How does one go about building big ships?

I'm not concerned with the technical side of things. I've logged around 400 hours in the game and have a good idea of how the blocks work and what functionalities are etc etc.

The thing that I find difficult is the conceptual side of building large ships, such as getting the appearance I want along with all of the functionality without compromising size or aesthetic. What I'm really looking to do is design ships in creative and then bring them into survival. I am also looking to build multiple ships for different roles but I want them to share some common design traits such as using the same colors for armor, lights, and the same shapes and details in the design even if the shape of the ship overall is completely different than the others. But I always find myself overwhelmed and becoming something of a perfectionist when I try to go for large grid ship designs.

Do you start with an exterior shell with the shape you want and then fill in the details; or do you start with all the functional blocks that you want and build armor around that. Do you build modules, and save them and then stitch them together? Do you do sketches or drawings on grid paper to help sort out how component blocks can fit together efficiently?

 

Play Crashed Red ship start, and tinker. modify the wreck. empty out an engine pod to make a hanger. Detach and move the the main hull components around to your liking and merge block them together. look at the hanger now- somethings not to your liking, so modify it. Since you are the admin of your world, goto the Entity List (Alt-F10), and find a derelict- copy it, and paste it to your redship area. continue the snip and weld.

Doing this lets your own particular tastes emerge. It is also good practice on scale and space that is truly needed for your own ship designs. You will get "Habits of design" that is more meaningful than "the ability to download and blueprint someone elses' designs"

Starting with prebuilt examples- where a lot of the alignment and wraparound work is already started, is in my opinion the best way to get experience on large ships when starting out.

 

Well... what's a "big" ship to you? If we're talking 500 meters and up, you can just go for the hull first - you'll have plenty of room left if the ship's supposed to be used in Survival.

It's not really necessary in Creative to do that, but if it helps you focus on that section go for it. Also makes it easier to build and connect in Survival, i suppose.

I just ripped off Star Trek so i always appreciated a nice set of deck plans. I'd say if you have trouble getting a shape right go for grid paper or just measure a sketch.

 

I have several configurations of ship essentials that I tetris-ed together, so i have a variety of ship cores that I just build a hull around. Granted, my ships are all just variations on a box, but they work.

 

With my current Large Ship build, I began with the exterior. I started with the front - [an arrow shape which had to accommodate multiple big battleship turrets] I then switched to doing the bridge tower, then stated the aft section with engines. Then returned to the front - chopped it up - widened it - narrowed it- until I got the profile I wanted - then did the sides for the ship. Chopped up the ship again. shifted bits around. scrapped the fist two attempts at wing sections.

Basically, my advice would be:

1. DON'T be afraid to chop your design up. Even if you have spent hours on a section - if you find it doesn't quite fit with another section - start moving things about or remove it altogether and start anew.
2. DON'T burn yourself out, don't worry about the look of the whole ship, just do bits at a time - if need be move onto other ships occasionally. I have 3 on the go at the moment
3. Copy & Paste is your Friend (when it works)

Here's an old image of my current build [TOP] - refit of an old ship [Middle] - the old large ship which I did get burnt out on and was too afraid to chop up at the time [Bottom]

 

Stage 1: attach legs
Stage 2: make it stand
Stage 3: arm it from head to heel
--- Automerge ---
Stage 2,5 make it walk

Sorry my mistake

 

There are so many things to consider when building big that have nothing to do with appearance or functionality or "aesthetics". Mostly, you have to consider performance. If your ship makes the game grind to a halt, it doesn't matter how functional it is or what it looks like. If you are building a "big" ship because you want a big ship, my advice would be forget it while you still like the game. Big ships come with a set of problems that you will not encounter building ships designed to hold and be operated by a single person. If, on top of everything else, you are going to insist on a particular look then Keen will do everything in its power to thwart that effort. If your concept of Space Engineers is large ships with crews with hangars full of smaller ships then your concept is in conflict with Keen's. As such, you will find it difficult to create exactly what you want. On the other hand, if you can live with compromise you might feel better about your finished product.

Having said all that, over the years I have always said that your agenda for a ship's purpose will decide how it looks. Space Engineers ships tend to be built with a military purpose in mind. Therefore, most "big" ships in SE share some common characteristics:Lot's (and lot's) of thrusters, lots of armor, and lots of guns. Shapes are inspired by WW!! battleships, submarines and aircraft carriers, or they are inspired by ships in other games or stories. Real battleships, etc. look the way they do because they have to. The mission for the ship determines what it looks like inside, and fluid dynamics determine what they look like on the outside. Fluid dynamics makes everything look cool. It's never a choice the designer made. It just has to be. Ships from stories are almost always designed for looks and they will figure out the insides if the plot demands it, otherwise it doesn't matter. So, the real question is what do you mean by "functional?" If it means you want people inside your ship living and doing things then I would suggest building it from the inside out and just letting the outward appearance "happen". Making a ship that "looks cool" and then trying to shoehorn people into it rarely works well.

