Ship design efficiency limitations

[Otto von Hartvich]

As an introduction I want to point out the fact that the way cloaking, energy generation and hulling works, essentially means that the most efficient shape size is a cube (or sphere but being square voxels ...). So ship efficiency with shapes with a higher surface area,leading to more mass on hulling and therefore requiring more engines, goes down and they are weaker than cuboids.

I realize that the loss in effiency can be balanced by reducing the area facing the enemy for example, but I would welcome some additions that would benefit ships with wings or some other "appendages" and these are my suggestions:

1. Have antimatter guns work in such a way the longer the harder they hit but the slower they reload and the wider or higher they are, the faster they reload. Have this work in such a way that if you make a cube of antimatter guns the strenght would be the same as a grouping of guns 1/8 the volume and and the same side length of the cube
2. A cooling system/heat:

• power unit/block(or mass) ratio would determine how much heat there is per block and if the more heat there is per block the weaker all the systems are.
• have the weakening effect happen in an exponential manner
• possibly introduce a ? cooling block ?
• note: I suppose a system based off of surface area would be the most logical but I don't know how demanding it would be for the computer or how performance demanding it would be.

3. Have a system like the one with antimatter guns work for engines too (this would eliminate the need for vectoring engines)

 

[Stakhanov]

This has all been discussed before. See http://star-made.org/content/cloakjammer-and-hulls , http://star-made.org/content/heat-venting-mechanic and various other topics.