Shipshape Sanity
Reduces the mass of purely decorative ship parts to 1. Reduces the mass of the HopeTech Hab Cross Brace & Hab Spine. Adds a new ship engine for aesthetic purposes.
Games are supposed to be fun. But what’s so fun about adding tons of mass to your ship, just to make it look good?
Decorative parts don’t give your ship any advantages in the game, so why is the penalty for adding them to your ship so steep?
THIS MOD…
– Reduces the mass of all strictly decorative parts to 1.
– Reduces the ridiculous mass of the HopeTech Hab Cross Brace and HopeTech Hab Spine. However, because both of those parts add to your ship’s hull strength, the Hull bonus was reduced to one-fifth the original and the mass was likewise reduced to one-fifth, rounded up: 1 and 3, respectively.
– Adds a “new” engine to be a better aesthetic match for the Slayton Aerospace SA-4000 series engines.
Why the Spine/Cross Brace had 14 mass is beyond me. Internally, they add nothing to the aesthetic of the ship, they don’t add storage, they don’t add workbenches, they don’t add crew… and they are significantly smaller than ANY other hab. WHY DO THEY WEIGH SO MUCH???
The Cross Brace looks pretty beefy, true, but if you compressed the Cross Brace or Spine into a cube, and did the same with any other hab, I guarantee the other hab would be bigger; despite that, the Cross Brace and Spine have more mass by far!
Not any more.
Another feature is that this mod adds a “new” engine to match the Slayton Aerospace SA-4330. There are six versions of this engine (left, right, and not-middle, plus upside down versions of each of those), but what you would expect to be the middle sections are asymmetrical, so you can’t create a 3×2 bank of engines. Without resorting to mesh creation, the closest fit for a middle engine is the Slayton Aerospace SAE-5660… but its power requirements prevent you from using it for the purpose of a six-engine layout.
I’ve added a new “Slayton Aerospace SAE-4330” engine, which uses the mesh of the SA-5000 series engine, with the stats of the SAE-4330, so you can create a more symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing layout.
Anyway, this little mod attempts to restore some sanity to ship-building, allowing you to make your ride look good, without tipping the scales. And it’s totally fair to the NPCs, because their ship parts get the same weight reduction from which you’re benefiting.
I hope this brings some fun to your game and reduces frustration. Honestly, it took me much longer to write this description and compose the pictures than it did to make and test drive the mod.
INSTALLATION: The usual. Extract the ESM file into your game’s data folder, or install it with a mod manager (I only have Mod Organizer, so… yeah). You can add the mod’s filename to your plugins.txt file (as directed in the instructions for Plugins.txt Enabler), or let Mod Organizer handle that for you.
COMPATIBILITY: This mod is NOT compatible with any mod that directly modifies any purely decorative ship parts from the Structural category, the HopeTech Hab Cross Brace, and/or the HopeTech Hab Spine, nor with anything that might modify the mesh of the Slayton Aerospace SAE-5660 Engine.
This mod IS compatible with Outpost Shipbuilder Unlocked ESM, and I highly recommend using it with this mod.
BUGS: None that I know of. If there are any… well, hopefully I can fix them.
Note: Incompatibility and user error aren’t bugs.
NOTICE: This mod was made with an experimental version of xEdit (thank you xEdit, you’re my hero), so back up your stuff and use this at your own risk.