Back in April of 2014 when SE was just a baby I decided after about 100 hours that I needed a big ship. Here is the ship I built:

One kilometer long from end to end. It's purpose was to provide space for four people to build the ships they wanted to make in preparation for a journey across the system mining everything in our path. Made almost entirely of modded blocks, this ship was a performance nightmare, as Commander Rotal can attest. It wasn't going to win a beauty contest, but it could do what it was designed to do so in my mind it was beautiful. I named it Chilkoot Trail. Google it to find out why.

I never gave up on it and the game continued to improve. About a year and a ton of new mods later she turned into this:

Still only one kilometer long, she now starts to look like her intended role which was "mobile base". The rear decks are now for docking cargo vessels and the forward deck was for mining operations. I had to make the forward deck detachable because the ship was too large to exist in a world in its entirety without crashing the game. This screenshot was one of the rare times the whole thing was in one place.

All these performance issues constantly had me re-thinking what the ship needed to be capable of and what was just fluff. That generally meant that any block that I could not justify as necessary had to go. As such her weight has fluctuated between as little as 120 million kg to as much at 390 million kg. While always on the lookout for cool looking blocks, any block I added had to improve functionality first and if it improved the looks that was a bonus, keeping in mind that my idea of "good looks" is a bit different from the popular norm. This is probably the one thing you will have to ultimately decide on your own. You will have to accept that no one thinks your stuff looks as good as you do. Even if they tell you to your face that what you made looks cool, they're really thinking it could be better. This is why a long time ago I stopped commenting on the way other people's builds look. My motto is if it works, it looks fantastic.

I will say this, though. If you build a ship that looks like a penis it will get good reviews. I don't know why that is. There is no reason to build a ship with that shape in Space Engineers. In fact, if you are building a spacecraft there is no accepted convention as to what shape it should take. You have ultimate freedom to build whatever without constraint, yet the penis seems to be the preferred general structure. I have one other ship that's as old as Chilkoot Trail. It's a drill ship designed to penetrate asteroids. I shaped it like a drill, which in mining terms is a steel rod with a pointy end. I named it Felix Pedro. Google Felix Pedro to find out why. People that have seen Chilkoot Trail might say, "nice ship," but if they see Felix Pedro they seem to really, really like it. I tried to make it not look like a penis, and failed. It is what it is. I'm just saying if looks are important, a penis seems to be a good starting point.

Anyway, over the years I have tried various ways to have Chilkoot Trail perform its intended function, none of which made her any smaller.

In fact, to this day it's an effort to retain the original size. It hasn't helped that the game now has block limits and shape limits. Good news is if I turn off block limits I can still have Chilkoot in a world with other ships and planets and pirates and cargo ships and probably even other players.


I don't know what it will look like when I'm done. As long as it does what it's supposed to do, I don't care.

You just have to start somewhere

 

Define a "large ship" for survival. Define what you want to do in survival.

If all you want to do is maximize the post-scarcity condition, and minimize the amount of work you need to do in building/repairing then you want a very densely packed slug of production and storage blocks mostly self-supported by welders, and then just wrap it in armor. Then you can add some quality of life stuff like a bridge with some LCD readouts and pressurization. I don't even waste time with hangars and stuff like that. I just land my stuff on a flat slab of armor that has some connectors poking through.

Ideally you want it modular so that you can build a core production set, and then build more sets (and add expensive things like grav drives and large ions) as you gain resource.

It'll look like a shitty brick, but it will absolutely dominate in the sense of doing the things you want to do in terms of what meta survival provides.

Anything beyond that and you're basically adding RP/aesthetic building. Both of those things are fine, but then it becomes very much an issue of taste and not an issue of efficient design for gameplay.

Most of the ships people have posted here are "mega/super" class and are absolutely and utterly useless in survival because they aren't worth the sim-speed hit. At the end of the day what limits survival builds is sim-speed, which favours minimalism. Even spamming too many production blocks will eventually tank your sim speed.

 

Hmm. Since only two ships have been posted thus far, and one of them is mine, I might take issue with the term "absolutely and utterly useless".

