Hmm, wonder how well shields in a spaceship-building game would play if they were treated as the foci of an n-ellipse (where the shield surface is all the points whose sum of distances to the foci are equal to some constant)

Like, would that be a big hit to performance to calculate? Would it be a good or bad gameplay experience? What sort of interesting possibilities would it open up?

@starseeker I've yet to find a sufficiently convoluted spaceship-building game for me, one of these days I'm gonna have to make it myself

@VoxSomniator oh very much same
Closest is Stationeers (different from Astroneer!), though there's quite a few design decisions I'd do differently

@VoxSomniator e.g. some of the oddities of the pipe-network simulation (like AC units being able to deal with unlimited backpressure) or things like coal on the moon

@starseeker lunar coal is possibly one of the wildest worldbuilding decisions ive ever seen

@VoxSomniator it *kinda* makes sense as a gameplay decision, but the I'd say that if your gameplay requires lunar coal, your gameplay needs to be tweaked

@VoxSomniator (the reason the coal is there is for use as a carbon source for making steel)