KSN FG-2 Tisiphone

    KSN FG-2 Tisiphone KSN FG-2B Tisiphone

    I don't normally mess with PvP type ships, but I saw the screenshots of the interior, and felt it deserved a look.

    I like the bridge layout: simple, and Spartan but looks very nice, especially with the lighting. Mess hall and bunks are good, and I especially like the "ladders" that go below deck.

    The exterior looks very nice as well, and those bulky ball turrets go well with it.

    You've already gotten lots of advice on the performance. Any input I have there would be useless, since I don't really know what I'm talking about lol. But totally 5/5 stars for the interior that you did put in.
    Tamren Shade
    Tamren Shade
    Thanks! :D
    nice ship
    Tamren Shade
    Tamren Shade
    Thanks! :)
    I don't normally post reviews but I have field tested this myself against a couple of pirate stations and wanted to put in my comments.

    I cannot comment on its PvP capabilities like https://starmadedock.net/members/raisinbat.419353/ as this is not my scene. The ship performed well but was seriously in danger of being overwhelmed by fighters (even vanilla Isanths) as it had little in the way of anti-ship defence. I know it is supposed to be a long range artillery ship and in a pack of three but I don't know if that would have made much difference. In the end, I had to call in four small fighters to act as a CAP to keep them at bay.

    If the station had AMS, I agree that the missiles may have been a little useless so I would have to go in with the cannon which defeated the object. I rejigged a couple of my own AMS turrets to provide a missile/cannon config. A couple I added 50% ion and a couple 50% EMP. I doubt in the real world (or PvP at least) these would make a huge difference but I guessed that any that hit would add to the enemies woes! I also made sure they were 100% self powered. While on the subject of AMS, yours LOOK great but are just too heavy! I stripped them all off and replaced them with some of my smaller single and twin barrel ones. 2-3 times the turrets and less overall mass.

    The beam turrets again look cool but I would prefer to have some supressing fire at greater range. Not sure what the answer would be but if I had a couple of fighters heading my way I'd like them to hit a wall of fire long before they could potentially engage me.

    Interior. WOW! I love some of the features and details. I did notice seven "seats" and only six bunks? I am now marking you down on RP but that might be a little unfair in a PvP ship. I would also consider using lighter materials for the interiors where possible. There seemed to be a lot or armour used as seats and interior panelling that could have been done with regular hull, ingots, motherboard, etc. The layout was a bit muddled though and it took me a while to find the core, and why oh why is the Bobby AI module where it is? I would prefer it to be next to the core for easy access.

    I will be interested in seeing an update if you decide to do one. I might use this myself once I have completed the modifications. Great stuff"
    Tamren Shade
    Tamren Shade
    Thanks for the review! I just realized I am short a bunk compared to my duty stations. I just miscounted that one.

    As a long range artillery ship, it's really intended to be grouped into an AI fleet and support a ship that's going in against a pirate station, not take it on by itself. The turrets are designed to suppress the shields of larger targets, and perhaps get lucky and pop an aux reactor, or render a turret on an opposing ship combat ineffective.

    Using a CAP to screen this ship as it bombards said station would also fit in well with the roll I had envisioned for it :)

    Versus fighters, the idea was to splash them at long range with one of the main missile batteries before they got into range with anything besides missiles, and to maintain the rate of fire to keep the fighters at bay, working in a squadron would be best.

    Feel free to swap out the turrets as you see fit, I gave these ships a very heavy AMS setup (both in volume of fire and pure mass!), as the threat environment on GXN consists of lots and lots of heavy missiles.

    I do have plans to update this ship and rectify some of the inefficiency the first ship off the line has. I intend to add some more back up cameras and replace the two forward AMS turrets with a lower profile Missile-Cannon-Overdrive turret. While I'm at it, I'll add a seventh bunk to match the duty station count.

    I also have some plans for a cannon heavy recon variant that could trade in all those power capacitors the missile batteries need for enhanced speed and shields. That variant will have a pair of Mk 450-600 Autocannon turrets, which might do a better job of dealing with fighters.
    Love the aesthetics, but that's not really my thing, so review is going to be on the ship's systems.

    Conducted 4 ship vs ship fights, 2 vs https://starmadedock.net/content/lrsf-1-orion.6268/ (4300 mass fast attack craft), 1 vs https://starmadedock.net/content/chronos-ftl-180k.5828/ (12000 mass combat ship) and 1 vs https://starmadedock.net/content/rai-arbalest.5824/ (12000 mass combat ship), unfortunately it lost all fights due to a few extreme flaws in design, most glaringly:

    Critical flaw #1: Missile ship with no chaff

    At long range this ship wont be able to overwhelm a single AMS turret, and against multiples it can't do anything at all. We never succeeded in landing a single missile across all 4 battles and eventually just gave up and stuck to guns and beams.

    While this is the most serious problem, its also the easiest fix; just add a few mis/can turrets or mis/can in the hull controlled via logic and your ship will a lot scarier.

    This is hands down the biggest issue with the ship, i kept a 4 star rating (would be 5 but its in pvp so im weighing combat performance a lot heavier)

    Critical flaw #2 : Too Slow Scanner

    A missile ship with a scanner that takes over a minute to charge can't utilize it's main weapons for most of the fight. This might be acceptable in a 3 ship group, but if one or more of the ships go down the ships can't do much. Cut shields, cut thrust, cut anything at all, you cant go several minutes without your main weapon functional!

