Starship Corporation

I think the ability to add rooms next to each other, sacrificing safety for economy, ease of mantenance and space optimization would add a degree of depth to the game.
I definitely approve this!

I like the idea of being able to "merge" similar rooms as an option. I also like the idea of variale sized fuel, oxygen and water tanks (or at least multiple fixed sizes) but without the ability to merge rooms the largest size will always be the most efficient footprint making smaller sizes little more than fine-tuning options to get to exactly 100% of the fuel or life support requirement (not an entirely bad thing in itself).

One thing I quickly noticed after some time in the editor is that the freedom to design your own starship isn't truely possible. What we really have is the ability to tweak a design slightly by putting things in different places but in the end any two designs are very similar in that they all have essentially the same components with many of them in similar, if not identical, positions. This means the real difference between designs is down to a very fine detail level where you chose to place a cooridor when I instead chose to place a room so in a disaster simulation there will be a difference in performance that's far more subtle than we'd see if you could place some of the rooms together without a safety wall between them. If you're really worried about accessibility to a larger audience this degree of optimization will be a lot harder for the average gamer to grasp than something more obvious like no fire wall between fuel tanks being a bad idea.

The biggest problem I see as a result of the current limited design placement is that you don't have the freedom to design truely unique layouts. Perhaps I'd like all of my ship designs to focus on crew comfort and morale, with the current restrictions in place it's not really possible to do that because there is just barely enough room to cram all of the required rooms in there in a way that is actually functional. With so much emphasis on omptimizing layouts there is almost no room left for style. This would be fine if everything was a warship but maybe I'd like to build the luxury freighters for the snobby merchants out there. Then again, maybe I'd like to aim for ruthless efficiency and design ships where ultimately the cargo is more valuable than some of the crew members.

From a development standpoint, more flexible room placement will mean there is less need for multiple hull designs to achieve the same level of design freedom. So I guess it boils down to which is easier; re-working the editor and simulations for more flexible room placement or hand-crafting a ton of different hull designs that have similar capabilities to ensure a healthy variety in ship designs. Considering multiplayer (and assuming players will be competetive) I think it would be better to have more flexible room placement to help make different designs on the same hull less predictable.

I think to achieve what you ask (ie, true differences between designs) we would need to be able to actually design the rooms themselves, not just their placement and rotation. As well as have more "micro" design ability, IE wall thickness and corridors with armor of various types, so that designs get a larger range of cost sources and saving possibilites. As it stands (particularly with the fuel tanks, engineering and cargo, we are nearly required to design ships a certain way with only marginal differences because we can not actually affect the shape of rooms ourselves.

In order to design rooms we would essentially be designing the room as a template first (like in Hospital Tycoon, placement of devices, large and small, as well as vertical access shafts, energy relays, fire extinguishers and stuff like that...) , then the room placement and rotation, and depending on where we put doors in the template the room has connections to corridors.

And as for Corridors.. I think it'd be neat if we could put (less efficient) energy relays or oxygen/water tanks into the walls of corridors (that large gap essentially that currently exists in between rooms.

Not sure that is within the scope of the this project, but I think currently the design element is too "zoomed out" ie, we don't have enough complexity and freedom to allow for truly dynamic designs.