Here's a copy of a post I've made in a few places on this topic: Okay, so, lots of talk about Volume, storage, CPU, and Power units. Due to the ridiculous power draw of current storage systems and the even more ridiculous potential CPU usage, maximizing your efficiency for storage is paramount. To that end, let's look at some numbers. I'll start with ore here as most other goods will fall into a category of 'you're unlikely to build that many and/or they just don't take up that much room.' Iron, Silicon, Copper, Cobalt, Magnesium, and Promethium ores and Crushed rock all come in at 2 su per ore. That means that full stacks (going to round to 1k stacks for ease) are each 2k SU and 64 stacks, the maximum you can put in a single container, comes in at 128k SU. That means that if you're storing single ore types per container, you have no need for more than 128kSU in a single container system to store them. that works out to one controller and 15 extensions, 16 total units. For Neodymium ore and raw Pentaxid, you bump up to 24 units, or 192kSU in total. For Sathium, Erestrum, and Gold ores, you can use 32 units for 256kSU total storage. Wood comes in at exactly 40 storage units and 320kSU and Zascosium would need 48, so the maximum of 40 is what you get to deal with. If you're storing water containers, 64kSU, or 8 units is the maximum necessary. This totals up to 344 total container units to store 64 stacks of all 15 Basic resource types. An argument could be made that fiber is a 16th now, with it's necessity for nanotubes, but given that the max volume of 64 stacks of fiber is a measly 2,880 SU, it can be stored in a standard single cargo container which only takes 1pu instead of 10. So, with these numbers, you can properly set up your storage to maximize your storage efficiency and minimize your power use and still hold max stacks of everything but Zascosium. For processed ingots, I find that a 16 unit storage system is suffcient. That holds 128kSU which is more than enough for me to store 64 stacks of any combination of ingots. For those of you who enjoy storing mass quantities of components such as power coils, you'll need to adjust accordingly and may wish to consider a 320k unit for those. That being said, If you are using a furnace to smelt ingots in quantity, a 16 unit is your best bet for the output, as you'll run out of stacks before you run out of volume.
As it stands weights and especially volume makes no sense. You can take a large constructor from a 1x1x1 alien container and it 'hydrates' into a massive item with negligible volume in your own storage. It's tough to make W&V work game-wise and still make sense without being hugely onerous to use. In my mind: Large pieces of ship or base equipment should retain volume or should come in a 'kit' or 'cargo item' form with smaller volume, eg 2x2x2 => 2x1x1 kit. You would require a suitable constructor to rebuild the item from a kit, or a fully built cargo item can be placed somewhere suitable and unpacked to create a functioning piece of equipment. You should have placeable, invisible cargo area blocks for vessels, so you can fill an area with cargo area blocks and that becomes the block-for-block volume you have available to place cargo items on vessels. Weights still apply for vessel performance. You can then tag loot as cargo as you discover it and when you get back to your vessel you can go into your cargo area and stack tagged items tetris wise, filling the area available. On bases, you can dump cargo blocks from vessels anywhere you have space. Smaller loot (weapons etc) can have smaller volume to fit inside actual containers, but do it with box size, so a rifle can take up 1x2 squares, and you can get 10 steaks in a single square. Ore can come in different size package blocks, e.g. 10 to a player inventory slot, 100 to a container square 1000 to a base sized block. Ingots take up less space of course. Blocks themselves are the most difficult to make sense of after all, one block should take up one block of space, which would be totally unworkable. You could treat them as 'block kits' for storage, so you can get say 100 'block kits' in the space of a base block. My 2c.
Query, since I haven't been following much: Are there plans to re-balance CV/BA cargo containers against SV/HV? Because, right now, the difference is at least two orders of ludicrous. --Brian
It's balanced perfectly right now. A 2m x 2m x 2m CV/BA cargo container holds 8000 units of volume, each unit of volume, based on 1kg of water taking up 1SU, works out to 1L, which is precisely correct for a 2m^3 cube. A SV/HV cargo container is 0.5M^3 which works out to exactly 125L, or 125SU, or exactly 1/64 of a large, which it is. The volumes are exactly proportional. Otherwise, you get back to the pre-A9 issue of an SV/HV cargo container being able to hold more materials in the same amount of overall space, which was determined, rightly to be, as you say, two orders of ludicrous.
