Mass has been a great mechanic in this run through, changing almost every aspect of our gameplay and at least for our server, we love MASS. Volume on the other hand has some serious issues. "Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by a closed surface, for example, the space that a substance (solid, liquid, gas, or plasma) or shape occupies or contains" (Wikipedia, Volume, 2019). Volume does not equal mass, nor is volume an indicator of mass. More importantly: Volume, given the same size object, does not increase as mass increases! This is really messing with ship sizes and builds. CV/BA Combat Steel blocks are the same size as CV/BA Steel blocks and yet, they take up 4 times as much space! A 250SU cargo container can fit 16 CV/BA Steel blocks and only 4 CV/BA Combat Steel blocks. With mass enabled, volume should not be the limiting factor in the number of blocks a given ship can carry, mass should be. Volume being arbitrary is fine, if applied across the board equally to objects of the same size! So if an SV/HV block is equal to 2 SU, then a CV/BA block should be equal to 54SU. It would be far smarter to simply consider a 1x1x1 SV/HV block as being equal to an SU, leaving any given 1x1x1 CV/BA block as being equal to 27 SU. All values being for a completed block. This would mean that a given 250SU storage container can hold 250 SV/HV blocks and a mere 9 CV/BA blocks. Not a bad ratio! To give a good example, one of the heaviest, if not the heaviest, devices in the game is the XL CV Thruster, weighing in at 433t. It currently takes 2000SU to store. However, fixing volume to properly reflect size, not weight, would yield an SU value of 1,458 or about 1.5kSU. Perfectly in line with its current SU value! Fix volume guys, mass is the quantity to determine if we can pick up a given object with our ship, volume should simply be about sufficient cargo space.
I should note, that for anything that is not a full block, rounding down would be a good idea. Deco, packed, should take up far less space than a Steel block. Think flat packing!
I agree entirely. I am only just now starting to play with mass and volume because it was a mess at the beginning of A9, and I can tell it has improved, but I only have a couple hours experience with it so far at most, so I haven't run into these things yet. Barely have a pocket full of rocks near my tent.
Adding back to this and posting in the direct feedback thread: CV thrusters need toned down. Seriously toned down. In vanilla MP, there is no good reason to run less than a CV except for the first day of playing simply because CV thrusters produce way too much thrust! A small CV, comprising of less than 300 CV blocks (which btw I can farm from a single site) out performs SV's in every way, especially in lift.
Well, really, material density needs to be taken into account. This also happens to give a convenient and consistent way to determine the stored volume of a block/device/component: the stored volume is the volume that the materials in the item would take if at solid density. If a block requires 100 kg of steel plates, then it would require about 12.8 L of volume in a container (density of steel is ~7.8 kg/L).
