A Rimworld fan comic

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
New DLC

Me playing Terraria about to build my third epic shoebox base to hoard all the items I'll never use.

But they force you to build several distributed shoebox housings for the NPCs now instead of one big for all of them.
- I once watched a speedrunner build NPC houses and it's hard to resist building that every time...
- I really dislike building pretty things, but I dislike ugly buildings even more. It's such a terrible combo to have.
  It wasn't a big issue when I could build like 2 huge houses next to each other and shove every NPC in them back in 1.3, but now I'm "forced" to build like 8 unique sets of houses every play through and it's rough. I'd sit there building the best looking biome-specific houses I can while dreaming of doing literally anything else.
  Nowadays I just refuse to build lol. I found out my standards aren't as high when it's not something I've built.

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.

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".
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.
- 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.

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?
Awesome show
I need to watch that show

We are the Box-shapes, resistance is inefficient.

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!

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.
- 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.
- Only if you didn't have to pressurize them. Corners are bad news.

Also applicable to Cosmoteer

And Factorio: Space Age
- As some one currently redesigning a box space ship in Factorio I can confirm this.
- 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.

factorio spaceage is very much like this

AZUL CRESCENT IN LEMMY??? YOOOOO

One thing I miss about reddit was seeing all the new Azul comics shortly after they are released. Now I see one of these every so many months and go check out their page to catch up.
- She's got a fedi account she posts her work to, https://tech.lgbt/@AzulCrescent
  And at the very least RSS is an option.

Also applies to Avorion lol.

Me playing Kingdom Hearts.

Ahaaaa I thought I recognized azul crescent :3 she's delightful~

She's great!

Space Engineers. I always end up with bricks.

My favorite ship classes are "brick" and "ominous pyramid."

Should have made a hexagon

Every FU***** time

Ha, my gravship still looks like a mushroom from my mushroom people eating mushrooms in their mushroom biom mushroom-formed colony. All Hail the Shroom Rocket!

I did this in the first Kingdom Hearts. I maxed out the number of gummies I could use and basically made a giant cube with a bunch of wings and guns and stuff. It was actually pretty good.

This is fascinating to me because i always end up with a cross between a Terran battlecruiser from Starcraft and the Normandy SR2.

Need to get oddessy and see if that persists there.