Give a scale of reference! At some point just the sheer number of power blocks should overcome any reactor design, especially past the 1mil soft cap.
You're missing the point here.
"sheer numbers should overcome any design" is exactly the kind of cancerous mentality that needs to be stamped out here. It encourages giganticism.
Special reactor designs are useful no matter what size of ship you are using. If you can pack more power into a smaller amount of space and get more energy out of it by placing it correctly, then it's a useful design that will help you stay on your feet. Especially if your ship takes massive amounts of damage, and has gaping holes in it that have lots of your simple chunk-cube power clusters destroyed. The reactor could most likely still be kicking and giving out enough power for you to still survive.
Since you asked for a reference however, I quote my own ship design:
The Space Battleship Sunset.
It is 275 meters long. An average-sized capital ship.
It has 2 million power regen, so I suppose you would say then, "it doesn't need an advanced reactor then, its sheer power alone should overcome any need for such a complicated internal mechanism".
But what you fail to realize is that a good reactor is crucial to every ship, no matter what the size, as it helps kick off the power regen values when you start building the ship, so you can more quickly (and lightly-weighted) reach that 1 million soft cap and start adding on long lines, and then slowly transition to large chunks of power blocks as you get less and less returns.
That's how the system works.
To show you just how useful an advanced reactor is on a ship this big, I did a cutaway of the ship the other day where I literally went in build mode and chopped off one entire half of the ship running from bow to stern. The ship, thanks to its advanced reactor, continued to produce a large amount of power, having only lost less than 1/4th of its power regen even though half of the ship was destroyed.
I have been working on this little girl of mine for 9 months, pouring into every detail and aspect of it. I have had to refit the interior only a few times, and only partially, because of changes to game mechanics.
Luckily, I have done no changes to the actual reactor since I first began construction 9 months ago, back when boxdim reactors reigned supreme. I had added in long lines all over the underside shoulders of the reactor (it was T-shaped inside, for the big boxdim regen), so they give me just as good a boost as I need.
Ultimately I have not lost any actual power from the shift to long line reactors (I believe it was because long lines were brought up to the usefulness level of boxdims, rather than boxdims being scaled down, or at least the two mechanics agreed to meet in the middle), but this change to long line supremacy still brings the issue that you can no longer build a specially-designed reactor to more easily power your ship.
