TLDR:
- OP's system is likely less creatively restrictive system than the current one, at most it is just restrictive in a different way.
- Due to the incentive to have empty volume because of inter-system interference, we will now have much more room to put rails in our ships without impacting said ships performance.
- People who dont want to or enjoy spending time ship-building can just use those built by others, this will also increase the value of non-builders and building-inclined players for each other. Non-builders will need the building-inclined players to make them cool ships, and the building-inclined players will have more motivation (both economically, socially and creatively) to build cool ships, given the increased demand for their work from the non-builders.
wide lockon missile has larger locking ellipsoid.
Perhaps changing lock-on speed would be better effect for this.
Since the size of the locking ellipsoid does not have a big impact on effectiveness (especially when AI is using them), as well as the fact that there are a bunch of ways to get around it as a restriction. For example: futzing with my FOV, using the third person camera mode (double tap shift iirc) to get around my ships turning speed. If the third person camera was removed to enforce the locking ellipsoid restrictions I would be sad, since I one day hope that this game has different ship control schemes for different ship types (a third person "captain" styled control scheme like EVE Online's for capital ships for instance).
I think all the people waving the pitchforks are being "triggered" by your thread's title (specifically the word mandatory, which i feel is actually inaccurate) rather than it's contents. Its obvious that at least one of them formed an extremely negative bias before he even started reading, evidenced by his saying that he didn't even read the whole thing.
To me it just seems as though OP's idea is just changing one set of restrictions for another. He argues that this should be done because the current set of restrictions have an undeniable bias towards brick ships. He suggests changing these restrictions to remove that bias, so that there is no inherent benefit to brick ships and that they should instead have the inherent consequences one would expect from something that was constructed without care.
OP's new system will have zero restrictions on the aesthetics of ship design that I can see. In fact it would make some of the more boring and time consuming parts of big ship design much easier. Filling in the shell with "sealant" shields for instance, would now be less of a chore and more of a creative challenge. Since I now need to think about whether or not shields would be effective if they were placed here, or there.
Will this new system inform the overall shape of our ships? Certainly, as OP said, inter-system interference would probably inspire more multi-hull designs. I feel that this effect would be as good or bad as the how the behavior of water informs the shape of boats.
The only argument against the system (and indeed, the only argument that could be considered specific to this suggestion), that I have seen in this thread, is that due to it's increased complexity, new players or players who are less interested in ship building will not enjoy these changes.
If I understand OP's suggestion correctly, the effects of system interference would scale with size of the ship, reducing their consequences in smaller ships. If that is the case, then new players might not even notice this effect, until they have been playing for a while and are starting to build bigger ships, which only really introduces a learning curve, which to be honest the present system already has.
In regards to the players who are not interested, or skilled enough to enjoy, aesthetic or complicated (drones/carriers) builds, and would instead prefer to fly ships in combat, mine, or some other non-building activity. This new system would not impact them much either.
Instead of them just slapping systems together as quickly as they can, so they can get the part of the game they feel is boring out of the way and get to the good stuff. They would have a bigger incentive to approach the more build-inclined players with requests for ships. They could also procure a ship from the Community Content, or server catalog. If they dont like to build in the first place, I don't see why they would be particularly attached to using a ship that they themselves created, especially as it stands now, where people are ridiculed or outright punished for building brick ships.
A lot of people are saying that this new system would be too restrictive and would hinder creativity, I strongly disagree. So strongly in fact that i would go so far as to say that the current system is far
More restrictive than the one suggested. While brick ships are the only ones being mentioned, the efficiency bias towards simple dense cubes does not only affect the performance of aesthetic ships vs brick ships. It can have an impact on the performance of aesthetic ships vs other aesthetic ships.
Chances are, that the more time I spend on a ship adding in little details trying my best to make it look as cool as possible, the less effective it will be against a ship of the same mass. If I spend a month working on my ships shell, and pit it against a ship of the same mass that took someone a week or day, chances are that I have much more of my ships mass dedicated to blocks that have no relevance to combat, and in fact have a negative impact on my ships combat performance. My ship would need to have more Ion effect blocks to get the same Resistance as my opponent. My ship will either be slower and less maneuverable than my opponents, or it will be less durable or have less weapons because of all the extra thrusters I need to add. My ship is more likely to require larger box dimensions to fit in the same mass as my opponent, since the more complex a hull is, the less volume it is likely to have, making it have a slower turning speed.
So If I want to use an aesthetic ship and do well in combat I only have one real option. I have to make my ship bigger than my opponents, to offset his advantage in efficiency. A course of action which has even more consequences. I have little practical way to know the mass of my opponents ship at the time I begin the construction of my own. Even if I estimate the sizes correctly, victory is far from guaranteed, even assuming I am not outnumbered and that I am a better pilot, The server could lag (and is far more likely to lag since our ships are larger), and I could loose track of my opponent, and need to spend more time then he would to re-acquire my target, since my turning speed is slower. If I loose, I have lost more blocks than he would have had I won. If I loose, the economic disadvantage I already had just from constructing my ship in the first place is now multiplied.
So in the end, the only incentive to build an aesthetic ship is the entirely subjective (and slightly masochistic) desire to have a pretty ship. The only practical incentive to not building bricks is that some servers have some ambiguous and easily circumvented rules against it.
All of this is going to get even worse too, when rails are added. Since ships with rails are going to end up using much more empty internal volume on spaces to allow things to move around. Heck, that's another point for this system, since it promotes having some separation between systems, it will create a need for all that empty space to put rails in!
Right now it is pretty trivial (at least from a design standpoint) to build a ship specifically to defeat another ship. If I know how much shields they have, I just need to make a weapon that can take them down in one shot. There is no creativity involved, not need for clever tactics or piloting. I just need to spend some time to prepare and I can build a ship that can kill you as soon as my missiles hit you. The only limit to this is the time spent acquiring the blocks needed, and the technological limits on servers/computers being less likely to handle bigger and bigger ships. With OP's system it becomes much more complicated to build a counter-ship like the one I just described.
