Right now there is 0 advantage to having interior space.
Right. Exactly. This is Step 1.
Now. How to fix?
Probably crew quarters is the only way. You're right there, IMO.
Crew could have replaced this entire systems overhaul, to be perfectly honest. Absolutely nothing accomplished in it couldn't have been integrated into a crew quarters system, with "crew chambers" instead of "tech chambers."
Lecic is 100% right: As implemented, stabilizers are pure red tape. You
must add some, so you do, and that's it. They can easily be put on a rod or island to pervert the intended design constraint, and they do absolutely nothing functional; you're just penalized for not having them. Somewhere. We might get something near the (apparently) intended design constraint by requiring the stabilizers to be connected to the reactor by conduits, particularly because conduit redundancy and spacing and insulation of the redundant systems could encourage a substantial bulk-up, but even then...
their entire function is to force a design choice. So let's talk about how to force design choices.
Repeatedly, for years now, crew appears the best solution to a number of problems with the meta. Let's move on to that already and stop repeatedly trying to solve the problems by messing with the same primary systems that created the problems in the first place. The solution requires the nuance of secondary and tertiary systems. Stabilizers are not the tool for that job. As demonstrated.
NOTE: Even before/without ever actually implementing functional crew toons, AI, crew recruition, survival, XP, etc, etc, etc, just forcing
crew spaces would do the job. Crew spaces would have to be enclosed, connected to each other, and adjacent to vital systems. Geometas gone, instantly, because every component would need to be adjacent to an 'empty' crew space that was connected to all the other crew spaces by a tube ("hall") at least large enough for a toon to move down, even before looking at notions of insulation, pressure, life support, etc. You'll have to armor those halls and quarters to prevent losing function from those spaces as well.
Why even try to passive-aggressively force empty space? What was this stabilizer affair all about? Just demand that space outright, if that's the goal!
Call it crew or whatever, but if the goal is to force space,
just do that. Stabilizers (as implemented) don't have the desired effect, and it would probably take another year to make them do so (if even possible) rather than moving on to a tertiary dynamic (ie crew quarters) that would naturally accomplish the goal by
directly forcing the enclosed, interconnected spaces.
Crew toons aren't even needed!
Skip toons. Skip the new AI routines. Just implement crew
quarters; designated functions for designated, enclosed spaces adjacent to systems & components. Access passages. Berthings. Control rooms. Server rooms. Medical bays. That's how the entire new tech-tree system should have been integrated in the first place, not as an appendix to a new power dynamic that took half a year to implement.
tl;dr - Ditch the stabilizers. Convert the "tech chambers" to non-colloidal "crew chambers" that only function if fully enclosed by hull and connected by hallway conduits to necessary berthing and command chambers, and have a minimum of direct adjacency to the relevant primary system or component.
Done.
Sorted.
Figure out actual crew-toons and stuff whenever. It's just icing. The crew spaces can perform the roles of the chambers and simultaneously require connectivity in builds and additional interior space as well as exterior hull, if so coded, without ever spawning a toon once.
LATE EDIT: In the spirit of fairness to our devs and
schema in particular, I am going to correct something from the top of this post. They made it very clear that the power changes would solve a lot of code issues that were preventing them from streamlining other parts of the game. As many of us know, code can get super messy when things you didn't originally plan for start being implemented. Yes, the solution reduced the build meta to a pile of rubble. For now. It's still pre-release though, and nothing that was done cannot be balanced after the fact. Hopefully the changes to these core mechanics
did actually do
something behind the scenes that will allow the team more power to make changes throughout the game. Crew spaces will fix a lot though, and chambers now do all the things we would expect crew to do (various buffs and capability expansions to the ships), so I do think that migrating chambers away from a concept of some mysterious brick nominally connected to the reactor (but not really) to something more like a network of interconnected chambers symbolizing crew space, maybe eventually becoming crew space, would be of great benefit.
