McDuff wrote:But... they won't be producing any watts. They'll be producing arbitrary numbers which don't matter, except as they relate to other arbitrary numbers. You could plug anything in there in the UI and all it would mean is "X shots from this laser knocks down Y amounts of shield" or "F quantity of fuel lets you perform G amount of travel."
The most powerful ships and stations will produce power that's greater on some ratio to the least powerful ones. Whether that's 1000W or a bajillion Uberwatts is really neither here nor there. What matters is the ratio, not the units.
Well said and endorsed.
What really matters is how things compare relative to each other. This is what I was talking about a week or two ago with the 'fundamental constants.' They ultimately control the answers to things like "how strong is a shield relative to a weapon," "how much energy does shielding cost compared to thrust," etc. Basically all the different forms of "energy" in the game (thrust, dps, production, research, shielding, etc.) have conversion factors that determine how they relate to other forms of energy.
This means that the properties of the universe can be easily modified by modifying the fundamental constants. You can very easily swing the balance of energy such that DPS is a very cheap form of energy, making it a much more 'aggressive' universe (because destruction is relatively easy). Likewise, you could swing the balance to integrity, resulting in a universe where destruction is a much more difficult means of action, because defense is relatively cheap.
Those are interesting questions to think about, but keep in mind that, ultimately, they are not hard-coded and can be changed as you like by tweaking just a handful of fundamental constants.
Other than that, the only real question is a question of relative magnitude. How powerful is the most powerful weapon compared to the least powerful? In a universe where research is not asymptotic (as the default universe will be), that question is ill-formed. The better question is 'how does energy scale with magnitude?' In a universe where a weapon of twice the strength only 'costs' twice as much energy, we would expect to see extreme teching-up and rampant tech races. At the other extreme, we could have a universe where a weapon of N times the strength costs infinitely much energy (e.g., there is an asymptotic hard-limit on the maximum attainable strength of a piece of equipment that can never actually be achieved (think: similar to the concept of asymptotic speed limit in our universe at speed of light)). In the defaults I will probably specify somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 (quadratic) energy scaling.
As for what kind of technology is actually powering the equipment in the game, that will mostly be left to your imagination, although there will be 'hints' in the grammars that will be used to generate names for the equipment. Again this is something that you can change at your discretion (replacing all tech names with Heisenberg-related ideas, for example
).