Does anyone understand this (I mean beyond the obvious). Take this screen shot made in creative that I switched to survival and then reloaded. It shows a bunch of spans (each is a separate BA) created out of different materials. From front to back, they are: Wood, Carbon, Concrete, Armored Concrete, Steel, Hardened Steel, Combat Steel With structural integrity debug on - they are all the same. I had kind of hoped that combat steel would be stronger (way beyond its increased mass). I has assumed (evidently wrongly) that the stability_glue attribute in MaterialConfig.ecf was the controlling factor, but according to this it isn't. Neither is hardness or anything else I can obviously associate. For reference, combat steel has stability_glue of 6000, as does armored concrete. Hardened steel is 3000, steel 1500, concrete 600. I guess stability_glue affects the maximum strain before something falls off. (For eg, I have noticed that a hanging turret mount made out of concrete will likely collapse when hit by a rocket from a drone, whereas a steel one will generally not). However it seems to have no effect at all on adding overall stability to a span - which makes building large on planet hangars a no go area without them ending up looking like something out of roman era to stop them from collapsing at the slightest nudge, or even being breathed on. Anyway - this image seem to at least illustrate why I keep getting caught out by this with the apparently stupid expectation that combat steel might help with spans - apparently not I wouldnt mind this SI mechanic (I wish SE had it) if it seemed logical for modern/future materials, but in its current stone age form I hate it - utterly. Maybe if there was a support beam block available in various length to support spans it would help, but TBH I thin it is reasonable that the upper tier materials should have a marked improvement on SI and especially allow useful length spans. Another point, looking at the image above - from the right side, the SI looks reasonable in that it evenly diminishes. OTOH on the right side there is a sudden loss. That just looks broken. hen I placed the blocks, I did so from right to left.
I'm guessing there's some technical limitation on how far the game can "see" a beam as supported. Structural integrity is determined by stability_glue divided by material mass (not block mass). By default it's 12 for all building materials. Looking at your screenshot, it seems the maximum supported distance is still 12.
Ugh - not even medium sized hangars then. I tried to build a large base a while back - its desired hangar span was over 27 blocks (3 9x9 pads side by side). Not a hope. The damn thing ended up looking like part of the colosseum by the time the roof would stay up around damage/edits. Ended up turning it into space station instead. Thanks for that hint - looking at the 'mass' values, it seems they are setup to more or less cancel any potential material strength advantages. And yet there is still enough variance in the ratios between materials for me to be a little surprised by the consistency in the above image between the materials. While all similar, I might have expected there to be a block variation over a span of 12, or do you think there is a max span size of 12 and material strength is ignored and instead it just interpolates over the distance so cancelling any material benefits? Kind of sucks if that is the case as it would suggests this is unfixable. Given your comments, I think the SI is done to far too vertically weighted and needs tro consider vertical diagonals as well (to at least provide some simulation of common angles support beams used for weight spreading). Even horizontally connected block shoudl have a small part tom play - think when the middle sags they will tend to curve and thus push against horizontal neighbours distribution stress to the enclosing walls. Complex calculatins if done propely of course, but consider a simple small percentage factor from horizontals would give adequate consideration for I think. I get the impression SI for a structure is not updated regularly - only when something changes, so I don't see it would be a performance hardship to do a more complete job of it.
Si calculations are, afaik, exponential in complexity with the greater span. That causes serious problems when trying to span large distances. Have you tried force fields? I do not know if they provide support or not - you may be able to support larger spans using a force field.
Trusses should have twice the span. Trusses were specifically designed to have a far greater weight vs strength ratio. It would think it would be a fairly easy fix to allow trusses to increase the span of another material by 50% by placing trusses underneath the other roof material.
A greater weight vs strength ratio means that it has high weight at low strength. Perhaps you meant to say a far greater strength vs weight ratio? Meaning more strength at low weight.
Until SI has been implemented in a more complete and realistic way I think it should be removed from the game.
Only once in a rare while do I run afoul of SI limitations, usually when trying to build exceptionally large landing pads for CV's, and then it's not usually any important blocks I break, just the wooden beams I use to ensure things are lined up correctly, especially when compensating for uneven terrain. But that does remind me of a bug I need to report....
So - 2 years later, Structural Integrity - Did not look like this before? I am looking at this in Creative - 1.8.8.* Vermillion's "Creative Library is to the far right and The Schneewitchen by sulusdacor. A remodeling of the Creative Library - is at Center. Yes - I have Structural Integrity selected; do not know why I needed to point out. And there are Green Blocks - about a dozen - at the center of the remodel. But none to be found on Vermillion's Original. I did not inspect 'Snow White' any closer for this. What should I make of this - what am I missing? Grateful for any insight.
