[Shane Watson]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
But building a large structure in space still requires engineering for stresses and pressures. Especially if it is going to be a moving structure. The engines have to 'push' on something or other to make the thing move, and it has to hold together when they do. Not to mention resisting damage from enemy weapons.

That said, I agree that a more flexible style of 'engineering' is needed for SE ship design. The current fixed 'tonnage' for every ship regardless of what is really installed just doesn't make sense. We need to see real costs/benefits from altering the engine power/mass ratio of our ships. The idea of ship classes as rigid 'containers' needs to be dumped.

I still think a series of hull size classes should dictate the relative building costs (scaled by your construction/materials technology level) according to how big the final design really is. BUT... we should not go 'choosing the size' before we do anything else and then be forced to 'choose the size' again if we want to add more equipment than will fit into the rigid size we chose before. We should be able to just add equipment to the design and let the game track how big it's getting. As it crosses 'levels' of construction size, the cost gets re-calculated to reflect our ability to handle the scale. And if it looks too costly you scale back to a smaller size -- by removing equipment, not by 'choosing the hull size' again. [/QB]

There's a reason that I'm an artist and not an engineer or programmer haha.

I dig your ideas. I think something like that would work very well and be a lot of fun to noodle as well.

Cheers,