I know giving this ship 2 stars might seem somewhat unfair but when you read why I have done so I believe you will find the rating to be a reasonable one. I want author to know I was REALLY looking forward to this ship but unfortunately I would strongly suggest either pulling the design or at the very least addressing the issues post-haste. Once the changes have been completed I'd be more than happy to "revise my review" to reflect new state of the ship.
I am going to be comprehensive and cover this review in 3 stages, visually, technically, and combat worthiness.
First, visually this ship is brilliance, no doubt, the detail, the shape and design of the weapons is all visually impressive. The interior in places was a bit sparing on the eyes but was functionally sound. Some of the placements of the weapons and the turrets were a bit huh! and didn't seem to distribute the capabilities of the ship very well, but that's just my opinion.
For this stage of the review;
4 out of 5
Second, technically this vessel has everything you would want from a capital ship, size, presence and ultimately BIG ass guns! For that I would of given this stage another 4/4.5, that was until I did a systems check. With 378 mil power and 17 mil recharge you would of thought this ship would be A-OK in a fight! Unfortunately this is not the case, in a controlled environment I dry tested the various systems of the ship, 3 of the primary weapons drew so much power from the ship that it could effectively zero cap the ship in less than 3 shots. This would of left the vessel in a serious powerless stage, meaning shields were unable to draw power, automated defences would be offlined temporarily and most importantly any bonus effects the ship had would be switched off to conserve power. All of which would spell trouble for any ship in the middle of combat. Do not misunderstand, the weapons were incredibly powerful but in some cases completely pointless!
One example that springs to mind is the donut cannon, points for creativity, more points lost for the complete pointlessness of the weapon, it lagged worse than Arkham Knight and failed completely to hit the target unless you focused fire, which defeated the creative purpose of the weapon in the first place. Then there is the uber beam of lag cannon, the less said about that the better. Suffice to say while massively destructive, it was virtually unusable due to excessive lag it caused. And for the record this is not a off the shelve mid range PC, its a £1200 custom gaming rig.
Overall what this said to me is that the design of the power grid and functionality of the primary weapons need to be seriously looked at. The power grid can only deal with half of the weapons and only being shot 2 times when the rest of the systems were active. On top of that there were particular weapons that yielded very little stopping power for the problems they caused (lag/power draw) the donut cannon for example. That being said the homing missile and the cannon/beam combo array worked fine and were managable in terms of power and had no impact on fps!
For that I decided to give this stage of the review;
2 out of 5
Third, now this is the important part, the part where we see if the design matches up with functionality to give performance in combat. So I first ran my test with just turrets versus a number of small light fighters. I started with just 1 fighter, something that should of been no problem.
Man WAS I wrong! :D
The moment I spawned 1 fighter the frame rate dropped fast than Donald Trumps presidential chances! I watched as the fighter ran rings around the ship, the only weapons that appeared to engage were some beam turrets awkwardly inset into the side of the hull. These turrets struggled to turn correctly to track the fight and at time couldn't align correctly for a shot. On top of this the forward missile turrets, the main body turrets and the aft turrets completely failed to engage at all. I deleted the fighter, which was quite literately laughing it's ass off at the apparently lack of opposition, and started to look into what the hell was going on! It hit me pretty quickly. The turrets were unable to turn due to what I can only assume to be excessive mass, at no point had the designer factored in the need for mass enhancers, the turrets were turning but at an incredibly reduced rate. Wow! A tad of an oversight there to say the least! Then there were the aft turrets, their problems were worse, they had been placed so close together that they were impacting into one another and interlocking, the aft of one turret was stuck in the front of the turret behind it and so both turrets were unable to turn at all! This was obviously the cause of the massive lag as this particular problem was occurring to a fair few of the aft turrets.
I pushed on with my test with a capital focusing on missiles, again the ship failed, it lagged and more than that it didn't appear to have any effective missile defences. This may have been some of the turrets that were failing to turn but frankly I figured if they had been all placed at the aft of the ship it was just another reason to give this ship a bad mark.
I decided at this point to just call it as I was getting increasingly frustrated with the ship and ended my review there. The ship just failed in combat it was being out fought by a mass 9 fighter for the love of god!
For that I decided to give this stage of the review;
0 out of 5
To conclude this review I rate this ship at 2 out of 5 this is due to visuals versus overwhelming issues caused by a unbalanced power grid, lagging weapons and non-functional turrets which also added to the lag. I believe this to be a fair review given the experience of the ship.
I do like your idea of making a similarly designed fleet. Maybe that will be next on my list of projects?