From day one Chilkoot Trail had a purpose, and it absolutely serves that purpose to this day. Although it's a big ship, it's a lot smaller than many stations I have seen. In fact, part of the reasoning for building her was that at the time I was working on a station that arguably had just as many blocks. My problem was that I knew that if I continued to build this mining station I would use all the ore in the immediate vicinity and when the station was finished and ready there would be nothing left to mine. I would have to build ships just to find ore to mine and bring it back to this spot to refine it. It just seemed more efficient to me to take the facilities to the ore rather than the other way around. Besides, if I happened to find a rich source of ore I would probably abandon the old base anyway.

If Chilkoot Trail is serving a Mothership role for a group of players, it's very likely few other ships would get built, and those ships would be considerably smaller. As it is today, the presence of Chilkoot Trail does not tank sim speed on my potato of a pc. My sim speed seems to be affected more by certain kinds of mods than just her being there. If I have three or four other large grids all in the same spot sim speed will suffer. If they're nowhere near each other it doesn't seem to matter. I suppose if all the ships, including Chilkoot, were armed to the teeth and they were all shooting at each other the game would probably cease to run. If it's just there serving as a base I would say you would have to look elsewhere to find a cause for low sim speed. Chilkoot is a GOOD girl.

 

The short answer is both ways are acceptable, it depends on what works best for you.

I agree most super large ships are not very practical for survival unless you simply want to show off, and yes, it will annoy the rest of the players on the server as you lag everyone out.

Survival and Creative are two very different games. Large ships in Creative are great fun and the more detail the better. Survival is all about doing the most with the least amount of resources.

That said:

Personally, I like to build the outer shell and then fill it in making small edits to the outside as needed. This way you get the look you want and you should have more than enough room inside to do whatever you want. You'll find the opposite issue of, what the hell do I put in all this space.

 

For me a ship gets "too big" when a single engineer cannot reasonably support its infrastructure needs.

Like Ice for the Hydrogen Thrusters, or Uranium for the reactors. Most "mega carriers" and "Base ships" on steam fall into this group- sure they look nice, and are fun to tour around in. but to go to 1x1x1 survival and try to actually operate in the thing- forget it, as it would be a full time job just to maintain/fuel it. And I want a sandbox/serviceable ship, not a job.

But as should be restated; Every Engineer is different. I'm a bit of a minimalist. What most call a small fighter is giant compared to mine- most of which can fit in a single large grid block, the biggest of which is designed to fit through a Raiding Outpost hangar door (I take to heart the loading screen quote: "An Engineer would say the Glass is twice as large as it needs to be"). And in my experience: designing a "cool ship" in creative mode, then projector printing it out in survival mode... is the fastest path to a facepalm emote- when it hits you just how many gigatons of iron and weeks of steel plate production it is going to take (==JOB)

So for me, what ->I<- consider a "large ship" is an Argentavis, Or a flying Death Frisbee Raiding Station conversion. Or a flying Lone Survivor Platform "filled out". Or if we're really talking big scale crazy: an Argentavis grabbing a Raiding Station with a lone survival platform wraparound landing pad Kit-bash:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1354533814

Anything much larger and it becomes a waste of my time and my resources (And most importantly; my interest/burnout levels)... so I stop at this size and then engineer it to make it "optimal". The Puzzle of making a Raiding Station (Or Cylon Base ship stack of 2) a nimble ship that can land on earth and climb back to space is an interesting self challenge in its own right- the mass/thrust/power ratios start to have real impact at that level, and any level more grandiose than that is... the aforementioned useless empty half of the Glass .

I use the Jump Drive to reign in my ambitions: If a single Jump Drive wont get you more than 200km.... too much junk in da trunk, Mr. Self... bring it back a little bit

 

For ME, a ship that can reasonably be supported by a single engineer is called a drone. If it only needs one person it doesn't need anybody. A ship with no engineer aboard is inherently more resource efficient and a total novice could make one in a few short hours. Perfect for survival.

My point is that if you build a ship in Space Engineers that can accommodate an engineer at all, it's bigger than it needs to be. Any ship in Space Engineers that has an inside is automatically too big. Large ship armor blocks are six feet thick. That's why ships that look great on the outside are usually really cramped inside. What that means is that the ships you can get away with represents a small subset of what can actually be built if your pc has the horsepower.

I understand this and I respect it. I would never attempt to impose Chilkoot Trail or any of my other ships on someone else's server. "Rude" would not be on the short list of things everyone else on the server would call me, and I'd deserve the worst of it.

On my own server, however...

 

These last two posts illustrate how difficult it is to get a straight answer for the OP

Your tomato, His tomatoes and my potato are completely different umbrellas. [oops this isnt the potatoes thread]

Which is a good thing. It reveals the depth of this games' play- that such fundamentally different approaches are equally viable. (I See that I am more FireFly/Millenium Falcon, while @Stardriver907 is more Macross SDF-1)

..That different sandlots are just that- different.

