I've started to play a lot more with creative inventory to test out all of these different factors that go into making a ship. And by far the one that has me the most puzzled is structural integrity. I've looked for help on the wiki but it seems outdated on that topic. Can someone at least begin to explain? My main problem is not knowing what causes integrity to decrease and increase.
Crashmaster
I got N64 problems but a bitch ain't one
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Cubes are good, lines are bad. It has to do with exposed faces in groups of like blocks. Also it's broken.
Good luck.
Good luck.
And while I'm at it, is there something broken with the docking system too? I'm attempting to dock a single ship core (With a rail docker of course) to a Basic Rail but it's telling me there isn't enough space despite it being 20 meters above ground.
Is the rail docker upside down? The yellow arrow should be facing toward the dock. This happened to me a lot.
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As Crashmaster stated, the current Integrity system heavily favors cube shapes in order to maintain positive integrity. As you likely already know, negative integrity means systems will blow up if you are hit by a weapon (even if your shields are up).
In regards to how to handle things like salvage beams, 20 blocks in a line is the max you should do (not only for good mining power, but over 20 means a very high possibility of negative integrity). Additionally, integrity is based on grouped modules, not the overall module count. This means that, for example, if you have a waffle array of salvage modules with 20 modules per line, that means each line of modules has it's own integrity calculation, as long as none of them are connected to each other.
And, yes. Integrity is very broken right now. People can't even make Warp gates because of integrity the way it is.
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Says a lot about how much they have thought this update out, doesnt it?
How integrity works: for each block that's part of the structure, determine how many faces it shares with other blocks in that structure to get a number from 0 to 6. Use that number in a table to find a score (which will be negative when the number of faces is small). The sum of these scores is the integrity.
If the integrity is a negative value, then the structure will be fragile (easy to blow up) and it makes no difference how negative it is (-1 is the same as -99999).
If the integrity is a positive value, then the structure won't be fragile and it makes no difference how positive it is (+1 is the same as +99999).
This means that a cube is fine, but a thin stick with a blob on one end is just as good, and 3 * 3 * 200 bar is also just as good. There is no reason at all to prefer cubes.
If the integrity is a negative value, then the structure will be fragile (easy to blow up) and it makes no difference how negative it is (-1 is the same as -99999).
If the integrity is a positive value, then the structure won't be fragile and it makes no difference how positive it is (+1 is the same as +99999).
This means that a cube is fine, but a thin stick with a blob on one end is just as good, and 3 * 3 * 200 bar is also just as good. There is no reason at all to prefer cubes.
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Not exactly. If you have +1 integrity, and you get shot anywhere, you will drop to negative integrity, and begin to chain react. The reason for cubes is to create a buffer where-by a system can sustain damage that increases its surface area to volume without going critical. Damage almost always decreases integrity; so, cubes is like armor against this. Also, 3*3*200 is even worse than 1*1*1800 because it is skinny enough to chain react, but thick enough to take significant damage per explosion.
Oh, yeah - once your shields are down and your hull no longer effective, a cube might let you live for a whole 4 milliseconds longer!
Skwidz
turtleStew
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Yep, definitely. I shot one missile at a planetary base once and a chain reaction explosion kept happening until several minutes later. It looked like their reactor or shields weren't structurally sound because they had a spherical reactor and maybe shield sticks. It's best to build a giant box or some smaller boxes spaced out for the most integrity. I think the closest two system groups of the same type can be is three blocks. I'm not sure if that applies to thrusters too or if they share one integrity pool still.
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This is power 1.0 thinking. rHP means you can mitigate TONS of damage into you systems blocks because you don't have to worry about structuralHP, and new shields mean you can't regen tank. While I cant predict for sure how the weapons update will reballence this, under current systems, about 3/4 of the damage it takes to kill a ship is system damage when arranged in cubes. This number goes up or down a lot based on their integrity and how well you place them to insulate your reactor.