modular thrusters

Adding some large-sized thrusters will also be good since stacking ton of small (compare to the ship) thrusters on a huge ship looks pretty silly. You can build a giant fake thruster with blocks but its thruster flame still looks too small.

如果能加入一些大尺寸的推进器也很棒，在一条超大的飞船上堆一堆推进器看着太沙雕了，如果用方块做成巨大推进器造型的话推进器尾焰还是太小。

Yeah, not sure if that mod is still supported though, the cannon was a nice mod by keen too!

oh that would be great, maybe hydrogen thrusters that were more efficient

IDEA: each thruster module will also act as effectivity/power module for whole directly-connected thruster array.

So 2 thruster modules directly attached to each other will have its total thrust power (slightly) higher than if they were to be separatered.

Possibly even create 'thruster module' variants - one increasing thrust power, other decreasing electricity (or hydrogen) usage, another without increases, just lighter ...

I have a twist on the idea- how about thruster output scales with the amount of power the grid has?

Rather than needing new blocks to increase thruster power, and maybe having to redesign the thrusters so that the new blocks can attach to them ( like on assemblers and refineries ), simply re-code thrusters so that they output more thrust as you increase the number of reactors, batteries and solar panels, upto a pre-determined maximum thruster output ( I'd say maybe triple the current max output ).

It makes more sense since it doesn't require more blocks or redesigning existing ones ( though vanilla Ion thrusters are sinfully ugly... ), and it naturally balances itself since to get more thrust, you need more power = more resources. It never made sense that you could overload your ships power by placing too many thrusters- the thrusters should only output as much power as they are given, just like an electric motor or heater or LED etc etc.

Actually the mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=916589542 has the Keen upgrade modules, and i can confirm, they're working fine. Tested for the vanilla ion thrusters (even they have no visual module slot indicators), modded thrusters (titan engine), gyroscopes and drills.

I'm curious how the upgrade modules would be 'plumbed in' as such- having attachment points like Refineries and Assemblers would be one way, but that doesn't really work for Gyros ( not easily anyway ) or Thrusters since it requires additional space that might already be tight to begin with on the block the upgrade module is supposed to attach to. Adding them into the conveyor system to give a literal 'power boost' makes sense ( overclock the reactor that in turn boosts the output of the thrusters, if you get my drift ).

I'd prefer just stand-alone blocks that you simply just place on the grid and don't require a direct connection to the blocks in question in order to boost their output. A different boost module for each block- gyro and thruster, don't see any point boosting drills or grinders as they've been balanced to death over the years, gyros and thrusters never seem to get any love besides keen screwing with the damage radius and distance...

It would be so cool if we could build more powerful engines connected to the thrusters, then having stuff like overheating / cooling gameplay related to the thusters, Engineering is the name of the game.... I want to Engineer stuff.

People have been asking for vanilla tiered thrusters for ages- it's such an obvious way to add progression to the game and make survival much more approachable and enjoyable. Upgrade modules to increase power would serve the same function and be just as good, all it takes is to design a new block, decide on how much power each module adds, and code it into the thrusters output. Power and heat/cooling management has also been discussed in the past- it just seems like Keen went down the route of a more basic, arcade style approach to building and engineering, rather than delving into more advanced game-play mechanics ( such as heat/cooling, proper power distribution and management, guided weapons, aerodynamics, atmospheric effects, orbital mechanics etc etc etc- the term 'short-sighted' comes to mind... ). If you don't mind dealing with constantly broken mods, then you can certainly address many of the short-comings in the game, but not all, and at the expense of performance and compatibility across servers that run different mods ( if you use multiplayer, which isn't as fixed as we'd like to pretend ).

I completely agree

* increase acceleration

* increase power

* add work on overheating

* add cooling

* add mains overload

* add resource generation, after which the engine must be repaired !!!!