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Materials and voxel building?


Glowtape

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Is there even any point in the different materials, outside of crafting elements? Apart from density giving a dynamic construct weight? Is there some sort of physics simulation that tests strain on the spaceships I'm eventually gonna build? If not, what stops anyone from building a huge dreadnought mostly from wood, or say the cheapest metal in the game, in layers as thin as possible?

 

And I figure, even if stress physics are there in some capacity, depending on how damage mechanics work, you could probably still make a ship somewhat resilient by air gapped layers of cheap material to emulate ablative armor, implying that you probably just need a light and rigid frame.

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I don't think there would be anything stopping you from making such a ship, however, if it gets hit by weapons/impacts then the damage would spread through the ship much faster as the lighter, less damage absorbent materials, buckle and burn.  Materials could be light and strong, or light and weak, some heavy materials could also be weak against some forms of attack. The choice of material(s) in a build will always be a compromise between strength, weight, and the ability to absorb certain damage types.

 

As far as I know there isn't any DU simulator to show if say, a ship made of wood, could have engines strapped to it and achieve orbit without crumpling from the forces involved. Im assuming it will be wither a stretch goal, or maybe not allow certain types of materials to be used in ship construction.

 

Any design, ship, building etc will always be a compromise. There will never be a perfect build.

 

Aint variety fun? :P

 

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8 hours ago, Glowtape said:

 Is there some sort of physics simulation that tests strain on the spaceships I'm eventually gonna build? If not, what stops anyone from building a huge dreadnought mostly from wood, or say the cheapest metal in the game, in layers as thin as possible?

AFAIK NQ are not planning to add stress mechanics for either static or dynamic constructs, so you could probably build plastic spaceships if you wanted to, or an elevated city balanced on a single voxel column.

 

However, I'm quite sure that material properties will be a factor in damage calculations eventually.

There is a graphic that simulates heat friction when you enter a planet's atmosphere. Perhaps it will include a damage calculation.

Constructs take damage when colliding with planets, moons and asteroids. Material properties will probably factor in those calculations.

How combat damage will be handled is unknown at this point, and will most probably remain a mystery until NQ start implementing PVP in alpha-2...

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Physics-based stress calculations aren't really something they've said they'd be doing with the game.  That many calculations would bring a server this size down in seconds.  It's the same reason they're not going to have gravity-based voxel destruction or dynamic construct VS static construct impact damage (to the static).  It's just not practical with the hardware and processing ability available.

What materials will most likely do is provide certain armor class against damage received from outside sources.  Just like most building games out there, you'll see a marked difference of say wood VS stone VS metal VS reinforced metal VS unobtanium etc.  Since area-specific damage isn't really going to be a thing - ships will most likely take an average of material used into account and assign a "HP pool" to the construct. 

Thus two ships of the same size and voxel-count will have markedly different durability based on the material used in each.  If one is primarily wood with some metal and the other is almost entirely reinforced metal with some space-age polymers, the wooden ship will most likely have only a fraction of the durability of the metal ship.  That means it would disintegrate under even limited incoming fire, while the other would be able to take a pounding from small-arms and still remain in flight.

Add to this, that they could theoretically add certain "worthiness" values to each material.  Just as they have engines meant for atmosphere and engines meant for space, perhaps things like wood and the like could negatively impact the function of a ship once it hits the space threshold, if used too liberally.

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