Yet another suggestion thread

Along with more accurate selections of quantities, I assume some limits will be removed so we can make smaller RTGs with the next update. No idea when it will drop, but I assume it's soon since qswitched has been talking about it quite a bit.

I suspect most of the mass and come goes into "remote" (long range comm, sensors), not "control" (digital circuits, processors).

I do not know enough about electric engineering, but neither did I know about lasers. Being able to exactly model the subcomponents would be great for micro missiles / drones / payloads.

In addition to showing recoil, we need something that shows accuracy in degrees of dispersion.

Don't know of its been posted before, but it would be a nice feature if when you disabled a module, say, a a group of 150 GW lasers, it automatically retracted any and all radiators linked to that system.

*edit*

To clarify, that would be when you manually disable a subsystem rather than when a subsystem is destroyed.

Hi all, first post here! Been lurking for a while and haven't seen these suggestions around, though sorry if I missed anything.

Cluster Modules. The ability to put a large amount of small modules within a larger container, where they are not individually simulated, but their output is combined/averaged out. This would allow easier and more performant (FPS/CPU-wise) scaling with e.g. Fission Reactors. Add inefficiency or weight increase as needed. Bonus is that it would make some economic sense to be able to mass-produce small redundant systems (e.g. 100MW reactors) and cluster (100 of) them together than custom-make a 10GW reactor for a single ship. (Or, you know, 200.000 tiny 5KW reactors ).

Solid Rocket Fuel. Smallest possible missiles/one-use drones, with a more or less decent ISP. Bonus being that they'd be cheap and easy to mass produce compared to other, more complex ones.

EDIT: Two more suggestions

User-shareable Per-select-box Material Bookmarking

User-shareable Per-select-box Custom Material Ordering

Perhaps an in-game spreadsheet popup instead of a select box would work better as well, or, at the very least, having the values all appear on fixed locations. This would make comparing materials much easier. I'd also personally prefer to have all value labels visible with their value set to '---' or similar when not available as well, to make sure everything is on the same place as you switch materials (since some have certain extra or unavailable properties).

Carpet Bombing Launching. The ability to shoot a constant stream of missiles/drones towards a fleet, with the missiles/drones aiming and correcting course on their own. This would be extremely useful when you're trying to send groups of 5 nukes every minute, as a human can only do so much, and the game grinds down to a halt very quickly if you need to click 'intercept' for every group of missiles several times before you get to the enemy fleet just because they're evading.
The idea of getting on a higher orbit than the enemy and simply start sending missiles at them until they die makes a lot of sense, and is certainly doable as is, although the system currently favors launching a large amount of missiles/drones at once (if only to avoid having to aim 20 groups of 5 missiles [100 total] vs 5 groups of 20 missiles [100 total]).

Alternatively, the ability to choose how to spawn in your ships/missiles/drones, such that you can send a group of 100 missiles, but have them spawn in at an arbitrary rate/distance. Again, this can be done manually with the current system, by intercepting at a slow speed, setting their orders to none, then change them to homing in groups/one by one. And again, this slows down the game down.

If we were to get to an intercept with 100 missiles, then be able to spawn in 10 missiles each time we click a 'spawn' or such button, we'd be able to easily bombard an enemy from afar, with a single intercept of hundreds of missiles, without slowing down the computer to a halt, given that even if your fleet was composed of a million missiles, only a few at a time would be rendered. Currently very large swarms are unfeasible due to lag, and this wouldn't fix that issue if you wanted all missiles to hit at once, but if you wanted them to be more of a stream... Specially useful to use 'streams' of missiles given the current targeting system (nobody wants to see fifty nuclear missiles all aim and detonate at the same target. Well, unless it's the only target. Or you're feeling particularly blood thirsty).

An order to "keep X distance from the enemy/target", useful for drones or ships with enough DeltaV and acceleration to slow down the intercept velocity, and remain in the perfect range against the enemy. Or even for missiles, if they are to surround the target before attacking from all directions (although this would be more feasible if the missiles were to use DeltaV before spawn to start in a given location, covering a target in a sphere well beyond the target's weapons can hit them, then spawn in the tactical view and watch the enemy become swiss cheese.)

Also, lets get the ability to have ammo and propellant lighter than 1 gram, barrel thickness below 1mm, length down to 1 cm, and energy input all the way down to a single watt. Additionally, radiators smaller than 10x10 cm and the ability to remove the battery from our remote control to reduce its weight but takes energy from reactors/RTGs, perfect for super small drones but not so much for missiles. I'm not stopping until my drones can fit in the palm of a hand and cost less than a candy bar.

EDIT:Also, minimum RTG fuel size down to just a few milligrams. Polonium-210 has plenty of energy density to produce a single watt at those sizes. I'd put 2 watts just as a buffer for the decay, and that can be gotten with only 14.2 at 100% efficiency, realistically it'd be about 30-60 milligrams on a super efficient bismuth-selenium thermocouple.