Why should I use voxels in my ships?

[Koriandah]

Hey everyone,

Recent news of Athena got me thinking: Why would the average player want to use voxels on their ships?

You see, the more voxels you have - the heavier your ship. So clearly, using voxels costs more in fuel costs, lifting capacity and warp cell cost. Additionally, for PvP, more voxels means more mass which currently means slower acceleration and maneuverability. With Athena, it will also mean that voxels will lower your ships' top speed - a terrible thing for missions runners who spend hours being afk and PvPers who are trying to catch them. Lastly, more voxels also adds to the cost of ship deployment.

This leaves us with two, just two reasons to use voxels as it stands:
- Your ship will look cool
- CCS value for PvP ships

The first one is pretty self explanatory, but it doesn't change the fact that the majority of missions runners nowadays don't bother putting voxels on their 'ships' and just fly element only piles of garbage because its cheaper. Its entirely an optional bonus.

The second is a little more complex. You have PvPers who use CCS in order to out-tank their opponent, however, with the current meta and ways of PvP, more voxels means more mass which means higher warp costs - terrible thing for pirates warp chasing haulers from whose packages they can't even profit. I'd say that it is also an optional trade-off because with shields, you can fly faster glass-cannon ships that don't have any voxels on them. Note that with Athena, high CCS ships may become useful for control of the Alien cores and strategic territory holding around them. They will be able to, in theory, out-tank the smaller nimbler ships, but that remains to be seen to be believed.

I propose a crude solution to this problem: mandatory usage of voxels in order to be able to carry mass.

The addition of a "Structural Stress" mechanic, where ships need a certain number of voxels or CCS in order to carry loads. For example, you would need 10,000,000 CCS in order to fill your containers on your ship with 10kt of cargo (just as an example, numbers can change ofc). If your ship doesn't meet the CCS requirements to carry that cargo + docked ships, it will either take damage to its elements over time or not work. 

This solution is crude, however, hopefully it will force people to use voxels in their builds. Sure, you will still have cubes that are optimized for that value, however, once a player uses voxels it is a much easier mental hop for them to at least try make it look like a ship. Compare this to now, where the usage of voxels is strictly suboptimal for most cases. This should remove voxel-less ships from the game, because lets face it, they are not only ugly but also against one of the main pillars of the game - player creativity. Why put all that work into a voxel system if nobody uses it?

Thank will be all. Feel free to discuss below or yell at me for "Proposing to ruin my super optimal warp shuttle that is just elements floating in space!". Up to you. 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Koriandah
Spellling

[Bazzy_505]

well for the most part the current system is a lazy way to counter lack complexity in game systems.

 

Ideally, i would lean toward 3 layer health pool,

 

shield with corresponinng healthpool and resist

structure health pool (calculated by voxel volume and mass with structure resists being a mean value of resists of materials used)

core stress ( as it works now, depending on core size)

 

this would of course need a lot of tweaks to to hit rates based on cross section optimal range, angular velocity etc ..