Yeah, there should even be a challenge in building a capable, large mining ship. I can accomplish the same thing you have by placing down an equal number of blocks in any way I want. No consequences. Boring building mechanics. It gives me creative freedom, for sure. But that doesn't make good gameplay.
But what challenge? Some arbitary pattern we need to follow, and how is that fun?
We need ships with different FUNCTION, miners that work differently, as well as combat ships. Figuring out what you want your ship to do and optimizing that is fun. Following some stupid puzzle to make your ship better isn't.
This right here is my point. You fail to see how anything outside of combat could have a purpose. Or that designing a ship haphazardly for anything other than combat is good gameplay. There may not be non combat oriented gameplay now, but we would like there to be. And when that happens, we don't want players essentially "beating" the game because there are no major restrictions for non combat gameplay.
I really hope you stick to this, but not by focusing so much on how and where the blocks are placed.
I can't remember whether it was you or lancake who mentioned in a thread that all ships would put shield capacitors under the armor because losing them didn't matter, and i think this is kind of the same mentally i'm seeing here; focusing too much on individual block placement and trying to force complexity into building by having some predetermined pattern to it. Consider instead what would happen if ships focusing on capacity over recharge were competitive; would such a ship have the same priority of which blocks it will want to lose?
What if we could have miners with different specialties instead; some miners get more ore from the same asteroid, but are much slower, some remove the rocks much faster and some can recover resources from dead ships?
Second to starmade
Aurora 4x Games - Index has the best ship design i've seen so far, and it doesn't have ANY locality or even blocks, you just pile formless systems onto them like master of orion. What makes it great is a massive variety in ships you can produce; engines scale between high speed / high fuel consumption where you want extremes for fighters, but if you go all the way for a cruiser you can't deploy it for more than a single day, to low speed and low fuel consumption; you can make ships run on virtually no fuel but they'll be extremely slow. Same thing with sensors, fire controls and weapons. Different design outcomes is what makes mechanical design fun, not arbitrary patterns.
On a more personal note, I just finished a ship. 180+ meters I believe. Extensive interior. The rest of that space is naturally filled wall to wall with systems. There is no power core, because power lines run in many directions. I have physical engines on my ship, but due to the shape, it's likely more of my engine power isn't housed in that physical detail. I don't have concentrations of shield systems, it's just a wall of shield modules running along underneath the hull. My scanners fall into the same boat. They aren't concentrated. You could hit a few different spots on my ship and manage to damage a single specific system each time.
This whole thing is a clear indication you don't PVP. First of all, fights happen at over a km distance, you cannot aim at specific systems, you'll be happy as long as you're hitting your target no matter where it is.
Secondly you don't know where your opponents systems are.
Third and probably most important; if those two things change so that you can both see and target a ship's reactor you can instantly kill your opponent once shields drop. How is that fun, or rather how is that more fun than gradually disabling a ship the way it is now?
I rather build (what I consider) inefficient and have the immersion of important system areas on my ship. That's why I like the proposal of reworking the power.
And you're perfectly capable of doing this if you'd rather roleplay than combat.
