Rejected Piping your ships - connect everything using pipes

[taisong]

I propose to make a power pipe to send power to everything in a ship.

Power grids
I think it is safe to imagine pipes from the minecraft mod IndustrialCraft2, or BuildCraft pipes. They are made to take power to where it is needed.
They have low block health and a slight amount of reactor health.

There are no restrictions to how many pipes a system can connect to, but it is not possible to pass power through other system blocks.

It can be severed by enemy attacks. Beam weapons will be much more powerful with this implemented...

And this is the picture i drew to explain a little more.

I have excluded reactor stabilizers because I thought it is not really necessary to power them.
My headcanon for stabilizers are that they are absorbing fluxes of power coming out of the reactor and making it their own power!

Problems and solutions

Big ships big problems
Now, this system might be easy for players building fighters, but for those who are building titans might have a hard time connecting all the systems together. This is the problem that happened on the old power system, and it might happen again.
To counter this, I think a block variant of the pipes (which can be in any diameter) can be implemented. It has no direction, which will make it easier for titan builders to mass-build using this block.
This block consumes massive amounts of power when the reactor is not large enough. It is strictly for larger ships which utilizes more power.

Filling entire ships with pipes
I want to discourage players from doing "cant connect, Imma fill the whole ship with dis". It will cause players to blindly fill ships with pipes, which makes the whole "severing" mechanic irrelevant.
So, I will make pipes quite heavier than any other blocks to discourage overuse of pipes. I may give a little more restraints, but that is for another time.

 

[MeRobo]

A problem you didn't address: This is creatively limitting for ships with floating, not connected parts hold in place by SpaceMagic™ or other ships with seperated interior spaces

 

[Criss]

This is not likely to happen. Players build an assortment of shapes, and some of their designs would be ruined by forcing pipes onto everything. Also, were this to happen, we would use blocks, not pipes, as those are a very specific decorative block that we shouldn't force everyone to use.

 

[Lecic]

It can be severed by enemy attacks. Beam weapons will be much more powerful with this implemented...

Beam weapons are already on par with cannons and missiles ever since their armor penetration was fixed. Also, this would not make beams any better. They would still be a hitscan cannon analogue.

I think this might be good as a config option to try out. It could be fun. Maybe not as the default, though.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

The connectivity side could operate the same way logic does without physical pipes. Using the way logic is connected it would give very little interference with existing designs.

Having physical connected power distribution makes logical sense in the real world, but this is just a game with pseudo reality compensated by magical fudging to make things work.

It could have a large rework impact on the blueprint files. Although, we already have logic/pipes embedded so it could me simple by extending logic with power distribution piping and logic.

Perhaps make it an additional function of the logic blocks.

I guess wireless power would need to be a thing, but then this would be limited by interference, distance mystical Starmade magic. Like have the transfer work the same as magical shield/power transfer does through the docker.