Space Engineers have a guide for that:
I mean… you cant exactly be shocked, when cube/square based objects are the second most efficient shape in a cube/tile based world.
As for what the most efficient shape is, well, anyone familiar with RCE should know that one by heart.
Starfield. I want it to look cool. But I also don’t want to climb the damn ladders inside my ship, so I end up with a big flat slab.
It STILL pisses me off how god awful starship building was.
Its like… how can you not fucking conceive that I might want stairs in my ship.
or control where the fucking doors/ladders go.
but no… we have to generate laberinthine messes because apparently the power core is a goddamn minotaur.
ISO 9001 Human Starship. Brick. With guns.
This is, in concept, why my brother won’t play space engineers with me.
I’ve never even seen a ship. I didn’t even know there was a ship until a year or two after i started playing.
I’ve still never seen it.
It’s a DLC that came out recently
Odyssey DLC just dropped recently…
But there was still a ship, the one you build to end the game
Yes, but those ships look completely different. More like the skeleton of a ship.
Yup! That’s exactly what i referring to.
New DLC
Same in factorio
Very þe same. You can not beat the layout of a bar. I prefer vertical, but the hardcore ones I see are just a long, wide bar. I can’t bring myself to do þat, despite it clearly being þe endgame configuration; it just looks too dumb.
I wish þere were some advantage to style, or some advantage to differentiating platforms. But, no: you figure out þe optimum rectangle and just copy/paste it for your fleet.
In space, shape doesn’t matter as much as mass center. Here’s the spaceship Sidonia from Knights of Sidonia
Cool design ! This sent me for a small research loop, wondering if there is any connection to the song from Muse Knights of Cydonia. The song came out in 2006 and the first manga in 2009. Most likely explanation is they are both named after the Cydonia region of Mars. Probably, the manga got translated back from Japanese phonetically.
Thanks for doing the legwork on that! I’m not familiar with the manga, and I immediately thought of the song.
Unless you go really fast, then an aerodynamic shape becomes super important again
Yeah, can’t have that pesky air resistance slow you down. In…space.
Edit: Okay, now I’m actually super curious at what speed this would come into effect. I know space isn’t 100% vaccuum, so there is some point where this would become a necessary factor to consider. However, it must be at truly insane speeds, no?
Space is full of particles, and if you want to travel relativistic speeds, they’re a problem.
Awesome show
We are the Box-shapes, resistance is inefficient.
I’m surprised anyone has the patience to get to a space ship. I get bored late midgame when you run out of steel and have to juggle caravans and a colony which is constantly beset with attacks and adverse conditions.
It’s such fun game. I will never see what happens past midgame.
Rimworld is the kind of game people beat once, then switch to Randy (the only non-modded story teller that allows for indefinite gameplay) and just build big honkin castles, or go on genocidal conquests, or try to eat the entire world population… often paired with the genocidal conquests.
Oh absolutely. I have hundreds of hours logged, probably over a thousand now. It just gets so complicated and intense that I give up before getting anywhere near “end game”.
Part of me never wants to finish it, it gets fun just mowing down raids and then pillaging others via shuttle 🤣
In the Odyssey DLC, there is a scenario where you start with a ship.
Raid strength is proportional to your wealth, as shown in the history tab. You can reduce raid strength by donating wealth (using caravans or drop pods) to potential allies.
its why I install the quarry mod and just dig forever in it lol
There’s a FUCKING QUARRY MOD???!!! Thank you kind sir. I’m going mining.
There’s a fair few mods like it, but some trigger insect attacks quite often
and turn the harvest rate up, I MEAN WAY UP
I think this refers to the new (awesome) dlc where your base is a spaceship
Yes, but it’s a “gravship” to differentiate.
Honestly it’s kinda fult of the game maker to not enforce some constraints that would force some cooler designs.
I’ve tried to think of an algorithm that would make it at least allow for less boring designs being nearly as optimal, but I can’t. It could be a surface area requirement to break cubes, but then you just end up with circles. The tile limit promotes cubes for the fewest wasted tiles to walls. The range limit doesn’t do much except add a gameplay and design component on how you want to expand.
I don’t know what constraints you can add (or modify) to improve the design. Maybe having the option of different types of engines that don’t have to be on the rear (or facing out whatever direction you decide)? Maybe they could change how ship defence works to make you need to design more interesting defences into your ship?
There’s no good algorithmic solution I don’t think. It just needs to be some external force that makes the existing optimal design not as good in some way. It’s the same issue with the kill tunnels though; they can tweek it forever, but there’s always going to be an optimal method players will abuse.
Haven’t played the game, but maximizing surface area for cooling would work. IRL, cooling is a big issue for space craft that do more than just coasting with an occasional short course correction burn. Space might be cold but its near-vaccum is an incredibly good insulator.
So if heat management is a thing in a space game, this would encourage ships with more surface area (so non-boxy, non-circles). At the same time logistics within the ship would favour boxy/circle-shaped ships, so you’d have two contradictory design goals requireing you to find a good compromise between both. That should lead to some more interesting designs.
Oh yeah, wanting to maximize surface area could do some good things.
I dont think you need a fancy algo, just some simple contraints.
For instance, maybe the grav fuel cell thingies emit radiation in a certain radius.Make certain parts like the jammer require no obstructions on N sides (like the wind turbine)
There are already little constriants like this in the game for vanilla structures.
In avorion the physics simulation is pretty accurate, for example RCS thrusters placed farther away from the center of rotation are more efficient. However, still no air resistance in space so I just make bricks with struts coming off them.
You could just enforce some level of aerodynamics or similar real world esque constraint. Even if not applicable for space, you could invent some.
Maybe if they changed the way heat dispersal worked? That would be minor though. Currently a freezer is optimal when rectangular because each side (and not diagonals) contributes to heat transfer.
Maybe adding more things you could mount to the sides of the ship like external storage that don’t need to be inside and then make them shaped like nose cones? That might make ships look even worse though lol, a square with spikes.
Mildly impossible, there are some limitations of geometry itself that make certain designs optimal no matter how railroady the game mechanics, and naturally players will optimize the fun out of anything.
Unless you artificially constrain it, it mostly just makes sense to make rectangle shaped spaceships
If we could make spaceships in orbit, you’d bet they’d be quite rectangular too
If they never have to enter an atmosphere, then you only have to consider stress due to acceleration and impacts from smallish matter.
I played Cosmoteer before this DLC came out. Everything ends up being a box. I’m guessing FTL and similar games also have that problem.
☝️🤓 You don’t design ships in FTL!
Also applicable to Cosmoteer
And Factorio: Space Age
As some one currently redesigning a box space ship in Factorio I can confirm this.
I’ve made ships that have made it to the first 3 planets.
They never make it back though, and I always forget I need a way to use the research on each planet.
The bioplanet with its stupid item half life timers can fuck all the way off though.
I just overbuild every ship and then don’t need to worry about if my ships make it back.
And BossConstructor
I always wind up with ships that are much more phallic than boxy in Cosmoteer
That’s okay, it’s a Borg cube.
500 named thrumbos and 2600 harvested kidneys later:
2600 kidneys ?? That’s rookie number.
Why only harvest kidneys when you can harvest anything until nothing left ?One lung, one kidney, liver. In that order. Kidney affects blood filtration which means infections are more likely. You could do the heart but there are currently no ways to get any sort of artificial livers while there are artificial hearts. Plus livers and hearts sell for the same price if that’s your vibe.
You’ve got a hard point there. At more than 100 colonists, my game loads in at less than one frame per second. That’s why there’s a cap on kidney harvesting. Otherwise, I would be a more terrible monster. Thanks for your concern, though.
