Noticed this in some of the ship designs as well as I recall seeing it somewhere in the settings. Anyone shed some light on this design aspect? I have seen lots of builds where the blocks behind the thrusters are just missing but don't have any air access. Would make sense to need air access for turbines but maybe not so much for thrusters. Thanks for the info.
I think I've seen mention of "Blocks Thruster" on blocks and maybe certain devices. Probably one of those "Coming Soon" features, like CPU was "Coming Soon" for quite some time. Probably going to wind up hated by PvP Brickbuilder's Union too. Can't bury thrusters behind 9 layers of armor to keep them from getting shot with this enabled.
It's already a feature right now for the exhaust of thrusters. You have to activate it yourself in the gameoptions.yaml file. It's called ThrustersNeedOpenSpace. They may eventually give it an in-game switch in the difficulty settings. Other than that it's assumed that the feature is already complete. I doubt they are going to make it so we also have to unblock the intake side of thrusters like the OP is asking for though.
This is what I get for not reading all the yaml files every update... To be honest though, I think I rather like the idea of needing through-and-through airflow. Granted, many of our pretty ships won't be quite as pretty, and/or they're going to have to give us some more blocks and get creative with airflow or the masses may riot.
So I've been testing out the "ThrustersNeedOpenSpace" and I do like the idea to stop the typical borg block builders especially for a PvP server setup but I feel the implementation of the feature is somewhat flawed. There does need to be something in the game that stops people hiding their thrusters behind 20 layers of armour, but how can it be implemented for a genuine build where the thruster do have exhaust access and the thruster is visible on the outside. The tests I've done on my server show that a block placed 20 units away from the direct exhaust outlet still prevents the thruster from working yet there is direct exhaust outlet. Maybe the option should calculate the length of the thruster and then verify that the same exhaust distance is not blocked. This would still allow for good ship design but close loopholes for the borg block builder designs. Right now, I feel I have to turn the feature off as design and function outweigh the exploit option.
This make so much sense in space I could accept this in SE for their atmos thrusters (which do not require intakes be open oddly, only that exhaust will damage interfering blocks), but in this where we have the same generic space thrusters on everything everywhere?
I think they could fix this problem by adding 1-3 invisible blocks to the nozzle side of the thruster.
That will screw up the fit of some ships as they will end up with huge invisible bits sticking out that will snag on things unexpectedly. This is bad enough already with thin block hit bounds occupying the full cube. As a for eg - this would break pretty much ALL CVs designed to fit through 13x7 hangar doors.
