A confederation of servers for managing the Space Engineers subspace network.

The Subspace Coalition is founded on the goal of providing a standardized union of servers with shared mods, rules, and connections to a centralized site. This will allow for the expansion of Space Engineers multiplayer into a large star map of interconnected sectors, with each server being a sector.

The Concept

So, I hope everyone has seen http://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/2dhzzq/subspace_drive_prealpha_crossserver/, a WIP subspace drive plugin. And I hope everyone has read the description of a trans-server warp drivehttp://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/27ir9r/concept_warp_drive/. What I propose is using the former to help make the latter a reality, and thus changing the scope of this game dramatically.

The Problems

Sadly, there has been some very valid criticism of this point from much of the community over whether or not this should be implemented in vanilla, and many good points have been raised against it. Mostly:

1. Administrator/creative abuse. Pasting enormous creative-made ships and/or stations into servers would kill the use of this for survival. Additionally, administrators abusing tools to delete ships in their servers in real-time, as a sort of cruel plugin-based defense.

2. What happens to the server when the last player warps out? The game is currently unable to handle this situation and the devs shouldn't waste time trying to force it.

The Solution

Now, I propose a solution. As soon as the hotfix arrives and multiplayer is in a playable state again, all of this can be implemented and solved. I propose creating an organized network of dedicated servers which wish to opt-in to support the use of the warp drive on their servers and connect to others in the network. This solves these problems:

1. Administrator/creative/easier game setting abuse is solved. Only trusted servers with administrators willing to comply to an agreed survival setting will be added as new nodes to the network.

2. The servers are all dedicated, so this will be a non-issue.

If we as admins standardize our server settings and don't allow cheating, we can create a subspace network and bring server-warping capabilities to them. How would one choose where to warp to? How would one know what's going on/what are nearby servers? Well, all the ship data is stored on a webserver in that plugin. This can be used to create graphic online maps. We can create webs of warps, attach servers together in certain ways, and make a very pleasing web interface map for browsing the universe we create.

Autonomy of Servers

Beyond complying to the survival settings and a universal list of mods (all of which agreed upon by the administrators), servers are free to manage themselves however they'd like. It adds diversity and makes the network of sectors interesting! Warp into an empty world of complete darkness, or a world brimming with asteroids and life.

Subspace Coalition[www.subspacecoalition.com]