Please implement more realistic structural engineering

frazmi

Just for fun, I decided to see how many corridor segments I could string together, all cantilevered out from a multi-purpose room. I added perhaps 100 segments, all connected in a single straight line, before I ran out of patience. I added perhaps 15 reinforcing panels, but that just reinforced the lack of realistic constraints in the current building system.

There's simply no way to construct such a cantilevered structure except in a zero-g environment. It should have collapsed, even with the reinforcing panels.

I'm not calling for a real-time finite element analysis of structural integrity. However, I think a system that considers both placement and type of unit could be implemented fairly simply to give a reality improvement. Each time a non-reinforcing unit is added to a base, hull integrity would decrease based both on the unit itself and on the length of the unsupported-unit chain it's attached to.

 __________
|          | ____  ____  ____  ____
|          ||____||____||____||____|
|__________|

             __________
 ____  ____ |          | ____  ____  
|____||____||          ||____||____|
            |__________|

Side view of two Multi-purpose rooms.
Top room has 4 corridor extensions cantilevered from
one side only. Bottom room has two  extensions on each side.
Top option should be much less stable than bottom
option (assuming all corridors are "free-floating")

Darwin-Evolution

This will reduce construction freedom, but I actually approve of this idea.

zetachron

No chance the way they did it. It's not intended to have physical simulation and you can be glad to have a simple reinforcement system at all. Problems:

• You can place structures and then remove the base, so things float in nowhere. No static calculation at all. Not even a reduced one. Base parts can't collapse.
• You have a moonpool above water surface and I've seen flooding not passing an open bulkhead. No flood chambers. No water pressure calculation. Hatches to water allow a stupid side entrance.
• Big creatures and subs can ram the base without creating breaches. No impulse impact calculation. Plant and creature explosions work though.
• You can connect 2 moonpools with a height difference of 500m without air pressure problems. No air pressure calculation. No air mixtures or decompression chambers. Nitrogen calculation is only console and crude.

I think the devs would need months of work to implement even the simplest physics of structural integrity and kinetics or water and air pressure balances. If it would be weeks or days, it would already have been implemented. There aren't any currents in the game worth speaking of. There isn't even a simulation of heated water progressing from heat sources or currents produced from heat differences in water. There isn't even a static heat or current map overlay in the game.

I can live with it, but don't expect an underwater physics simulation game. That's probably next generation underwater games for next decade. This game can't even simulate a big submarine movement underwater (that's the part I can't live very good with it).