When making ships, do you completely fill it's insides?

[hakkarin]

When designing a ship, do you make sure that there is no empty space inside of it by completely filling every single place with something, or do you allow empty spaces to exist inside the hull? What is your design strategy in this regard?

 

[Megacrafter127]

Apart from interior space, I usually make sure to fill every empty spot within the hull.

 

[Keptick]

Some people leave some space for future upgrades. However, that's pretty innericient. The was I do it is to leave some cubic internal space and make a blueprint of that before filling it in, makes refits a lot easier.

Apart from interior space my finished ships are completely filled in, there's really no reason to leave empty space unless you lack ressources or it's a station.

 

[Groovrider]

I leave empty space for future upgrades and modifications without changing the hull. Basically shields,engines and power are usually solid. weapons are organized so that refits are easier with some spaces.

 

[<SCRIPTKITTY>]

With larger ships I fill it all the way besides interior which is usually what I build first. However I (am going to start) leaving areas for docked reactors so that reactors can be easily upgraded.

 

[sayerulz]

I am a bit sloppy with building systems, which means that there are often unintentional spaces around. But I also like to leave room for upgrades.

 

[Comr4de]

I've found that having empty pockets with hull on both sides greatly slows down missile explosions

 

[StormWing0]

Depends on if I care about having internal walking areas for my ships or not but yes I fill in all spaces that aren't hallways or rooms with hull or shields.

 

[Unnamed25]

99.9% of it(if it has checkerboard weapons i leave some space), except for the core corridor section of my ships.
Or if its a huge ship, i prefer to "spawn" an incomplete one(not 99.9% full) if i cant "spawn" the finished one

 

[PriZm]

Yes, just fill all the room you dont need with systems. Especially when building a smaller ship, i dont leave lot more empty space than i need to enter the core. I have blueprints from most of my ships, where there is only power reactors and thrusters installed, so i can refit it or make different versions of it (more/less shields, more/less power capacity, missile/cannon/beam based main weapons, different passive effects etc).
There is really no reason why you should leave any more empty space in a ship, once you have all your interior/hangars etc installed. You want your ship to be as combat efficient as possible for its dimensions and volume

 

[ilec]

I generally have a small area on each side of the mid line that I leave as a void and then fill in with heavy adv armour to move my COM back to the mid line to help with maneuvering. - Essentially ballast

 

[Panpiper]

It depends on whether I have brick built my ship as a test first. If I have done so and tested all systems so I know it balances well, then the proper ship build using those block quantities tested in the brick build will indeed fill up all available space. Unless your ship is past the point of being able to power it's systems, any all all nooks and crannies can be better utilized by filling them in with shields, regenerators or thrusters. However sometimes I am just playing around with ship concepts and will jump right in with building the ship proper. In that case I am likely to leave 'some' empty space, primarily around weapons, and slowly fill that in as the ship evolves through use and testing.

I do not consider RP space to be 'empty' space however. RP rooms I will at least box in, if not decorate, long before I have filled up any space they might need. That said, I do not go overboard on RP space, I include just enough that the ship is believable as a crewed ship. For a medium sized and up ship, I will have a comfortable, appealing and functional bridge, where I can access all essential ship systems such as the ship's computers, logic activation and monitoring, etc.. I'll have a dozen or so 3x3 crew quarters rooms, a head with showers, a dining lounge area with kitchen, a sick bay and a storage room. In some ships, I might build a hangar for a stealth (cloaking) runabout. IMO more than that 'is' starting to waste space, unless your entire reason for building the ship in the first place is to decorate large rooms.

One last, I will have a logic room, usually above my bridge where I will include most logic systems. There 'will' be spare space in this room.

 

[Edymnion]

Like everyone else is saying, it depends.

On my current workhorse combat miner, I do have a fair bit of empty space inside of it. Mainly because I have large recessed turrets in the front half of a hull built around a salvage array in the back half, and the turrets don't go all the way down.