 

I started playing around in survival and I'm building a big ship. I might need to change the world settings though cause I'm concerned about the heat death of the universe arriving before I can refine a quarter mil platinum.

 

Survival really should be renamed "resource management" . One of the advantages of my playstyle is I salvage those thruster components from NPCs.. and the "Kitbash" ship linked above has the merit that I didnt build or mine for a single one of those blocks (Granted its a creative mode kitbash- but replicates an actual survival build of mine)

And I see you've already met the "facepalm" state.

A new quote for the loading screen should be "Over Eagerness leads to Over Regret"

Because one of the "meta" sub games of Space Engineers survival is "Practicality 101" -somehow finding that "sweet spot" between still cool ships and non-wasted gameplay effort/time. And a sub-sub game is "Dont build something you cannot afford to let Clang have His way with in a permanent way" - like KaaBOOOOM!!!!! [autosave]

 

There's a few things that affect how big is 'big'. You really define how big you can really handle.

I can share my way. Most important:

Planning

Start with a pad and paper.

• Role: What do I want the ship to do?
• Profile: What is its profile?
• Inspiration: Is there an inspiration for it?
• Unique: What makes this different from other stuff I've built so far that I would want to build it?

Role is exactly what you want it to do. Light fighter that is agile (change directions) with anti-fighter weapons.

Profile is the total % of mass (unloaded) that certain types of ship modules occupy in the ship. This gives me an idea of the purpose of a ship at a whole. Just some examples of what I might try to balance around:

• Light Military - 30% Armor/Structure, 40% Propulsion, 20% Power, 15% Weapons/Storage/Other
• Heavy Military - 60% Armor/Structure, 20% Propulsion, 10% Power, 5% Weapons, 5% Storage & Other
• Cargo - 25% Armor/Structure, 30% Propulsion,20% Power, 20% Storage, 10% Power, 5% Other

So based off stats, you can make something on graph paper that looks like a radar chart but for: Propulsion, Production, Other, Power, Weapons, Storage, Armor.


Makes you think. Woah, its suffering in an area I didn't really mean to. Then you adjust it. You don't have to be really exact.

Inspiration: Usually tons of inspiration available on Google. Whether a specific sci-fi ship or just a general shape or concept.

Unique: This gives you encouragement to see it through to completion. Gravity gun? Atmosphere to Space capability? This might be several items. (Rail gun, escape pods, carrier, etc.)

This makes everything else much easier and keeps me focused.

Design

Then comes Design. This is sitting down with graph paper usually. Decide how many decks it has. (I usually have 1 deck per sheet of graph paper).

Then go the next steps:

1. Layout - Where rooms are going (with a separate key of the purpose of that room.)
2. Shape - What is its overall shape.
3. Scale - How big I want it to be.

So you may end up with something like this but a bit more basic/liney:


Then I start building, usually the interior rooms first and then the exterior outside it. The building portion is easier (when you're not guessing what you're doing and backtracking all the time as you're changing your mind.) The last steps are decoration/hookups/polishing which are really just techniques anyone can learn over time.

As for the perfectionist side of things:
Flaws give ships personality. If its perfect, it won't grow. As long as you're pleased with each level of 'growth', you're golden. A ship you love is one you'll revisit several times and improve. Always figure out what is 'Good enough' and make it tangible for that session.

 

Again it depends on what is a big ship to you. My go to survival ship I can actually build in a server while respecting other players sim speeds is variations on the Fathom;





Now these are large ships but they do have low block counts compared to what others build and consider "big". The reason I use this design in Survival is because everyone has a role on the ship and there isn't any room or space that isn't used. I found with my survival Agamemnon builds that I had alot of empty rooms that none of the players needed to use or had any actual survival or RP use for which seemed like a waste to me personally and started to outweight the fact the ship was hella fun to fly in and walk around;





All that said I usually decide what I want the ship to do and what it needs. Then I look at building the exterior the way I want it and then having the challenge of fitting everything I wanted into the shell. That's how the Fathom Mk3 was built which is why it will never really have anything added to it again because it doesn't need it. There were repairs and replacements done because its survival and "accidents/attacks" happen but that was fun to do. Hope that helps

 

Your ships are several orders of magnitude larger and heavier than anything I've ever needed in 1x survival, even with 5 people playing, and many hundreds of hours into a world progression. That volume/tonnage/block count is completely and utterly excessive.

Things that lag the game: lots of production blocks, multiple players all doing things, complex physics interactions, spamming of active blocks like tools and turrets when they go active, etc. A big ship doesn't necessarily cause problems when its just sitting there. But the problems become massively apparent the moment anyone tries to do anything, especially in MP with everyone connecting/disconnecting their grids and whatnot.

