Suggestions about Overhaul & General SE

I really liked the new stuff implemented; especially miniature respawn crafts. Really makes the first hours of the game feel different. Hydrogen engine provides the needed energy boost when you want it and survival kit makes "APC Rovers" for combat much more utilizable. I didnt play the scenarios (Didnt have time to do so because I was checking if my prior problems regarding the SE was fixed or not)

(Skip this part if you don't care about my playing behaviour and straight to my feedback details)

Me and my friend plays as a duo everytime, our connection sadly doesnt allow us to play on servers. And we start at earth-like planet. Build a green energy base (always) and save uranium. We always struggle with manual mining and try to devise a wheeled miner (because wheels save alot of energy) and most likely fail due to pistons/rotors/wheels/rovers not working as they should (in our opinion) and get us frustrated. Most likely taking a break after and return a few weeks later.

(Introduction is over)

From what we understand blocks are kinda overweight even for small grids. A cockpit weighs 1tonnes and a normal car in real life weighs about 1-2tonnes with engine and everything. Which makes it almost impossible to make a speedster because even if you lower suspension strength the smallest bump will send your vehicle flying (Because of airshock, if you close it, it's better) and the landing is almost always going to destroy your vehicle, kill you in the process. Also lack of presets for suspensions (AKA transmission box) makes it very tiring to use rovers. Because even if we try to make toggles on quickbar for strength,friction and power; the increment and decrement is either alot or too little. I tried to make a transmission based on timer blocks but failed because you can't make a timer block increment/decrement a suspension setting enough or you need to use a very high number of timer blocks, making your rover made out of timer blocks instead of armor blocks. Also heavier vehicles (Like mining rigs or cargo transport rovers) almost always need to be covered by wheels on the bottom side because if one or two wheels stop touching the ground; you can't drive your car any further. Also suspension being side-installed is another frustration on our side.

-Suggestions about current regular SE-

Suggestion regarding wheels and small grid wheeled vehicles;

1- Make small grid blocks a little bit lighter.

2- Transmission; Presets for wheel suspensions OR adjustable increment/decrement for wheel stats by hotbar, allowing timer blocks to proc one setting more than once would be also acceptable since then we can use timer blocks to make our own transmissions. (Like when timer block 3 is triggered; it increases power by 2 increments, friction by 3 increments, lowers strength by 2 increments etc)

3- Suspensions shouldnt be straight line in placement. Their wheel connection point should be lower than the connection point to the chassis. And a little bit of other dimensional movement should be allowed. Only Y axis displacement doesnt cut it, it should be able to move slightly forward and backward when necessary as well, outside of steering. These would fix the problem of vehicles being wedged to some extent I believe.

Suggestions about pistons and Rotors;

1- Pistons go clang when you connect 2 or more small grid pistons together to make a column. It even goes unstable if you connect large grid pistons together (more than 4). Only workaround to this we found was to make the pistons share inertia tensor and be connected to a static grid. Which makes you unable to build moving rigs with extandable/retractable parts that gives you enough clearance when you need it (Piston mining rover failures). I can't make any suggestions on this part but maybe make pistons not connect to each other but form and make a one giant single piston instead of multiple pistons and multiple subgrids when connected to each other?

2- rotors feel somewhat powerless at points, I understand being so small for smallgrid you'd expect it to be weak, but when you need some sort of strength for it; you need to open experimental mode to increase the strength over 9000! Why not make a stronger rotor variant that is a little bit more bulky? Also connecting 2 rotors to the same block is a pain because you cant make it without adding extra blocks to one side after aligning the rotor and cutting the head. Maybe make the building of rotor without head at first so we can add the head later?

-Suggestions over Overhaul-

1- Hydrogen engine needs throttling. It chews through ice if you let it be.

2- Gravel should be given use except reactor component. We decided to not ditch stone we get while mining other ores now since it would give us some sort of resource as well, but we almost always end up with more gravel than anything we mined for. How about cement blocks that can be made with Ice and Gravel, or add iron as well for conductivity between grids, and make it static only (Like wind turbine) so our bases can be more efficient in building the husk of it?

3- Low amount of encounters for PvE content makes the game feel hollow. Only thing for us to do without raiding the occasional cargo ship was to mine and build. We would try the never surrender scenario but from what I heard it also has a finale. So we decided to not try that but rely on the PvE content mods. We need some sort of PvE overhaul :( Contact some of the modders that do PvE content for SE and make a collaboration in terms of adding more PvE content to the game perhaps?

-Overall we enjoyed the test, miniature starting craft gave us our first challenge. Needing to progress through blocks to open up new assemblers and refineries to get the stuff we need was a nice niche. But after all that we ended up on our usual base, somewhat late this time tho. But we liked how it is not always better to land in a place you want your base in and dismantle the lander, build a base with the salvage. Progression tree could be tweaked a little bit. Needing to build a landing gear for a wheel was somewhat confusing. Why would I want a landing gear if I was going for a wheeled vehicle?

I hope my thoughts are somewhat useful to you and gives you some sort of idea to make space engineers even greater than it is today. Which we all know, is already great.