I could fill that space, but I consider it wasteful. The ship already functions beyond what it needs to for. It's salvage arrays are sufficient to eat planets, it has plenty of thrust, it's shields can sit in front of an Alpha pirate station without failing, and the weapons are enough to destroy any pirate craft or station while on auto-pilot.

Aka, the ship meet it's design criteria before I filled all of the available space, so I stopped and left the empty space.

On the other hand, my small explorer/dogfighter is a solid block with a tiny little cockpit. Kind of wish I had more room for bigger weapons on it, but I built the hull first on that one and decided not to modify the design just for bigger numbers when it technically could do the job of out dogfighting similar sized Isanths.

 

[jayman38]

I fill in absolutely every space that is not astronaut-accessible or rail-entity recess. In other words, if a rail-guided entity is not meant to fill that space when the rail moves, and it's not a dedicated RP space for astronauts or docked entities, it is filled with systems. Thrusters, shields, anything seems better than empty space.

Exception: I am currently working on a secret design (to be released some day, some day...) that contains superfluous spaces, simply because the original ship it is based on seems to have those superfluous spaces. (For no apparent reason.) So in this case, I'm leaving spaces to comply with the original design layout.

Edit: Almost forgot: I will also sometimes leave spaces directly behind thruster blocks to get that sweet thruster glow. Anything with a glow or other similar effect will need a space for the glow to manifest. Otherwise, the game engine turns the visual effect off to reduce processing load.

 

[papachabre]

Out of curiosity - why is it more efficient to fill in empty space? If you are happy with all of your systems, including thrust (which is affected by mass) then why bother filling in the space? What am I missing?

 

[Panpiper]

Out of curiosity - why is it more efficient to fill in empty space? If you are happy with all of your systems, including thrust (which is affected by mass) then why bother filling in the space? What am I missing?

It is a question of surface area to volume. Empty space inside your ship makes your ship less efficient in that regard. The surface area of your ship cost mass in terms of hull, possibly armor, and any decorative blocks one has added. It also makes you a bigger target and therefor easier to hit. The idea of using all available space is to maximize your ship's effectiveness relative to the total hull mass it has to haul about and target area it presents to an opponent.

 

[PriZm]

well, then you could have built a smaller hull and have less weight(less thrust, less power for passive effects etc). So its more like building the hull just big enough to fit all systems in, rather than filling the hull youve just built completely with systems.
In your example, it might be better to leave some empty space, considering you have a hull you simply like and you dont wanna change it, just to make your ship a bit more efficient.

Edit: Well, panpiper and me posted almost at the same time, with almost the same content :p

 

[jayman38]

If you are happy, you are happy. However, some of us can never have enough shields. Or thrust. Or power capacity. Or cargo storage. Or....

 

[papachabre]

It is a question of surface area to volume. Empty space inside your ship makes your ship less efficient in that regard. The surface area of your ship cost mass in terms of hull, possibly armor, and any decorative blocks one has added. It also makes you a bigger target and therefor easier to hit. The idea of using all available space is to maximize your ship's effectiveness relative to the total hull mass it has to haul about and target area it presents to an opponent.

So basically the idea is to increase the mass of the ship and compensate by adding thruster and power to accommodate cosmetic design decisions?

If you are happy, you are happy. However, some of us can never have enough shields. Or thrust. Or power capacity. Or cargo storage. Or....

My thought was that you could always make the hull bigger if you're just trying to add stuff to it.

Forgive my ignorance by the way guys - I still feel like a newbie after 40 hours of play. I probably will for another 40 or so at this rate.

 

[Panpiper]

So basically the idea is to increase the mass of the ship and compensate by adding thruster and power to accommodate cosmetic design decisions?

No, it is quite the opposite in fact. Because the surface area of your ship that contains the volume used by systems has a mass cost, having unused empty space inside your ship 'increases' the mass of your ship relative to the systems blocks it is using.