The point is this: I could stack a ship with 100 large cargo, 100 refineries, several hundred arc furnaces, and 100 assemblers into a form factor that is a fraction of the size and dry tonnage any of these mega ships. That's enough production and storage to suit many many players and it would make the game umplayable due to sim-speed issues. Also, to even make large quantities of production blocks manageable/workable you need to run an inventory script of some sort (TIM, a mod, etc). Those also have heavy overheads.

A ship that is mostly empty space and not crammed full with production blocks is wasteful (and bad engineering). If you look at 99.9% of the "super/mega" size ships on the workshop they look great on the outside but are either 1) loaded with unused rooms and spaces that need to have stuff added or 2) fleshed out with RP facilities like quarters, bridges, secondary bridges, etc, etc. The latter is great for RP, but useless for the core survival meta.

Design for survival, especially for long term games with multiple people (ie 200+ hr campaigns) involves one hell of a lot of optimization just to keep the game running well, while still having quality of life stuff. You constantly have to scrap grids, segregate storage so it doesn't get polled by scripts and generally just do all sorts of upkeep just to keep sim-speed around 1.0. There is no scope for mega building in that context.

It would be wonderful if SE scaled to the point where mega-ships actually worked in terms of survival, and didn't tank out the game. But they simply don't. Actually "playing the sandbox" instead of theory/fantasy crafting makes the limitations with the SE that limit build sizes readily apparent. It a shame really.
--- Automerge ---

You can tell who actually plays extended survival (MP) campaigns, and who theory crafts/designs stuff without putting it through the fun but hellish experience that MP-survival in SE.

Anyone who really plays it out MUST come to the same conclusion. Minimalism wins, all of the time, every time. You'll always be fighting sim-speed decline, when you aren't fighting clang.

My approach is different from yours. I do a lot of piracy but I strip the valuable stuff like ammo, uranium and valuable components from the finds (thruster and reactor bits especially), then I depower the grid and push it off into space for culling by trash collection. Those parts then get welded into self-building ships, where all of the core bits are welder supported, and then I go and weld on an armored hull with a big plate welding ship.

This actually means all my grids are optimized to my liking, but I have minimal interaction with most of the hard work. Selectively grinding is a bit of a pain, but it goes pretty well if you have the high-tier hand tools and you just grind next to a big collector array with a gravity vacuum. I find big grinder setups are just not very useful since most of the mass is steel plate that you quickly start drowning in after you grab a couple of the big NPC ships (a full grind of a military transport is a lot of hull building material for an optimized survival ship).

Also "large" grinder arrays (I mean a mere 10), have caused serious sim speed issues in past versions, not sure how things sit in the current build, I haven't played survival in a while.

 

Its not too bad Tank, if the server is of good quality and you have say 10-15 playing who actually know how SE works you can get some good things going. Fathom was built to a list of specs which included some RP focus such as being able to walk all over the ship with using little or no jetpack and at least having some walkways for inspections hence the lattice work and open areas. The problem about MP is when new players join that don't understand what causes performance issues for all concerned.

 

We managed to turn the topic from "how do I go about it" to "whether I should bother."

@Cyborg_Leopard I will just let my original statement stand. I believe you will have an easier time if you build your bridge and engineering sections the way you need them to be, then add any stuff like crew's quarters that the game does not support but makes it more real for you. Once you decide where all that stuff is going to be you will then be free to surround it all with the armor blocks you need in order to get a shape you find appealing.

Whether or not your ship will run on someone else's server or piss people off if it causes lag is not the point. You clearly want to build a big ship and SE will let you go hog wild if you want. Just remember that the larger it is, the less likely it will be welcome on someone else's machine. If that doesn't matter, build the ship of your dreams.

Most of the very large ships on the workshop were built to that size for the sheer fun of it and there is nothing practical about them, intended or otherwise. It seems to me that Cyborg_Leopard wants to avoid empty spaces and unused rooms and maybe would like to have some of that RP stuff that's useless for survival because he believes if you have a big ship you're not playing survival any more.

What we have not discussed is if you want your ship to be 100% vanilla and whether or not you plan to build it in survival or creative mode. I don't recommend building a very large ship in survival because resources will be an issue. There are modded blocks out there that can significantly reduce the size of your ship and even increase its functionality if you are willing to dig through the thousands of mods that are available. I never bought in to the "vanilla only" philosophy and posting a vanilla only blueprint is easier and more likely to gain popularity than a blueprint that requires seventeen mods. I have posted Chilkoot Trail in the workshop, but I did it as a world instead of a blueprint so that the person that wants it doesn't have to look for the mods as well. That also means it may not work on their machine.

