For those unfamiliar with Space Engineers, basically, you build spaceships. Imagine something combining Kerabal Space Program, Garry's Mod, and Minecraft, with soft-body physics and "terrain" (asteroid) deformation.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is, what if you could do that on earth? Add wheels and keels and wings to the selection of rockets and add a lot of different resources and you've got an awesome game.
... and it would be called "World of Physics" ... or Earth of Physics. Would be cool. I actually thought the other day, if it would be possible to make a chemical reaction simulation based "brewing/forging/mixing" mod. Simply add reaction constrains to all substances added to react the real world way (of course just as a math and index based thing) where the color and substance state (and stuff like breaking, flow rates etc.) would be shown in 3D. Just say you take iron ore(s) into a hi-temp furnace(whyte settable temperature) whyte some cole and do yourselves some liquid iron flowing out(whyte its dropping temperature regarding to its amount and outside temperature) till its solid. Realistic proportions of "waste" material and its props(aether substances too, or just one of predefined wastes) that maybe could be separated too, fluidization and filtration's, weights and other stuff too ... may seem complex and much work to do, but - if it would be realistic enough in some matters, maybe chem. faculties people would reach a hand to it. It could be considered as a lightweight chemistry learning tool too (if there would be a pop-up window option to show some chemical proprieties and possible reactions (added at that time) to see). Or just hardcore fun chem stuff buildup as explosives could be made too (whyte a simple toolbox addition to make the substances into just a C4 bomb whyte some plastic box, glue, electronic pieces as an normal "minecrafting table") .... of course all those things would be just in processor calculated, but the engine could render the shape(even crystals), state(liquid, solid, gaseous, plasma) and reaction effects (bobbles in fluids, sparkles, fire, explosions, plasma state emissions, polarized light refraction(in an additional mod, maybe even for refractometry or opto-spectrometry (would not be so hard to do as their basics are on simple math functions where the substances in mind would have an additional index parameter for that purpose and mixing them would be easy), but lasers would be nice to have - why to heck not ?
) ) and a simple "bottle" or "chem-glass" way to handle liquids ( maybe a surgeon-sim way, but just handling glasses, buckets and rubber tubes
) .... so simply said, a realistic way to isolate substances, mix/reacting and setting on fire or just material sources buildup for a crafting-table and stuff ...
... if that would be then combined whyte a G-mod of some sort, OT would be an epic playground. (lets get some penta-erytrytol "brewed up"
)