    Critical flaw #3 : No backup cameras

    This ship has abysmal shielding and only 1 camera in an extremely exposed location. The camera was shot out by both chronos and arbalest within seconds of losing shields, making it extremely hard to return fire.

    These three flaws prevents your ship from functioning in its intended role; it can't target effectively without scanning or cameras, and can't overwhelm point defense with zero chaff.

    Aside from these, the ship has some less severe issues that impede it's performance in combat. These aren't dealbreakers but might be worth looking into:

    Secondary weapons don't synergize with main weapon:

    Switching to the other weapons loses lock for your missiles and limits their firing speed. On top of that your cannon + beam setup uses as much mass as your missiles, leaving a large portion of your ship as dead mass. It's pretty clear what the idea behind the ion beam is, but the cannon doesn't seem like a good addition. Like i said, switching to it means losing lock for missiles, and you need to keep it selected during combat to use it. In tests it managed to shoot a pair of turrets of Orion, but struggled to deal any significant damage through docked hull, and was unable to beat shield regen on both chronos and arbalest, so what is it supposed to shoot at? The ship is not agile enough for a front gun to shoot at fighters, and it really doesn't need it since the turrets are perfectly fine for that.

    The beam weapon is also suspect for this. It might just be personal preference but i think your ship would do much better if you cut out both beams and cannons and raised your missile groups from 2 to 6. The faster you can fire missiles the less stress you place on your power systems = less space spent on power capacitors = more space for good stuff like shields and thrust.

    Another trick for getting smoother power curves with missiles is to simply reduce slave percentage from 100% to 50%. That will give you 30 second cooldown missiles that are slightly slower but still fast enough to catch the fastest ships and with enough range that they can't escape.


    Weapon damage inappropriate for hull destruction

    This is another general issue that isn't ship breaking, but isn't that hard to fix and will greatly improve your ship. Your cannon, beam turrets and missiles are all very poorly proportioned in terms of damage; the cannon being waffled adds 40% power cost to firing it without much benefit and could avoid being waffled at all, while the beam turrets i believe are !40.000! damage per tick; 10x higher than what they ought to be. This renders them almost completely unable to inflict meaningful hull damage, not a good thing when trying to fend of fighters. Turrets managed to poke holes in orion, but because they aren't waffled it made zero difference.

    I would recommend keeping the beam/beam/ovd setup, but switching to 45 blocks per output instead of 420... Another trick that would really help them is to stagger their slave effects, like 15/15/15 for 1 output, 16/15/16 for the next, 17/16/17 for the third, 18/17/18 etc.
    This gives each output slightly different delay between shots, making them spread their damage over multiple blocks since accuracy is redone per tick; you'll get good penetration even against fighters.

    This is also an issue with your missiles; 250k damage on lock on with punch-through is overkill; 100k will get you maximum destruction against system blocks. Consider more missiles with less delay or switching to explosive effect for larger radius.


    No overdrive effect

    Long range ships really like staying at long range, go figure. No overdrive means others can easily catch you and ruin your evening with lots of guns, giving up your range advantage. If you're cut some of the secondary weapons you should be able to fit some overdrive instead.


    Long range ship with bad regen

    At long range shield regen is your best friend. Accuracy is much lower so its easier to recover HP and out regen incoming DPS.

    Lastly, you might want to consider a docked hull. Since your armor takes up so much of your ships weight it restricts you a lot in terms of support effects and scanners. Moving them to a seperate entity would allow you to fix scanner and overdrive issues very quickly. Docked hulls are terrible though, and i think some servers don't allow it so im just mentioning it as an option, and your ship should be ok without it.

    But don't take all that to mean your ship is all bad, it's impressively durable and remained able to fight in all 4 battles despite severe damage. It has solid turret size and turret layout and good thrust to mass ratio. Just get some chaff on it and it'll be a perfectly solid PvP ship!
    Tamren Shade
    Tamren Shade
    Thanks! I'm still figuring out the intricacies of a good PVP ship and you gave me some things to work in future iterations. I see your point on the lack of back up cameras and that should be an easy fix.

    The combat doctrine of the ship when flown by a player is to drop the targets shields with the ion beams, dart in with the cannons to surgically take out AMS turrets, and then retreat to missile range to finish off the target. I haven't tested this versus live players yet 'cause no on on GXN seems to have a combat ship under 500K blocks.....

    The combat doctrine of the ship when in an AI fleet is to park a sector or two back from the action and provide long range fire support via the ion beams and missiles. In that case breaking AMS turrets to allow the missile through is up to the assault ship.

    I have no idea if this will *actually* work, but from your review it probably needs some adjusting.

    Logic fired weapons and docked hulls aren't allowed on the server I built this ship for, but I could easily replace a couple of the AMS turrets with a Missile-Cannon system.

    What do you use for your missile load outs at this size of ship? If I went for smaller missiles, dropped the cannons, and went for 50% beam support, as you mentioned that would free up a lot of power capacitors for Overdrive, Shields, Thrusters, and Sensors....
    awesome design !
    Tamren Shade
    Tamren Shade
    Thanks :D