If you have friends with you it's quite possible to build a Chilkoot-sized ship in a surprisingly short amount of time even in survival. That's the key, though. You'll need help.

Here's a screenshot of Yukon, one of my cargo vessels. People that see it call it a large ship. It looks tiny next to Chilkoot Trail

The cargo deck is sized to accommodate vanilla large cargo containers in such a way that they can be actually loaded and unloaded as opposed to just filled and emptied. As with most real life cargo ships, this one has passenger staterooms. 20 of them, in fact. There are also crew quarters, officer quarters, a cafeteria, laundry facilities, showers, toilets and a room for passengers to party in. It does not have refineries or assemblers or useless space. I have two of these and they're the only ships in my fleet that don't have ore detectors. No weapons of any type. She's big but she's about as server-friendly as any ship with mods can be. She was built to resemble a stearnwheel-driven riverboat and that determined the shape. The size was determined by the 3x3 block size of the vanilla large container block that needed to fit on the cargo deck.

And, it does not look like a penis.

This ship causes more performance issues than Chilkoot Trail. One of the culprits is all the glass. The worst offenders seem to be the Mexpex landing gears. They are modded pistons and since the 1.186 update the game no longer likes them. The two yellow things in front on the top are also modded pistons and the game does not like them, either. The game also doesn't seem to like the holographic radar mod that's on the bridge. None of that has anything to do with size. She is about as big as many battleships you will find on the workshop but she has twice the usable interior space and probably weighs less. She can land on a planet but cannot leave without assistance. Her acceleration is not spectacular but she's a cargo ship, not a fighter. She just has to get there.

So, you can make a "big" ship that does not tank sim speed or induce lag merely by it's presence.

 

What are you using for scripts? I find the game basically unplayable without some quality-of-life scripts like TIM and LCD outputs. Because those poll active blocks at a specified number of server ticks it can cause lag spikes or frame/speed drops at certain intervals once you hit a critical number of production blocks.

The other big culprit is active weapons and tools. Most servers limit these per grid/player, and even if you're playing alone there is a limit to the number of tools you can stack before the sim slogs so much its frustrating to play. Even if you know what causes performance issues, at the end of the day performance still limits what you can do.

So for me the only logical design method is figuring out what your active block limitations are, and then designing a ship around those constraints. You can add RP features if you want, and there is nothing wrong with them, but they have nothing to do with survival. Also I find pressurization hits perf more than it gives as a gameplay mechanic so I usually turn that off.
--- Automerge ---

I avoid mods for just the reasons you list: they tend to cause performance issues, often massive ones, in the longish term they tend to just straight up break and the creators tend to drift away from SE and stop updating. I avoid glass like the plague. I only use it to armor large ship cockpits.

By survival definition, ships that have things like quarters and the like are "wasting space" because they don't fulfill any actual gameplay purpose. Survival is depressingly narrow in scope, while offering very little in the way of goals or objectives. Sad stuff overall.

 

Well that is the secret for our server, no scripts and we try to keep the production block count low for the factions. No one is in a hurry to get into space which means the players tend to take their time designing and building ships and bases not just cobbling together parts to then send up with one massive thruster. As for weapons or defenses if we are attacked we'll turn them on but they are mostly off for now.

 

Well, not all mods are bad. I have subscribed to several hundred of them. There are around two hundred of them that I consider "essential" when I have to start a new world. Most of the mods I have were done by people wanting to get their feet wet in modding. They will take a vanilla block and alter it's appearance a bit, ending up with something that looks more in line with what I am trying to achieve. These blocks are harmless because all they do is sit there and look good. I call them "Passive Mods". There were a few that had complicated textures the game had trouble dealing with. By now most of those mods were either fixed or they're gone. Many of these mods are as old as the game itself and I use them without hesitation. Many of them were made to solve issues vanilla blocks cause, and therefore using them will actually reduce your overall block count. For instance, if you ever wanted to put a catwalk next to a window block, but couldn't because the window takes up a whole block and facing it the other way won't work, you can get a modded block that combines the window and the catwalk (window comes standard and inverted). I find that even though wall blocks take up the space of an armor block, they actually give you more interior space.

One type of modded block I use extensively is called a "scaffold block". It is simply an armor block with the last construction stage removed. So instead of grinding down a regular armor block to get that open scaffold look, you just place one of these. Beauty is that if you are building using a projection you won't have to go back and grind down the blocks to get your ship to look the way you planned.

And who doesn't like Kolt's Command Console Pack? It's been around forever and has no impact on performance. Thing about a beloved mod like Kolt's is that when Keen changes the rules, someone will do what needs to be done. I've found that when a modded block turns pink, often times within a couple weeks it's back, and that sort of things happens less frequently these days.

