Efficient Capital Ship Design Ideas :

Ok, so it might be a while before the large weapons are working. But when they are, I've been thinking about what an effective design might be for a large warship. Assuming equal resources as your opponent, you obviously want as many guns as you can possibly cram into your warship. You also want as many of them opening up on your enemy as possible to take them out before you are destroyed.

So I thought about it a little bit, and realized that a "pyramid" design meets these goals. Essentially, the ship is just a giant pyramid, tapering to a point at the nose. If you are facing another warship, you will try to point the nose at the target.

When the nose is pointed at the target, all guns on the ship except for the ones in the rearmost ring and the dedicated side guns should have a firing solution on the target.

I don't know how far the large weapons can elevate, but assuming it's limited, there's some recessed side guns that can shoot at enemies coming from the side.

The ship's forward engines are at the back, and there's more surface area there (so it isn't efficient to armor it all that thick because that will increase the mass of the ship), so the last "ring" of guns is all facing the rear. So, any enemies at the rear will be facing an entire ring of guns, about 10-20% or so of the ship's total firepower.

If you have to flee an opponent, though, you obviously want to do so with your nose aimed at your opponent.

Here's a visual aid for what I had in mind. Does anyone else have an idea that is better? Predicted Effectiveness is the goal here, doesn't matter if it looks cool.

 

I could convert the forward launch tubes to fire warheads instead of breach pods.

 

Inefficient from maneuverability standpoint, limited space for frontal and side thrusters without losing possible weapon space.

 

You might have some firepower diverted for both side and back defense, but considering you are so fire focused in the front and the pyramid design you will face issues against lighter warships that put maneuverability ahead of alpha damage. A bigger point of issue for you however would be with smaller fighters that would pick apart the bigger defensive gaps you'd have. When I think capital ship I think of a large vessel that takes into consideration it must fight other capital ship, corvette class ships, and ward off fighters until it can scramble its own on board fighters to fully repel them.

After all to me Capital ship means "I'm the big dog in the yard and you're gonna give me the attention I deserve in this fight or regret it."

 

Well, this design assumes the game will continue to allow you to cram a big ship full of gyroscopes or give it enough engines for turning that you can turn relatively rapidly. So any significant threat you plan to turn the ship to track it. If "one man snub fighters" are attacking you do have a few guns dedicated to covering every angle.

 

A radial-symmetry design, which this pyramid also qualifies as, is also useful because you can use conveyors to attach gun ports to 4 sides of a Large cargo container filled with ammo. However, even using 3 sides - top, side, and bottom - makes it easy to work into something like a cross-shaped pyramid. Using 3 sides in a "corner" configuration may also create a more focused threat cone for hitting fighters.

More data on gun rotation and firepower is definitely needed, though.

 

Hi wont most your turrets be destroyed by the thrusters behind them?

 

it would be now but I made that before thruster damage was enabled

I got newer ships though

Code:

 [IMG]https://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/468681270800564790/B4A855E40C5105B104E64741400D2B3B384EA099/[/IMG]  [IMG]https://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/468681270799077535/8EB828E000AC01235AE5205E045EFE9CBC74DDD7/[/IMG]  [IMG]https://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/468681270771611108/A5C0ABDBE35328573F955419C612A004E74F6446/[/IMG]  

I guess we can all build spherical ships instead

 

You also have to take into account your ships ability to take hits. A small ship crammed with guns could be easily killed if they are all crammed together in a twist of cargo containers and conveyers

 

Did you take into account the fact that turrets have a cubic hitbox of 3*3*3 large blocks ? If you put thrusters behind that hitbox the thrusters' jet will hit the hitbox and be thrown back, destroying large portions of your ship. I had this issue with a small mining ship fitted with two frontal drills and thrusters just behind the drills' hitboxes : https://forums.keenswh.com/post/low-ceiling-death-6818388?pid=1282065041#post1282065041

 

The Pangolin was made 17days before the thruster update. the green borgish ship was a few days before. The red/black ships with almost random geometric armour are the only ones where ive had to take into account the 3x3x3 box.

 

Acknowledged. Anyway that borgish ship looks cool

 

I think an efficent battleship in se would looks like this:



- same thrust in every direction
- same weapons in every direction
- same armor in every direction
- multiple backups (reactor...)
- optimum space use in SE

 

You remind me of the Borg.

 

Because it IS a borg ship, dude

 

The Borg knows the business

 

Most of the time you'd prefer to have more thrust in one specific direction. The weapons problem is similar: with decent speed you can hardly meet an opponent that can generate good enough intercept vector while attacking from sideways - they will most probably end up behind your stern. So, big guns for bow and stern, smaller (anti-fighter) on the sides.

 

Spherical ships?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=240269231

 

The countermeasures that Arron from LastStandGamers posted was awesome. It was so effective, that I think weak armor sides for capital ships can be compensated for by creating a decent debris field. You could spread debris in those directions and leave your very heavily armored side open with guns blazing. It would also be a good defense for a mobile platform or carrier type capital ship. Engage your countermeasures, spin to spread the field, then park and let the small fighters go to work.