Thank you, dw! I brain-farted on the numbers. However, they are NOT balanced when it comes to construction costs. It takes 12 Steel Plate to make a CV extension, and 128 to make an SV extension of the same size. While I'm not suggesting exactly the same costs (empty box is empty, and a box), I think 36 for the CV-scale box would be a better cost. --B.
I like how the weight that is added to containers is NOT simply added to the center point of Mass of a HV/ship. Instead it is only disturbed across the storage area. It makes design of HVs more interesting. I fear though that this takes the game too far into the realm of simulation instead of just fun game play for to many people.
It would be very very helpful if we could test out how our ship designs mass/volume is affected by stuff added to containers in creative mode. Either that or have a way to enable ALL other creative tools in single player survival - and just get rid of creative mode entirely.
Just wanted to give my 2c on the volume and weight feature in 9.4. I started a new game a few weeks ago, and have been playing on and off. I wanted to give myself time to work through the features, and to get reasonably far in the game before I gave feedback. Here is what I have found: I generally like how the new features work. I like connecting to the wireless. I like using the virtual toolbar (it took some getting used to). The container controller, and the (new) dynamic grid are great to use. BUT... The combination of still limited stack sizes (e.g. 6 for spotlights, 999 for ore etc...) and lack of stacking (e.g. weapons, upgrade kits, armors, etc...) combined with the limit of 128 slots still make it so that even with a fairly small CV, I am forced to build and juggle multiple containers since the slots/stacks run out far before the volume of the container runs out. The constructors silently pausing when the slots or volumes run out is irritating. There should be some kind of message or something when a constructor gets into this state. The lack of a search function (i.e. the one in the constructor build list) in the new containers is irritating. Multiple times this has lead me to build extra things when I couldn't find the one that had built, and just assumed that it was built. Container scrollbars have a persistence problem when switching from one container to another in the F4 view. For instance if I am scrolled down in container 'A', then switch the dropdown to container 'B', the view still tries to be scrolled to wherever I was in container 'A'. This is especially a problem if 'B' is mainly empty, and there is no scrollbar to fix the view. Often I end up seeing an empty window and cannot scroll to the items in 'B' without going back to 'A'. This is particularly egregious if I have just moved things out of 'A' and now no boxes want scrollbars, since I can no longer see anything in any of the boxes. Looting from Autominers/Water Generators is fairly difficult, since there seems to be no mechanism (at least that I could find) to move the items directly to a container. It was an irritating process of moving them to my inventory, switching views, moving to the container, switching views back to the autominer, getting some more stuff etc.... Thanks for all the good work!
For this last one you can move things a little quicker (but not as intuitively and - yea this is kinda clunky) if you are connected to a container and then move the items to the yellow tool bar on the bottom of your screen linked to the container. When you unlink to that container (for whatever reason) the items will auto move into the linked container - I'm not sure what happens if there is not enough slots available in the linked container. And you can sort of do the opposite for moving large volumes into the factory.
I'm working on building hauler HVs and trying to figure out how many hover engines I'm supposed to need. So each normal sized hover engine is supposed to produce 200kN of force. I put 20 on this HV. According to wolframalpha, 20 * 200kN = 401.4 long tons-force. I'm on a 0.93G planet. The vehicle tare mass is 40 "tons". So I should be able to lift about 360 lg tons of cargo. but I appear to be able to (limited by volume only) load almost a whole POI in excess of 1,000 tons into the thing and it flies along just fine, almost like it were empty. Is cargo mass not working properly for HVs or what?
@NimrodX Mass only works for regular controllers. Ore/wood and Ammo for some reason ignore mass. Its a known bug.
Looks like its under "filed/tracking" I have no idea what the difference is between that secton of bugs and "known issues" . https://empyriononline.com/threads/...iner-controllers-add-to-ship-mass-5900.47095/
Known issues = not actual breaking bugs and a lot of stuff where there is not a "simple bug fix" at the moment.
So its a list of acknowledged issues, but ones we are going to have to live with a while. Filed/tracking then is things that can be be fixed. Does it mean they are scheduled/ on the bug burn down list?