"Active" mods either have some sort of animation or they perform a function. My favorite active mod is the conveyor hinge. I find it indispensable. You can make a robot arm with less parts using a conveyor hinge, and the conveyor hinge does not seem to suffer from some of the vanilla rotor's drawbacks. On the other hand, Digi's ladders work great but they cause performance issues. Perhaps he will address them some day. I have all kinds and sizes of door mods.

I could go on but the point is you don't gain anything by avoiding mods, especially if you intend to build a big ship. You can slim down an otherwise humongous ship with the right modded blocks. Using one of Uncle Ste's armor panels instead of a full armor block can get you more interior space and the exterior still looks the same. Modded blocks can make the difference between settling for a huge mass of blocks that you can sit in an fly around with or an actual ship full of life that can do things in a realistic manner (not just shoot at stuff).

Maybe it's just me but it makes me kinda sad when people avoid making a ship that can actually function because they are afraid of mods. There are a LOT of excellent mods out there that can make for some pretty spectacular builds. What I find most peculiar is that a lot of the backlash comes from server limits more than game limits. I mean, to me the entire point of playing on a server was to get beyond the limitations of your personal computer. The purpose of servers is to allow many, many people to use a single powerful machine. Instead, SE servers are so restricted that I often wonder what the point is. I know part of the problem is that many of these so-called "servers" are actually just ordinary pc's. Real servers use Xeon processors or something similar. They are built to serve. As far as I am concerned, if your "server" cannot handle a single instance of Chilkoot Trail, then it ain't a server. A bunch of people with a bunch of ships all running a bunch of scripts? That's what servers are for. It's like Hotshot Jimmy said,

Players that don't know (or care) how SE works are the ones that will ruin the experience for all on any given server. As the game matures, more people will "get it". Others will use what skill they have to reduce the impact of players that don't "get it". Rdav just recently released a script that let's mining ships work autonomously. That means one can build a small mining drone that will mine an entire asteroid for you. So, instead of building a giant mining ship you can make a drone that will go out and bring you a constant supply of resources probably faster than you could do it yourself. Rdav seems to know what he's doing so I suspect the script itself will not be a performance issue. This is the sort of thing that will make the server experience better once the game is finally released.

This is also why I believe in the long run people will not have to settle for having dinghys and runabouts instead of real ships. It's no longer a real issue on my pc. It shouldn't be an issue on a server.

 

I bet! Some of the scripts that have come out have been fantastic and a great show of peoples skill out there. Some of the autonomous stuff excites me all the time. And ye about the small ships I would agree. However, the big stuff i've built over the years has certainly got more more better than when I began with SE. Basically saying the game has got better at handling more. There are still limits but they will always be there. Just they've been pushed out a little which is always a good thing.

 

All scripts cause performance issues with scaling because they add lines of code that needs to be executed. Raycast for eg gets expensive once you spam enough cameras to get a fast enough polling rate. Doesn't matter how clever the programmer is.

The major issue is that most people don't have the money to afford to rent a dedicated server, or own one outright and pay outright for a premium broadband connection. Most servers are hosted in a server farm, only getting a sliver of machine resources.

 

How do I build survival ships.
Some simple planning, and flexibility help. Build a few in creative to get the idea. Start with a metal slab, remember to leave an isle down the middle. Add in all the blocks you need. It might take a few tries to make it efficient. The idea is the minimum amount of blocks. Once you have this, add in thrusters, then armor blocks.

I tend to put the refinery on the right laying down with the assembler. The other components on the other side. Even conveyor tubes need to be as few as possible. Then additional rooms are added as needed. A large reactor might get a separate room. Then are you going to use an enclosed hanger? Extra cargo room? Big stack of jump drives? Make sure to throw in at least on connector, or a few. Add thrusters and armor. Here is the hard part, do not make a bread box. Use thrusters as areas to build around and break up the shape. Fancy things like a bridge are useful if your going to dock it, but no needed, and vulnerable in combat.

Good luck

 

This was touched on earlier, but with large ships you HAVE to be willing to make revisions.

I've found copying and pasting the entire ship when I am making a design change or reach a convenient juncture in the build is always great. You can either leave the copy of the ship in the existing world, perform a "Save As" and create a list of game saves to use as restore points, or rename each iteration of the ship and save each as a blueprint... i.e. "MyAwesomeShip_V1_041018" "MyAwesomeShip_V2_041118" etc.

Doing so allows you to experiment in your designs without painting yourself into a corner if what you're looking to achieve doesn't work out.

You can build your ship in a modular fashion. But that requires a lot of pre-planning in order to get the modular bits into the final design.

