Ship Architecture

Players will interact with the world primarily through their space ship, so the architecture of this space ship ultimately determines the player’s capabilities in the game.

A ship’s internal architecture revolves around two networks: a power network and a data network, alongside the ship’s ability to dissipate heat. Functionality and properties of ships stem from attaching modules to these networks. As an analogy, imagine the electrical and data networks in an office building, where a variety of appliances can be plugged in to solve a myriad of tasks.

The most fundamental modules are the ones that drive the networks. These are the Power Core module for electrical power and the Central Processing Unit module for processing power, respectively. The capacity of these two modules plays the most critical role in determining which other modules can be integrated into a ship, as well as the amount of heat generated by the system. Their performance directly shapes the ship’s capabilities and limitations.

• Power Core modules - Fuel is burned in the power core to generate energy per second, measured in Watts (Joules per second). Each power core has a maximum Wattage which cannot be surpassed. In calm situations, the core will typically work at only a fraction of its capacity to remain in a safe range. However, players will have the freedom to increase the power production by overheating the module and incurring degradation by burning more Fuel. Choosing when to run hot contributes to the contextual strategy of the game.

• Central Processing Units - Processing power is required to run codified programs through the game’s electrical and mechanical objects. For example, if a 3rd party developer creates custom program code that a turret runs on, the program would have some compute requirement, and would run on the CPU. These CPUs are measured in Gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second). Generally the CPU power of spaceships can be increased with the expenditure of energy and a considerable increase in basic heat generation.