Space Engineers

Space Engineers

Armor Ramps [By UncleSte]
Naetrimus Jan 17, 2016 @ 9:55pm
Component Costs
I'm gonna just say that, I love this mod, and I use it all the time for my ships and stations.

I've been using these armor ramps as part of a mega-atmospheric lander I'm building in survival. Over the weeks that I've been working on that, something has bugged me about these blocks. The cost, in terms of steel plates, seemed rather low to me. So, I did some calculations, comparing the 3x1x1 ramp to the standard 1x1x1 block. I calculated both the surface area and the volume of each block. Here are the numbers I came up with.

1x1x1 Block
Cost (Steel Plates) - 25
Surface Area - 37.5 m^2
Volume - 15.625 m^3

3x1x1 "Armor Ramp"
Cost (Steel Plates) - 26
Surface Area - 63.515 m^2
Volume - 23.4375 m^3

As you can see, from the dimensions, the Ramp is considerably larger, as makes sense. But it only costs 1 steel plate extra. That's using 4% more materials for 150% volume and 169.4% surface area. That doesn't make sense. Where does the extra surface area come from?

Based also on my numbers, I figured that the 3x1x1 armor ramp should cost 42 steel plates. The 42 is based off the difference in surface areas.

I'm not claiming that all the costs should be that. The cost should be figured out for each block individualy, based on the difference in in surface area, compared to the 1x1x1 block. I also chose the 3x1x1 instead of the 2x1x1 to more clearly illustrate the difference between actual cost and realistic cost.

I understand if UncleSte doesn't want to change the costs of all the blocks in his mod. That would be alot of work. And, while it only took a few minutes to calculate this, it was only for 1 block, and some of these have some... odd shapes to them, so it wouldn't exactly be easy to do all that work. I just wanted to point this out, since it was bugging me.