i think there should be no strict relationship between the size of the assembler and the size of the produced object.ThymineC wrote:Oh, assemblers, my bad! I was thinking of production modules. Production modules will always be bigger than the object being produced, because they're produced inside of them. Assemblers will always be smaller than the object being produced, because they form the core of whatever's being produced.Hyperion wrote: I agree, assemblers should be smaller than modules, but what the assembler creates should be quite a bit larger than an assembler. This is in fact somewhat necessary, because if an assembler had to be larger than what it created and the production module larger than the assembler, the baseline production module would be the absolute largest thing you could build, and leads to a bit of a puzzle as to where the first production module came from...If we say reduced an assembler to say 5% of the product’s volume, you could have a 3000m^3 capacity production module produce an assembler for something that is 60,000m^3 (perhaps the percentage could be a researchable upgrade)
i imagine production modules being 2 different parts, an big empty bay with a few transfer beams on one or more sides and the actual factory building the parts that get transferred into the bay to be assembled by the transfer beams.
because thats pretty much consistent with what josh said, that big ships and stations are constructed externally through drones and transfer beams.
this would make a nice split.
you may assign some space of your ship as the "construction bay", basically assigning volume like a cargo bay.
and on top of that you install production modules that do the actual work.
so you may have an large bay, but an small production module, builting slowly but surely big things
or an small bay but large module, building small things very fast.
this would also allow to pool construction capacity inside a ship, where you may have multiple production modules assembling the same object in a bay.
so you'd have nice, easily understandable relationships between stats:
bay size -> maximum size of objects to be assembled
number of production modules -> maximum amount of objects you can assemble simultaneously
quality of production modules -> throughput of resources, aka how fast you can build