Large mass driven devices would get through easily, but those can be avoided quite easily with an agile ship.

 

Debris field have a critical flaw. If the capital ship is accelerating (which is helpful to dodge incoming fire), it will almost immediately leave it's debris field behind. Of course, I guess if the capital ship is slow to accelerate enough, you might as well just coast in a space battle and hope you've got enough guns and armor to win.

 

I think the perfect ship design is highly circumstantial and depends on the weapons and defensive devices in the game.

For example, atm. a directional ship with heavy armour on the front will outclass the cube design, as you can easily keep facing the cube because of the gyro's strength. (You will hit the speed limit before you can outflank a big ship with a hundred gyros.)

Also, the only weapons we have fly in a straight line, thus making a massive frontal armour highly effective. This might change if you have some kind of "swarm rockets" which strike random points along the ships hull.

 

That's what the "pyramid" design is about. You keep turning to face the cube, and all weapons on the pyramid can hit the cube. In the cube's case, at most 3 faces of the cube will have a weapons solution on you.

So if your ship has exactly the same number of total weapons, each second you'll do double the DPS with a pyramid ship. Worse, a space battle is a rapidly collapsing situation. Suppose each ship can take 1000 points of damage, and weapons online are proportional to damage taken. One ship does 200 DPS and the other does 100.

Then, taking 1 second timesteps, the battle would go like :

Ship 1 Ship 2
Health DPS Health DPS
1000 200 1000 100
900 180 800 80
820 164 620 62
758 151 485 48.5
707.9 141 317 31.7
676.2 135.24 176 17.6
658.6 131.6 40.70 4
DEAD!
I'm aware that this game, it depends on more factors than just this. But it's a good approximation : assuming both ships are evading somewhat, and both pilots are spamming their weapons aimed at the center of the enemy ship, and those weapons that hit are spread more or less evenly across the enemy ship, the battle would go about this way.

Basically, a 2:1 advantage in DPS quickly escalates into a HUGE victory by the ship with more damage in a game where taking damage decreases how much damage you do in return. Most video games, your guns continue to work at 100% until you're dead. In this game, if your ship's armor is about half etched away, probably about half your guns are dead as well (assuming you are taking hits more or less evenly)

 

Resistance is Futile, prepare to be assimilated... Might be a little bit beyond the scope of SE, but yeah either cubes or (eventually) spheres would be the most efficient for combat purposes due to surface area, but aesthetically it's just no fun to work with.

 

Most efficient? Yes. Most effective? That's another story. It doesn't matter how efficient your ship is if it can't complete it's task properly.

A pyramid might be a very good design offensively because it can dish out the maximum amount of damage simply due to its shape. However, it's a terrible design defensively because your opponent can just blast off all of your weapons without doing much damage to the armor itself, not to mention how much easier it is to just punch through the most vulnerable location on the ship - typically the tip of the pyramid. Not to mention how much trouble you're in if an enemy gets behind your ship somehow.

On the other hand, a cube or sphere is a very good design defensively because all of your vital components are located smack in the center of your ship where they're hard to get to - you can just rotate damaged areas away from the enemy at no penalty because everything is equally heavily armored. It sucks offensively, though, because your weapons will have either a very limited firing arc so as not to compromise the armor integrity or get blasted off because they're mounted outside the armor with little or no protection.

 

Too early to speak of an efficient design , we miss information on how weapon will behave on large ship.
And we need to consider the possibility we get drone ship down the road in a few months every capital ship will need drone to defend itself.
Need an industrial room aswell for repair , engine room well covered with armor , lot of gyro of course for manoeuvrability and lot of thruster for speed.
Storage room so it can loot the battlefield once the battle is over.

Also any capital ship will need a large conveyor network to support in material and ammo any sector of the ship.
We need to consider boarding issue would be more interesting in faction warfare to capture large capital ship so a crew will be needed or some some of interior defences system against infantry and soon war machine with wheel that will act like little tank.
Some people see capital ship in SE like they are in Eve Online but your need to forget about DPS and Tanking , SE will bring a new kind of PVP , it wont be a war of number.

 

Cube can hit you with 5 faces at a time.

 

How do you figure that?

 

If the cube is small enough and your weapons exposed enough (which would give them essentially a ~100 - 110 x 360 degree firing angle), you could get the four sides parallel to the target and the head-on face all shooting at once. Of course, this means your guns are going to get blown off with superficial damage to the armor of your ship, so that's probably not a good idea.

 

But if the cube is massive its only going to be 3

 

Or you could like... just not get hit.
High-speed lightweight design, lots of Large Rocket Launchers... Basically a flying thruster with some light armor.
Dive-bomb the enemy ship with either kinetic weapons or rockets... or both at the same time. If your reactors or thrusters gets hit, you'll have enough speed to carry you out of range on a different angle than the enemy ship.