Yeah, but really, no!
If you want to have any sort of "heat box", there needs to be a reason for it. For example, if there were multiple reactor types, you might have one that produces radiation, and thus you would probably want to keep your astronaut away from it (or die while near it), so by design you would ensure your astronaut areas are far enough from the reactor. Or another reactor might be very efficient, but blow up when it gets below a certain percentage of HP.. so you probably would want to have some space (and maybe armor) between it and other critical systems. Other reactor types might create "interference," so they interfere with computer systems if too close.. and the larger they get the more they interfere, causing intermittant system outages. But, then you might have "hydrogen fuel cells," which cause 0 radation and do not explode if killed, but they don't scale well, so they would really only be useful for smaller ships or perhaps a ship that does not want to take on the extra risk involved with the other kinds of reactors.
So, spacing requirements in-and-of-itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but it MUST make sense, and there MUST be CHOICES. Forcing players to follow arbitrary spacing requirements only leads to nonsensical, weird things like the new meta becoming two part ships, where you get a giant glob of stabilizers 1,000 meters behind the main ship.
Also consider in the new system what happens if you figure out that you need a little bit more power to power those turrets you have attached? But then you add the power reactors needed.. but then your stabilizers are too close so you have to move ALL your stabilizers back further and completely redo the back half of the ship to keep it looking decent.. And.. why?! Arbitrary reasons? But if you COULD have more than 1 power reactor and the effects of putting them too close together is manageable, then this ceases to be a problem. For example, perhaps radiation could be shielded by lead shielding. Or perhaps a nuclear reactor can be simply made larger.. but this increases the risk of massive explosions if it becomes damaged. Or maybe the person just adds a few more power reactors in another section of the ship to make up the difference. It'd be up to the player then to decide what risk factors they are willing to make in order to reach their desired power generation.
Having a simple, FORCED spacing requirement is not good for anybody. FORCING players to only make use of 1 reactor is NOT at all realistic. Why the heck would any ship only run 1 power reactor at a time? It makes no sense! PvPers, not RP builders, not explorers.. nobody would willingly choose to shut down all reactors but one on their ship in any universe. This new system will force ship designs that look really bad, with giant globs of power reactors and giant globs of highly separated stabilizers. The new meta will be 2-part ships with a cloud of stabilizers somewhere off to the back/side/top/bottom.
In any case, there were definitely problems with how the old power system worked. The lines and diagonals were just annoying and didn't make any sense, but replacing it with a system that makes EVEN LESS sense does NOT make sense either. The replacement system should should add new functionality and VARIABILITY for server owners. The current proposed system DOES add more variability in terms of the "tech point" upgrade paths with the chamber system, but the underlying power replacement actually has LESS variability allowed than the old system and more FORCED requirements! Think of it this way, with the current, existing system, we ALREADY could have set power reactors to have a flat amount given or use a scale. We already could have power aux blocks have a different scale with explosions as a potential side effect from being damaged. And we could place these blocks wherever we wanted. The only problem was that the way the game configs forced scaling was bad (using the dimensions of each array of power blocks). This forced ships to adhere to long lines and diagonals to get the most power out of the power reactors, but at least they could choose where they put these power strips. The other weakness of this system was how it transferred power across docks and had soft-caps set, which encouraged using docked power strips to get the most power for the block count and weight. This, in turn encouraged players to build ships with high entity counts, which lagged servers like crazy as the ships had their docks blown off and bounding box calculations brought the servers and clients to their knees.
But, in any event, the new system FORCES a flat amount of energy generation per block with 0 scaling allowed. The difference is that it requires more blocks for common ship sizes to achieve optimal power and there is 0 diminishing returns with regard to block count. The only "diminishing return" is the requirement on ship dimension, which is not really any sort of debuff to large ships AT ALL, because they are already too big to move much or turn anyhow. Forcing titan ships to be EVEN LARGER is NOT a good goal! It just isn't! Players are not going to suddenly decide to build smaller because they don't want to build bigger. They will simply build crazily long ships for their titans and cause even more server lag. We do not need to be forcing titan ships to be 3,000 blocks long! That is utter madness!
Here is what I propose in the interim:
1. Add power scaling to Power 2.0 in the form of a log function. Give it a lot less of a scale up and a lot less of a scale down per grouping. This is to introduce diminishing returns. DO NOT HAVE THIS APPLY TO THE TOTAL SHIP POWER, BUT RATHER ONLY TO EACH POWER GROUPING. <-- This is so that it does not encourage players to use docked power reactors.
2. Give values that can be set so that reactors up to a certain size have a 0% chance of blowing up when damaged. For example, one value may be a chance modifier on damage. So if that individual reactor is at 90% health, perhaps it has a 5% chance of damage causing secondary explosions. If at 50% health, there is a 25% chance. This would be an inverse log function, based on the reactor health. This would need to be balanced, of course, but I feel it would be a lot more realistic.
3. Remove the space requirement from stabilizers or invert it. Make stabilizers more expensive than reactors. Then increase the "free stabilizers" so that ship up to around the 10 to 20k weight range do not need them at all. This would introduce diminishing returns on investment, and would encourage people to build smaller ships, rather than massive titans since a titan would be more expensive block for block in comparison.
4. Allow entities to share power with one another, but with one caveat, there is power loss when transferring through a basic rail. Perhaps 20% is lost per rail. Though turrets would suffer 0 power loss. This is realistic because really a basic rail is a multi-function sort of block, whereas a turret rail is designed for turrets.
The reasoning here for these changes is to allow the most freedom in building, but introducing DIFFERENT diminishing returns for building larger, more complicated structures. It would also discourage using multiple entities such as power strips to power turrets. Instead you'd probably want to put the power for each turret on the turret itself, but you would still have the option to have the main ship power them.
But aside from power, more options for AI need to be included. Such as options to NOT focus fire for turrets! This is one of the main reasons players must build a crazy amount of turrets to get a good spread of damage to their enemies. This makes very laggy ship builds the most powerful ship builds. It's not just power that re-enforces the laggy build meta. All things must be considered when looking at the big picture.
Well, that's all the time I have for now. I gotta go make some money.
