Im upset they are screwing with the potential for realism with the interiors. Optimized cargo racks? What does that mean? Is a normal cargo rack really somehow that ineffecient? How? Why? Its 330X how is that a thing?
The scales of ships have never made any sense, and interiors would certainly expose that if there was any actual detail shown of the optional compartments. But that's a problem which goes
way back before the Panther Clipper, all the way back to - at best - Horizons 2.0 and the SRV, and arguably back to the introduction in the pre-release Betas of medium and large ships which were considerably larger externally than the small ships but didn't have that much more mass or payload.
Yes, a normal cargo rack
is somehow that inefficient, and even the optimised one is still
incredibly inefficient.
A cargo pod is roughly 2m by 1m by 1m, so if you pack them into rectangles and leave a cargo pod's gap between each row so that you can access any individual cargo pod without needing to move any other cargo pods, you need 4 cubic metres per cargo pod (not even the most optimal way to achieve that goal, but good enough to demonstrate the problem). So a size 7 internal can hold 192t using the
optimised racks, so needs 768 cubic metres (or 512 cubic metres for the normal really inefficient ones)
A size 7 optional internal can hold 2 SLFs in "ready to launch" state (and 30 more in some sort of "needs assembly" state). So the smallest it can be in terms of volume is big enough to hold 2 Taipans [1] - which have a bounding box volume of 610 cubic metres each, so that's 1220 cubic metres just for the hangar for the ready-to-launch ships, assuming no need for extra space for moving them to the launch/retrieval platform, and that the other 30 are gravitationally compacted into neutronium when not in use so don't require any space.
In other words, the size 7 optional is already - making some very generous assumptions about the size of the SLF internal, and still allowing more space for the cargo than it really needs - about twice as big as it needs to be to store the "optimised" cargo racks. If you resort to non-magic explanations for how the 30 standby SLFs are stored, it probably has to be about 10-20 times as big as it needs to be for the cargo.
You get a similar issue on the small side with the size 2 internal - which can hold a SRV or a mere four cargo pods.
But even if you ignore comparisons to what else you might fit in that space, it's also the case that a size 7 internal is really small. If we're allocating 768 cubic metres for the cargo pods in the optimised form to allow very fast swapping in and out of any individual pod at the cost of pure efficiency, that can be held within a bounding box roughly 10m by 8m by 8m. That's a bit smaller than a Sidewinder (14m x 21m x 8m). Now compare the size of a Sidewinder and a Type-9 (117m x 115m x 33m). Let's just say that when they gave the Type-9 an extra size 8 optional some years back to make it competitive with the Cutter, they didn't have to worry too much about whether there was any space to fit it...
You've been able to ignore this discrepancy between the various external and (implied) internal scales entirely until now precisely because we
don't have ship interiors that would rub your face in it [2] and because people are generally pretty instinctively bad at visually converting between "bigger length" and "cubically bigger volume" without actual reference points. It's possible that there is an implementation of ship interiors (one, for example, which doesn't allow you access to any optional internals, or anything else which might give you a clue that the ship was 99% empty space) which would let you continue to ignore it. But the scales have never matched up sensibly from day 1. The Type-9 is about 50 times bigger by volume than the Cobra III - but even with the bonus size 8 it got later, only carries about 12 times the internal cargo. All the medium and large ships have huge amounts of unaccounted-for internal space. The Type-9 should carry maybe 3000t of cargo if it was doing so merely as inefficiently as the Cobra III does. A pile of cargo pods the same
size as a Type-9 would contain enough cargo to build an entire Coriolis station in Colonisation with plenty to spare.
[1] Really we should be making these hangar spaces large enough to hold any SLF without remodelling them, so they need to be as wide as the widest (XG-7, 19.8m), as long as the longest (XG-9, 15.3m), and as tall as the tallest (XG-7, 17.2m). Round those measurements up to the next whole metre so that it isn't literally scraping the ceiling and that means a SLF hangar bay must be at least 20x16x18m, so a size 7 internal with two of them must be at least 20x32x18m, or 11520 cubic metres, or a full 2880 cargo pods in an inefficient quick access storage pattern ... before we even start counting where the 30 spare SLFs are going to go. That's already 22 times bigger than the cargo capacity of an actual standard size 7 rack, and still 15 times bigger than the Panther's "super-efficient" racks.
[2] In the same way that we'd clearly had artificial gravity from the beginning in terms of how things were drawn, but it was only with the release of Odyssey that people suddenly went "hey, magnetic boots wouldn't work like that, would they?" because they could actually
see the allegedly zero-G spaces close-up.