What hull to use for capitalships?

[Pyreon]

It's in the title, do I use advanced armour since it's supposed to be heavy, or just basic hull because it's supposed to rely on shields?

 

[DrTarDIS]

depends on the ship. i normally use a mix.
adv in the front, and a couple layers thick over weapons points. also advanced casing around important systems.
standard on flanks or as padding in between less important systems.
basic everywhere else.

depends mainly on your playstyle, having all that extra weight in advanced you only use when you're close to death might be better placed in damage output, speed, or chaff.

 

[Az14el]

Adv armor in key places (weapons comps, turret/rail bases, also anywhere you have a core on outside of your hull...) is important for every ship imo, as far as exterior covering it depends on your definition of capitol ship, a 100k+ ship spends a much lesser portion (though still notable) of its mass on a full adv armor plating compared to a 10-20k mass ship (inverse square law stuff). Thrust is a problem with super thick bulwarks & multi layer adv armor plating, so don't go too crazy on it if you still want to be fast, which is important, at 5-10km+ ranges and often 100's of m/s a several hundred k mass ship can still mitigate a ton of firepower by jinking around.

Hull is ridiculously light, and stacks AHP better than standard does for its mass, AHP isn't much for hull blocks but for those tactically placed bits of armor around the important bits it's a huge buff. Recently hulling a 93k mass ship cost me 4.5k mass in basic hull & sparing blast door.
Hull doesn't stop shit though, don't expect it to help all that much on its own once your shields drop.

Standard Armor is eh, too heavy & just not that much a boost going from hull to standard, compared to standard to adv, plex is interesting from an economical perspective, and slightly stronger than its armor variant, as all doors are due to not having SHP, though this is fairly minor advantage.

tl;dr use adv armor sparingly until reaching a critical mass (200k+ imo), use hull when you wanna go fast & not spend a third or more of your mass on thrusters, use standard(plex >.>) when your feelin it, i dunno, i dont feel it much

 

[Zyrr]

Adv armor in key places (weapons comps, turret/rail bases, also anywhere you have a core on outside of your hull...) is important for every ship imo, as far as exterior covering it depends on your definition of capitol ship, a 100k+ ship spends a much lesser portion (though still notable) of its mass on a full adv armor plating compared to a 10-20k mass ship (inverse square law stuff). Thrust is a problem with super thick bulwarks & multi layer adv armor plating, so don't go too crazy on it if you still want to be fast, which is important, at 5-10km+ ranges and often 100's of m/s a several hundred k mass ship can still mitigate a ton of firepower by jinking around.

Hull is ridiculously light, and stacks AHP better than standard does for its mass, AHP isn't much for hull blocks but for those tactically placed bits of armor around the important bits it's a huge buff. Recently hulling a 93k mass ship cost me 4.5k mass in basic hull & sparing blast door.
Hull doesn't stop shit though, don't expect it to help all that much on its own once your shields drop.

Standard Armor is eh, too heavy & just not that much a boost going from hull to standard, compared to standard to adv, plex is interesting from an economical perspective, and slightly stronger than its armor variant, as all doors are due to not having SHP, though this is fairly minor advantage.

tl;dr use adv armor sparingly until reaching a critical mass (200k+ imo), use hull when you wanna go fast & not spend a third or more of your mass on thrusters, use standard(plex >.>) when your feelin it, i dunno, i dont feel it much

agree on every point, but don't underestimate what you can do with spaced armor and just an absurd amount of adv up front. there is such a thing as "too many blocks to shoot through", especially against random m/b targetting.

you can do a ton of armor, but you won't be moving quickly. you'll also need to take out a fifth mortgage to repair, which is the biggest downside imo - you have to build your ship down after pretty much every battle

 

[MacThule]

If this is your first capital ship build, save advanced armor for wrapping around critical systems (computers, backup power) a few blocks deep and maybe a thick advanced armor nose cone. Plain hull should be fine around the bulk of the ship, but a single layer of advanced would work fine if you have the thrust to move that weight.

Be sure to save a blueprint, because nothing is bulletproof.

