Space Hulks and Modular Design

[BeefBacon]

So I was sitting on the toilet and while I was squeezing out yesterday's bacon sandwich I had an idea. Wouldn't it be neat if spaceship designs could be modular? That is to say you create, say, a generator section, engines and a weapons array as different ships. You can then fuse these ships together to create one big ship.

At the minute you can dock a block of power generators to a ship and then the mothership will get the power from that block of generators. I propose that all modules should be controllable from the mothership - not necessarily from regular docking, but perhaps from some other docking mechanism that allows full control from the mothership.

So you could have a set of pre-fabricated modular sections for your ship and sort of glue them together to make one big ship. You could design each section to connect with any other sections so you can make a ship as big and as hideous as you want.

It'd also be interesting if this concept gave birth to space hulks. In the Warhammer 40K universe, space hulks are a large number of ships that have been drawn together into one mass. Could be cool if players could find some floating wreck and assimilate it, as it were, into their own ship. Doing so would have its pros and cons, of course.

I'm sure that a number of limits would have to be set in place in order to make it not game-breaking, but what do you guys think, especially in regards to the modular design?

 

[NeonSturm]

So you could have a set of pre-fabricated modular sections for your ship and sort of glue them together to make one big ship


I guess this is the big problem. I guess Schema will think it limits creativity (see copy+paste threads).

BTW: I think it will come sooner or later in a tool like SMEdit, or community will go to Space Engineers / Untold Universe, etc if there are too many artificial limits...



I see problems in how many blueprints a player can have per server (maybe this is the right place for Schema to apply limits on modules?) and the clutter it creats in the available tab.

Especially because all is \"[ ] Faction, [X] Others, [ ]Faction Home\" by default, not \"[X] Faction, [ ] Others, [X]Only at Faction Home\" (to avoid spam).



I would say modules count toward ships. Shield limits, power limits, etc? Module-AIs would be disabled while ships are docked onto \"module-dock-blocks\" btw and it would be stupid to require enhancers for this, as it counts to the ship\'s shield/power limits and would not break balance if you only require 1 connector spot defined by a block.