part of the same weapon group for greater power. Alternatively, turn off weapon sharing to have two separate weapon systems right next to each other.