 

[Brokengauge]

What everyone is suggesting is an " all or nothing" approach. Armor what's important, and put the most armor around the most important systems. You'll probably also have to layout your systems in such a way as to minimize how crippled you'll be at the end of the fight lol

 

[MacThule]

What everyone is suggesting is an " all or nothing" approach. Armor what's important, and put the most armor around the most important systems. You'll probably also have to layout your systems in such a way as to minimize how crippled you'll be at the end of the fight lol

Pretty much. Thrust, capacitors, shields - these are all pretty cheap and your ship will be filled with them. Just run a couple single-layer hull bulkheads through any very large groups of system blocks to prevent a single nuke from vaporizing the whole lot in one go.

EDIT: You can't protect everything, so just focus all your mass and resources in protecting the most important stuff. If you lose the weapon computers, you're gutted and can't fight. If you lose the jump drive controller, you're screwed. You want at least one small section of power, shield regeneration, and jump drives to be available for retreat as well.

 

[Pyreon]

Well this is my first time building a capitalship, and I also don't know where to start, and where to place all the components and what orientation to place them.

 

[MacThule]

I strongly suggest you work with corvettes and very small frigates for a little while then before getting into proper capital ships, and start downloading capital ships from the Community Content section to test, dissect, modify & reverse engineer. This way you will have a better understanding of what goes into a capital ship. Good ones are extremely complex, employ dozens of subtle tricks, dozens of docked entities for a variety of tasks, and so on. It's too much to pass on in a wiki or forum, it requires hands on work to learn.

You could waste weeks building a large capital only to find out after you finish that some tiny thing should have been done differently. So you'll spend tons of time fixing the problem or start from scratch only to discover something new you didn't know. It can be discouraging. Buff up on basics by building and testing smaller ships (ie blowing them up in various ways and using them to blow up other things) and by studying the ships built by players who have 1+ years of experience in the game. A few weeks of that you'll save yourself months of heartache.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

This question really depends on what you label as a capital ship, because the size matters a lot when it comes to armor thickness, along with intended role.

I personally have not seen the use of much other than advanced armor as effective as you can almost always efficiently overcome the weight added by using it. Those uses are only for smaller ships though so it doesn't come into view here.

The question you should be asking is how much advanced armor are you to use.

I use at least a single layer of advanced armor on all parts of my combat ships, the frontal plates are also thicker in large margins than the rest of the ship. Angling is also something to be taken into account if you are worried about damage tanking, though it is slightly specific in usage which I will expound upon later. Back to the original premise: On larger ships 500+ in max dimension the frontal plate thickness I aim for can be anywhere from 10 meters of advanced armor to 50 meters depending on the role, 10 meters being the minimum.

For the skin of a fighter being one thick advanced armor in order for a capital ship to have the same proportion of armor the thickness must increase. If you have a fighter that is 50m L, 30m W, 25 H then going off of the easiest to hit side which would be the top or the bottom, the relative thickness is 1/25 for each individual side which would be 2/25 overall. This is about the ratio I use for my fighters, normally one thick everywhere with around a 3 thick frontal plate in front of the cockpits. If you have a capital ship that is 500 meters long then its thinnest piece of armor is to be (1/25)*500=20. Now you can also take into account growing surface area and how the damage will be spread across it a little more than a tiny ship, so we can slim that armor down to half which would be 10. Depending on the role you may slim it down more in specific areas of the ship, but at minimum I would say keep it 5 thick.

There are ways for armor to be fit into smaller volumes that will save space but not mass. This includes double wedging to apply twice the health of a block in one block space and quad tetra-ing to fit four times the health in one block space. Wedging being used for anti-cannon and tetra-ing being use for anti-missile as they have different mitigation characteristics.

For sloping which is kinda finicky, you need to pick ships that will most likely be facing the enemy at all times. I have a 233 meter long light frigate that has 4 meters of armor on all sides except for the front which has equivalent of between 10-18 depending on the weapon used because of the mitigation characteristics of the composites I put in. However, because of the sloping on the side armor, if I am facing the enemy the sides will approach 30+ meters of armor with glancing shots. I can bank on this happening because I tailor made the ship to be able to fire all weapons forward which means that I will most likely be facing the enemy at all times.
The ship: Xerxes Class Light Frigate

Though I don't consider anything smaller than a cruiser a capital ship, cruisers start at 400 meters for me, I do think that the armoring of ships 100+ should take the proportioning I outlined in to account with some fudge room of course.

