Variable Length Thruster Plumes

[Edymnion]

Currently, thruster plumes are a set 3 blocks long no matter how big your ship is.

I know that as I make bigger ships, I'd like to have thruster plumes that remain obviously plumes and not "a small glow you can sort of see if you're close enough".

What if we just use the same "link a bunch of activator blocks to it" mechanic we have for everything else? Link 1 activator, the plume is 1 block long. Link 50 activators, get a plume 50 blocks long.

We can link a colored light to the ship's core to change the plume color, so why not link activators to adjust the plume length as well?

 

[OfficialCoding]

Actually that's a really good idea. Of course there has got to be some limit or players could literally make kilometer long plumes

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Yeah, that's a good idea, but I would prefer it be based on the number of thruster modules touching.

 

[Nauvran]

or it could just scale with the amount of thrusterblocks

 

[Ribbons0121R121]

or maybe by a system like that, but more thrusters facing 1 direction means longer the plume while the wider the thrusters if touching would make a wider plume, etc.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

or it could just scale with the amount of thrusterblocks

or maybe by a system like that, but more thrusters facing 1 direction means longer the plume while the wider the thrusters if touching would make a wider plume, etc.

Either of these would be preferable because then thruster plume size would give you information on the ship's thruster capability. More information not from a HUD in combat about your enemy is nice.

 

[VortrexFTW]

Totally late to this, but I want to extend Ribbon's idea for wider plumes a bit ... Shaped plumes.
Ships like ME:A's Tempest with it's rectangle thrust ports and those Vulkan ships on Star Trek with the thruster rings would be cool.

Yeah, I get that you can make this already but it's per-block and not "smoothed" together. Having one solid plume of the connected shape would be awesome.