Thin Plating

Thin plating is a sheet of material having the same surface area as one side of a standard block, but 1/50th as thick as a block. This makes it much more resource-efficient at the cost of structural integrity. Thin plating may be fabricated from any element the player can mine from an asteroid or any compound the player can refine from asteroid ore in an ore refinery.

One potential application of thin plating is in cooling. For instance, one could use thin plating to construct a heat-conductive tank containing coolant around a fusion reactor. The tank's thin walls would allow heat to transfer more easily than blocks. The coolant could then be cycled through a pipe network  by a pump  that moves it from the tank to radiator fins (which could also be constructed of thin plating), thereby cooling the reactor.