Drone 'frame' - layered construction for rigid ships.

[Lurkily]

My solution to building very large, stable drones, is the idea of building a frame or a chassis.  The chassis would be constructed on a second layer that doesn't collide with, but can be connected to, the layer we use now.  Chassis blocks would be large and unwieldy, requiring good design to use well, but you should be able to connect to any part of a chassis block. (Rather than only X distance from the center, a long block can be used to anchor a long ship.)

These chassis blocks would be a structural weak point as anything damaging them would also deal somewhat reduced damage to every block connected to that chassis piece, based on proximity to the hit. (So if you built your drone around a single chassis piece, a hit to the chassis could damage every part of your ship at once.)  If a chassis part is destroyed, every part attached to it should be destroyed.

The advantage in them would be that any adjacent chassis parts would be treated as a single block for the purposes of physics.  The core should be a chassis part.

The result would be that players would have a set of tools that aren't mandatory (except the core, as it is now,) that could provide a very rigid frame for a large drone.  Parts can be anchored to this rigid frame for solid construction, but the frame blocks are large, and the player will be constrained in design to build around the blocks.  In addition, he'll have to protect them, because damage to them is a serious problem for the entire ship.  In addition, if a chassis block is broken, it could separate chassis parts, breaking a ship's back, and it's rigidity; the chassis itself could become a liability.

I realize that this is a somewhat ambitious suggestion, but I think it's a solid solution to permitting rigid ships that doesn't rely on multi-connections.  If the hierarchical structure of connections is definitely needed to keep physics straight, then this may be a solution.