Long story short though, on anything "capital ship" sized the question should stop being about what type of armor you should use and instead be how much advanced armor you should use.

 

[Brokengauge]

I would recommend downloading and picking apart any ships on the docks that were part of the "blood and steel" tournament

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

I would recommend downloading and picking apart any ships on the docks that were part of the "blood and steel" tournament

Though if you were to pick apart this THI - Morax Class Experimental Corvette V1D3 then you might have a few issues figuring things out. It is the winner of the Blood and Steel 3 tournament which myself and Guthris made and piloted. It is very unconventional in design regarding just about anything you might think of. So you might want to avoid this. Or not, if you really want to look at how high tier builders conceptualize.

 

[Az14el]

If you took a look at some B&S ships you'd probably wonder where the hell the good armor actually is, they're all 11-12k mass ships and full adv armor hulls are an extreme portion of ship weight at that size (not that there weren't a few in each B&S, with some more "heavily" armored ships even winning the first competition, only that you're gonna see a lot more basic hull/just straight up nothing at that weight esp. from those particular ships)

 

[kulbolen]

heavily armored ships are for sissies

 

[Zyrr]

heavily armored ships are for sissies

rude

 

[Bladeriker]

Some other things you should consider is, how is this ship being used? Is it for Single player?, PvP?, RP?, Replica?.

Do you plan on fighting Pirates? or players. If Pirates, are you allowing them to use your Blueprints?

What is the role of the ship? is it an armor tank? or a shield tank.

Is money an option? as creative mode completely negates the repair issue, as you can either ship yard it or admin load it.

Just some food for thought.

 

[Lecic]

There are ways for armor to be fit into smaller volumes that will save space but not mass. This includes double wedging to apply twice the health of a block in one block space and quad tetra-ing to fit four times the health in one block space. Wedging being used for anti-cannon and tetra-ing being use for anti-missile as they have different mitigation characteristics.

Alternatively, you can stack as many layers of blast door on top of eachother as you want.

How do doubles and quads differ in damage blocking? I was under the assumption that quads would be superior to doubles with both cannons and missiles because you've got a chance of the cannon shot having to go through up to 4 blocks.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Alternatively, you can stack as many layers of blast door on top of eachother as you want.

How do doubles and quads differ in damage blocking? I was under the assumption that quads would be superior to doubles with both cannons and missiles because you've got a chance of the cannon shot having to go through up to 4 blocks.

The double wedging will always yield the cannon hitting both blocks if you position them the correct way. As in one behind the other.

However, the quad tetra composite actually has volume that isn't filled on the inside of the 4 tetras. Because of how the structure works too, there is a high chance that if someone shoots a quad tetra design the cannon shot will only hit 1 of the tetras. I tested the composites for days to find the hit ratios of the different composites.

Double wedging yield 100% effectiveness vs cannon and will also shrink the explosive volume of a missile by a half, leaving a hole that is only half the volume of a normal advanced armor bulkhead.

Now quad tetras (I call it Element 228 or 228 alone for short) have significantly diminished anti-cannon effectiveness. I forgot the exact numbers of the results but I do remember close to them. Around 50% of the time the shots from cannons would only hit 1 tetra, 30% of the time they would hit 2 tetras, 15% of the time they would hit 3 tetras, and 5% of the time it would actually hit 0 tetras because of the weird collision model calculations of Starmade. So this 228 configuration actually yielded poorer results than the double wedges for cannons. However, the 228 configuration decreases missile explosive volume by 82.5%. 1-.5*.5*.5 gives .825 and so do the results of my testing.

I use a composite of both double wedges which I call Titanium and the 228. How I arrange these composites in my ships is a trade secret, but you get what I'm going for in principle.

 

[Mortiferum]

Think modern ship designs

Armored critical areas such as magazines, the rest is like... literally unarmored to the point HMG would likely punch a hole in one.