Backpack building should be less efficient

I'll admit I'm not a fan of backpack building in general as a concept, it's space magic as I've said above. Definitely prefer the SE1-style production chain (so far). Refineries should refine, smelters should smelt also.

My point here is that if we're going to get backpack building as a feature, it should be much less efficient than the same work done at large energy hungry production stations.

I've been back in SE1 a lot lately and after that backpack building feels like a cheat code or a state between 'survival' and 'creative'. Just too OP.

I would 100% prefer proximity to storage as a mechanism for building vs. backpack building, if you wanted to give your space buddy a little logistics drone that you could deploy (or that deployed when you were near a friendly grid) and it would follow you and 'automagically' pulls components you needed while building (with a time delay compared to having it handy) out of storage in range, I would absolutely support that.

The primary equation in either case though is 'convenience vs. efficiency' The local convenience store might have the item you want and it's a lot closer, but it's gonna be more expensive. Backpack building should take more raw materials to make the same item than using finished goods, or if you pull items out of inventory, that should have a time delay (slower) compared to having the stuff in your pack.

If we're keeping backpack building devs, the more I think about it the more I think that it needs to take twice as much material (and time) to do anything from the backpack, vs. done at an actual production station or having the materials on hand in your backpack.

i.e. there should be some incentive to migrate from pure backpack building to processing raw materials in a base. Currently that incentive is only 'you can't make that in your backpack', which really isn't a good motivation.

Yeah, a loss of raw materials make sense.

I don't mind a few 'shortcuts' to processes, but definitely they need to encourage (by game mechanics) people to use the right manufacturing process to make things. I'm curious if the 100 item build limit is a reflection of the idea to 'just use backpack building' to fill in the larger scale building.

i suspect the 100 item build cap is a place holder to limit game instability. i have no doubt it will change as the game gets further into its development. but right now, it makes sense to try and slow things down.

Fair point, it's easy to assume what we see now is final game logic and obviously it isn't.

Interesting. I'd like it if the starting 'jetpack' was atmospheric/ion with the hydrogen boost. Meaning, you can't climb out of the atmosphere but it runs on batteries in gravity and can move (gently) in space via ions (also battery) but you have the limited hydrogen boost in both cases.

This is mostly a headcanon issue for me, because I'm used to SE1 hydrogren jetpacks where it always consumed hydrogen fuel. Since they don't unless boosting it feels weird to say they're hydrogen jetpacks that have unlimited fuel unless boosting??

The other benefit is that you wouldn't be able to use the jetpack to fly off a planet unless you possibly boosted with a few of the reserve bottles?

Yes, I like the idea of an atmospheric thruster. Since the system I proposed is modular, it could be implemented as one of the upgrade modules—a backpack-mounted atmospheric thruster. It might even perform better than ion thrusters in an atmosphere, so that's something worth considering.

If the altitude module isn't well received or doesn't fit the gameplay, it can simply be removed thanks to the modular design.

By the way, in the system I proposed, the hydrogen propulsion isn't just a temporary boost. It's a module that provides a full hydrogen jetpack. Of course, it should come with trade-offs—for example, it could have a risk of exploding if it's damaged during combat or overheats.

My main thought for the pack being that it has all three thrust types but most of the work is done by electrical systems (atmospheric in planet and ion in space. They're slow by last a long time as long as suit power holds. Hydrogen for short fast boosts.

The primary reason is something like this would prevent the jetpack from (at the start) being a way to launch yourself into space. Theoretically with enough hydrogen refills you could make it, but not right away

I'd be interested in a backpack drone interface for your base that if you're near a drone base station, it can go fetch resources for you out of base storage (if the drone base station is connected to that grid via conveyors) so that the backpack building is fetching the materials you need out of grid inventory in real time, though perhaps much more slowly (2x) than having the materials in your backpack already. This would seem more realistic than being able to take ore and turn it into finished goods in a 3x2x1 (feet) backpack that also has thrusters, oxygen/hydrogen tanks and a battery pack.

Plus can store 8 tons of materials!?!?!!

Indeed, no issues of the concept of backpack building, just need to refine (see what I did there?) a little.

I'd actually be even more partial to the drone station idea that feeds your backpack from nearby grids that have a drone station attached. So if you have it nearby in a grid storage you can build with it (with a delay).

Hopefully 50+ votes is enough for some consideration :)

There may be some limits to what they can do to compact some components to keep with some level of realism. True, we're carrying a backpack that is a jetpack, oxygen supply, blast furnace and 3d printer capable of doing micro-circuitry, while able to carry 8 tons of cargo, so realism is largely out the window. That being said, going more in the direction of unrealistic is a bad thing for an engineering-themed game, not better.

I'd hope that they would stick to some quasi-realistic yields of ore to...iingot (bring back ingots! It allows us to recycle components back to a starting state). Yields being how much of ore to make how much ingot.

Random example: Hematite is probably what they're depicting with their 'iron ore', it has about a 60-65 yield, i.e. there is an ~40% reduction in mass and ~45% reduction in volume. i.e. 1.6 tons of hematite = 1 ton of iron (in ingot form).

Somehow the backpack then processes the raw iron into steel on the fly, which means an additional ~5% reduction in mass while removing impurities.

<nerd>

My point is that the backpack is way oversubscribed feature-wise to the point where it's hard to suspend disbelief, If the components follow with unrealistic mass/volume, it would send the game farther away from 'space engineering' and into 'space magic'

I've been more a fan of the idea of fetch and carry drones that (invisibly) keep the space buddy supplied with materials from nearby storage as our 'backpack building' feature. The close you are to your grid/storage, the more efficient and faster the welding gets (drones have a shorter round trip), you can always carry the raw materials and have the fastest result, but if you're near one of your storage grids (and have the drone block, which would be a simple block to build and connect to your inventory). This way you could shrink the backpack capabilities on your space buddy to a much more realistic levels. You could even have the construction blocks be demand based, so that as you're welding something if you're missing a component, the system could automatically kick off the construction of missing components before they get dumped on a drone to be delivered to you (with added latency).

Adding volume as a consideration for inventories again would help alleviate this, giving balancing options against mass (ability to lift off, inertia) and volume (acting as the new old new hard limit for inventory capacity). Ore is exceptionally dense stuff, and inventory mass already impacts jetpack responsiveness, so ore having an outsized effect on inertia for how much you can carry at a time would be a good trade-off.

Yeah, having considerable time on SE1, I absolutely see how backpack building simplifies early game experience. It's handy, but it's also immersion breaking (for me). The backpack is too overloaded in functionality. Not saying take it out, simply asking that it use more resources than doing it the 'normal' way.

If you think about it this way, you're trying to teach the production cycle to new players. However, what you teach them from the moment they step out of their escape pod is that 'oh, my backpack builds stuff'. Then, just as they're getting used to the backpack doing everything, it suddenly stops doing everything. Now you have to (as a new player) figure out what things my backpack will do and what things I need other blocks to build. Wouldn't it actually be better learning experience to start with 'you need to make blocks to build everything'? Would it be so terrible if the survival kit made these basic things (maybe it even had a drone that fed you stuff to simulate backpack building?) and you had a survival kit in your escape pod?