The Merits of Small, Cuboid Exclusion zones around systems

[Valiant70]

By small, I'm talking no blocks for fighters, one block for small ships and a gradual increase up to a few blocks for gargantuan ships. This also assumes that stabilizers in their current incarnation no longer exist. This is another measure to reduce system stuffing, which doesn't encourage island builds.

Yes, this is like the old "heat box idea," but with a different purpose. Rather than specifically forcing ships to have empty space, this is intended to keep systems separate from each other so that they don't become an amorphous blob. Large ships may have room for a hallway or catwalk in there.

The heat boxes are always cuboid and their volume scales with the volume of the systems that create them, not box dimensions. This should make no system shape more space-efficient than another. A sphere, a wedge, and a brick of systems of equal block count all create a cuboid exclusion zone of the same volume, but maybe different shape.

On small ships, this box mainly ensures that one system can't shove its fingers up the other one's nose. On larger ships, this creates small gaps that can be left open, or used for bulkheads. Since the boxes are always cuboid, re-shaping systems to allow hallways through them has no notable drawback other than the weight of the hallway itself. Even at the large end of the spectrum, the gaps should not be large enough to encourage island builds. By the time you've got a 50 block gap, you've probably got a ship that's 2 km across. It wouldn't look island-like even if you did separate the pieces.

It may have occurred to you that a long projection could end up protruding outside the exclusion zone if it's based entirely on block count. I can think of three approaches to this:

• Don't care - you probably still can't squash the main bulk of two different systems together
• Separate - cut the blocks outside the box into a separate group, which forms its own exclusion zone.
• Penalize - artificially expand the box in the direction of the protrusion

The second is probably the best.

Alternative exclusion zone mechanic:
Use convex hulls instead of cuboids. It's harder to picture off the top of my head what building with convex hull exclusion zones would look like. What I can picture seems more difficult because it's harder to tell where you can and cannot put things. With cuboids, you can tell at a glance that you can't put other blocks in that box.

 

[petlahk]

Really creative. It takes the main point of the original idea of the "heat boxes" and removes the worst bit of the penalty.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Generally I like it. It's basically stabilizers, but it affects all systems, and over much shorter distances so that you can still orient systems into almost any shape. Only major thing I would suggest is to enforce a minimum 1 block gap; otherwise, the system can be exploited by checkerboarding tons of small systems. While this might penalize a very select few super small ships, it should be easy enough to work around.

One other thing this brings up though is privacy. One of the reasons for system stuffing that rarely gets discussed is that it lets you hide what systems are on your ship. Forcing all systems to be spaced out guarantees that cloakers could learn a LOT about your ship via spectating unless you use tons of hull to wrap everything.

 

[petlahk]

Only major thing I would suggest is to enforce a minimum 1 block gap

I disagree. I think it would be a fairly trivial thing to make it be a 1 block minimum at reactor size 2 instead of at 0 and 1. Small ships are really reliant on not having empty space. I think that the only way properly size fighters can be valid under this system is not being forced to adopt this. It makes sense for all the larger ships. However, fighters need to be a certain size in order to be properly carried. And, they are almost never designed to have much more than a cockpit. I don't think it's too big of a stretch to make the gap start at reactor size 1 or 2.

Additionally, about the post in general. Perhaps some select systems should be exempt from the gap and neither have one on contribute to it. Those systems would be chambers and conduits. Seeing as those are parts of the reactor system and would get built close to the reactors and possibly spread throughout the ship they shouldn't constrain the building of other systems around them.

And, as a final note, I think that the system exclusion zone should be dependent on reactor level and not the number of blocks in a reactor. If this were in conjunction with your heat-sink post Valiant (Heat/Cooling as an alternative to stabilizers and reactor HP) then the heat-sinks could be based on reactor blocks and this based on reactor level. Kinda helps even things out a little bit.