 

I have built several ships in survival on a server, and will chip with my own experiences.

As for how to build it, I begin with the scaffold. On my server a while back I built this ship, which is more or less a flying base, and was a bit too big. I ended up grinding it for something smaller, more practical. But this is what it was like, and how I built it.



Outside my small moon-base, I laid a framework of the general shape, and constructed first - in my opinion- the most important parts: the hydrogen tanks and thrusters. The hydrogen thrusters [upward] I positioned naturally underneath the ship. I basically work my way through construction from the bottom up. Once the hydrogen tanks and hydrogen thrusters are installed and all connected up, I build out the other thrusters (this ship had all three types for all situations.). So I want Large thruster types pointing in multiple directions. That is most important, so what I tackle early on.



This is what it was like in those initial stages. You have the general shape, and the main hydrogen thrusters in place, and adjacent tanks. I think this ship had about 10 hydrogen tanks in the end. The process of design is no different in survival on a planet than in space in creative. Create a logical design flow, as it would be in the real world. For me, that starts with a framework, an outline, then installing all the heavy machinery into it.

Once ALL thrusters are complete, I move onto to other key infrastructure, namely the oxygen generators to feed the Hydro tanks, and then production. For this ship I had Refinery (1), Assemblers (4) and speed modules, Furnaces (2), Large reactor, Large cargo container (1), several small ones, Oxygen tanks (2), Jump drives (2), and all the others things. I pipe everything together with tubes, and only then do I start welding everything up and placing armour blocks (hull) to fill the ship out.

The finished product (all vanilla - it's a vanilla server):



It was a fine ship, worked nicely for what it was intended, but was supremely heavy, cumbersome. I ended up grinding it down and building a different one, much smaller but capable of performing the same functions.

I built this recently to fulfil that role. It's a hybrid jack-of-all-trades ships (like the other), which means it has a refinery onboard,production, storage, all thruster-types for all situations (can land/take off from planets), and is armed quite significantly. Everything built into one ship. That's the way I roll.






It may not be especially attractive, but it worked out as a much better, more practical solution. It literally has everything I need, all crammed in with no internal spaces gone to waste (somewhat unlike the other).

 

If I'm going for a role specific ship, I start by building the conveyor network and such, then wrap with hull as needed.

If I'm going for looks, like with the Whitestar I've been working on, I start with a 3d model and SE toolbox and make a hull shell that I'll smooth out and fill up. It's a massive shortcut but still requires lots of work.

My Whitestar (WIP) is about 500m long. Importing and smoothing out the hull only took about 5-6 hours in total. I've spent at least 3x that on the interior. Still not done, but looking nice.

 

I do agree that ship is way beyond larger than anything one should've needed.
However, I have to respectfully disagree with your comment about "not filling every space with stuff is bad engineering". Making the interior not overly cramped while being functional is a better level of engineering rather than filling every part with stuff, although it'd be even better if the interior is loaded with stuff but not feeling incredibly cramped is wonderful.
That said, I am a horrible internal artist though, still got much to learn.
Generally I also would tend to avoid mods, but not because they tend to break or something. It's that not everybody runs mods, while pure vanilla would be accessible to players that has mod-phobia as well.
Scripts are quite a pain. On one hand, well-written scripts give amazing results and has not much impact to sim speed, like Rdav's fleet command thing allows you to control alot ships simultaneously, without causing major sim speed problems (unless you run mega ships which I find is mostly the problem why sim speed would struggle). Some scripts like Spug's landing script are also useful, but for some reason it actually causes more lag than Rdav's fleet command script.
Usually if you don't run a lot of scripts with extremely high refresh rate (like a hull integrity report script which runs 1000ms, thing is a charm to use but causes insane amounts of lag when en masse), they don't cause major issues. But when a ton of people are using them then you have issues......And the notorious air pressure thing. Boys this is why you don't do aqua engineers as the refresh rate can already bring the game on its knees really fast.



This is my own ship btw, called the Shin Arcadia.
Also kind of a minimalist design, with the large wings as fighter bays, holding a total of 32+12 fighters. Weighting 18,000 tons, it probably isn't much larger (but much wider) than a normal frigate class ship in the Workshop.
It is designed to fly and take off from any vanilla worlds and has a forward acceleration of 12. Said thing probably would hog up a lot of resource (game-wise) if in survival.

Because there is a similar ship produced before, so basically what I did is integrating the interior reactor/production blocks in a tighter but not-so-cramped manner, then refining the exterior and thruster positions.

BTW how big is that Chilkoot ship actually is? The Rangtaria carrier in the workshop can bring my PC to a crawl and this thing looks like it's at least twice as long.