Borg Shield Cube MK I

Hey everyone, new player to Starmade here (started about 4 days ago), big fan of Minecraft and sci-fi genre in general, so naturally when I found this game my first thought (well second, the real first was "how has this been available for a year and I only just found it?!") was how I could bring something from my favourite sci-fi series to life here.

I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but unfortunately not artistic enough to design a replica of something like the Enterprise (perhaps in time), so I immediately jumped on the idea of creating a series of vessels based on the Borg that we all love.

The first thing I'm focusing on is defensive vessels, trying to recreate the Borg's terrifying adaptive shields in Starmade. This first ship is the prototype "core" that the first larger adaptive shielding cube will be built around. There are a few issues to work out with it and I'm certain it can be optimised much further to increase it's defensive capability.

Onto those yummy stats;

Mass: 2941.7 (Blocks: 29,417)
Dimensions: L:31m H:31m W:31m
Power: 278,756.7 (389,488.9 e/s)
Thrust: 9,182.9
Turning Speed: 1.2 on all axis
Shields: 529,159 (14,490 s/sec)
AMC Array: 13.263.8 DPS
Price: 14,903,800

I was going to do multiple defensive tests against varying difficulty pirates, but changing the difficulty didn't actually do anything to increase or decrease their damage output.

Shield testing against a fully armed pirate station on "mean" difficulty, this vessel completely stationary parked 200m away from the station under full sustained fire from every turret except 1. After 10 mins and 12 seconds of sustained fire, the cubes shields hit 5% and the recharge rate capped at 25%. After a further 20 minutes of sustained fire the shields were pretty stable bouncing between 2-3%. They probably (maybe) could have broken the shields and actually plowed through every single block to the core if I'd left it running for another few hours, but that can be fixed with some optimisation.

For the later Borg ship designs I'll do some testing against the various other popular publicly available ships from other players.

The general idea was that lovely Borg efficiency, every single spatial block in this core vessel (apart from the small entrance and control bridge) provides a stat to the ship's overall power. The cube is powered mainly by it's four 9^3 reactors. I quickly realised whilst building however that it wouldn't be sufficient to cover the cost of the massive engines and firing the AMC's at the same time, so I also set up 4 more auxiliary 7^3 reactors to stabilise the regen. Looking back it probably only needed 2 of the auxiliary reactors to stabilise, but I was building on two planes of symmetry to make the construction quicker, so it multiplied naturally and I didn't really do much power testing after that. There is also a wire-frame made out of power blocks running around the ship that I used for guidance in early construction, both those, 2 of the auxiliary reactors and around 30% of the power storage tanks could be safely removed in favour of more defense or weaponry - something to consider for the mark 2 version.

Anyway, thanks for reading my wall of text! ^^ Here's some pictures.

This one is the first fully functional form of the core, the gigantic engines covering the four main reactors, with the 24 AMC Arrays visible and the small ship control bridge in their midst.


This next one is after I realised the energy regen was insufficient and constructed these four smaller auxiliary reactors as well as adding a skeleton of random power cubes and linked power storage tanks. The entrance to the control bridge can be seen in the middle.


The completed mark 1 shield cube, doesn't look very fancy I know! This is just to serve as the core for a series of other defensive based Borg vessels, they'll be built around it, literally.