Computer blocks and Automation

I've been messing around with the AI blocks in SE1 today and they've given me some thoughts.

I think rather than having a bunch of different physical blocks on your ships that provide automation by working together, I think that automation should be handled on a grid-wide scale and get powered by the "computing power" resource that is available on a ship, that is provided by computer blocks (which I imagine would look like server racks for the larger version or just like a motherboard with some smaller computer chips coming out of it for the smaller version for drones). The computer blocks consume power and produce computational power for the entire grid.

In the grid's control panel, there would be a new tab, automation, which allows you to automate certain tasks, like opening or closing doors for people, running and coordinating production blocks for maximum efficiency, conserving power by turning off lights when they're not needed, QOL stuff like that, with each QOLfeature taking up computing power. But it would also have a couple of far more important roles, such as controlling turrets, managing the inventory system so resources are getting where they're supposed to be, running apps on LCD screens, and if the ship in question is a drone then controlling the entire ship. The more you have the computer doing the more computational power you need to do it, potentially requiring multiple computer blocks for either a sufficiently big ship with fairly basic automation or a smaller ship with massive automation.

As an additional thing here, rather than having multiple different automation blocks for a drone to change behaviour you would just have multiple different profiles, each with their own CU cost, in the control panel, and then you'd have a master profile for selecting different profiles under various conditions, with its own CU cost being dependant on how many conditions its checking for swapping profiles, meaning that a profile you swap to by pressing a button or using the control panel doesn't contribute to CU cost. If for whatever reason the current CU cost is greater than the CU available then actions start taking longer to trigger, and automated movement gets more sluggish and slow to react to changes. The idea being that the computer is attempting to do the more complex automation in its entirety, but its taking longer to process things.

The benefit of this is that it unifies automation into a single interface, rather than needing to quickly move between different blocks as you're setting up automation, which makes it more intimidating and confusing to do, having it all sorted into a single interface should make things more straight forwards to learn and do. It should also make it easier to have more complex automated control since you would be able to see and manage all of the task automation done by timers, and sensors at the same time as well. You could even set it up so buttons (and possibly other interfaces: https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/45838-advanced-interfaces-buttons-lcd-screens-ect) tie into this as well with the button being able to be configured as it is now, or being able to be configured to raise a certain flag that the automation can see and do stuff in response to.

As an aside if this does get implemented then I think that computer blocks are the only blocks that should have ownership like in SE1. If there are no computer blocks on a grid (computer blocks on docked grids don't count) then all blocks on the grid are unowned. If there is 1 or more computer blocks, then the person who owns those computer blocks owns every block on the grid. If someone attempts to build a computer block on the grid, and the first computer block has permissions shared with that person then they can, but the block ownership defaults to whoever the initial owner of the computer was. If someone who doesn't have permission tries then their newly built computer will short circuit (welding progress is set behind the computers and the computers are removed from the block as some light smoke clouds come from the device.) This would make taking control of a disabled ship easier since you just need to find and hack the computers, unlike currently where you need to manually hack even each individual light, but it wouldn't be the same as being able to hack an entire ship from any block, since your computer realistically speaking should be pretty well defended pretty far inside of your ship.