What makes a good ship?

[momo 3]

So I've been playing starmade for a week or two now since I last played ~5 years ago. I've learned a great deal about the power update and the weapons update and I've improved my building quality and style from the long, spaghetti ships I used to build years ago.

I've built several different sizes of ships and experimented with turrets and weapon systems; and for the past 3 days, I've been working on the biggest ship I've ever built. It's not large compared to most of the contributions this community makes, but at 100+ meters long and ~ 40 meters wide I took great pride in having a "massive" ship compared to the previous ships I've built.

The purpose of this ship was to easily take on the default pirate ships: The ~400 mass Isanth ships. Having completed the ship today, I wanted to go test it out in a 1 on 1 with pirates. I ended up finding not an Isanth, but one of my own mining ship designs which boasted no weapons of its own. Even though this pirate had no way to fight back, I still felt like my ship's destruction capabilities was lackluster.

My ship holds two turrets. One with dual cannons and dual lock-on missiles with about ~320 mass; the other is a much smaller 47 mass turret with only a damage beam as a weapon. My ships own weapons include dual cannons, a single damage beam (stronger than my turret's), and 9 missile groups (which I learned quickly was useless, as I only have two ammo capacity and my turret's missiles are stronger so I have no reason to use my own.) And this is leading me to believe my ship is not as fleshed out with weapon systems as it should be.

So I am here to ask: What makes a ship powerful/good/satisfying? I understand there are different classes of ships with different roles too, and I'm open to answers about every type of ship; but I'm most interested in flagships (not large enough to be a carrier, so no fighter swarms or anything) that have the main purpose of dealing damage, tearing down shields, and getting damage on a core as quickly as possible.

I worked really hard on this ship and to have it feel unsatisfying is pretty disheartening. I do think it was a good learning experience for me, but if I want to build another ship of the same size or larger, I'd want to do it "right" and create a ship with large and reliable damage output for its size.

 

[Zoolimar]

Use lasers. Currently only they work properly. Well in theory cannons work too, but there is no way you'll be able to hit anything mobile with them past 1 km. Definitely not an Isanth.

First and most critical attribute is your energy generation. To comfortably beat Isanths in almost any numbers you'll probably want around 50k energy which equals to 500 reactor blocks and a base stabilizer distance of around 143 meters. Using multiple stab groups will lower the distance while making ship shape more boxy and upping turn rate.

Next you'll want 1400-1500 thruster blocks to have a comfortable 2.5 TWR even if you will add frivolous armour and pretty bits. Don't use Mobility Chambers on such a small ship they will weight too much for the benefits you will get from them.

Next shields - you'll want around 1800-1900 capacity blocks and 750 recharge blocks which will give you around 450-500k shields with 9k regen.

And now we come to weapons. You should be able to run 1100-1200 blocks of lasers. Use either basic pure laser with no secondaries or a beam-missile for close combat. Splitting it in more than 2-3 outputs is probably a waste (you don't have enough blocks to really benefit from it). Especially if it is not on a turret. On a turret always use separate computers for each weapon.

For chambers use anything you like.

 

[Bladeriker]

I was thinking about deep frying it, but then I realized that might not work.

In all actuality though you can get a few good turrets on a ship that size, some Arc beam (Beam/Missile) and some rapid cannon (Cannon/Cannon) are also not bad choices, though Beams weapons seem to be where its at for the moment (Or until they adjust them again)

 

[momo 3]

Use lasers. Currently, only they work properly. Well in theory cannons work too, but there is no way you'll be able to hit anything mobile with them past 1 km. Definitely not an Isanth.

I'll update my ship to be more laser focused. I have 750 reactor blocks, so I'm well above what you suggested for power. Wouldn't I want to have a decently powerful cannon system to compliment my lasers? From what I've read, the lasers focus more on outer blocks. If I'm trying to destroy the core as fast as possible I'll want some cannons to penetrate the hulls deeper right?

Next you'll want 1400-1500 thruster blocks to have a comfortable 2.5 TWR even if you will add frivolous armour and pretty bits. Don't use Mobility Chambers on such a small ship they will weight too much for the benefits you will get from them.

In building this ship, I accidentally built it using like 5000-6000 thrusters, so I'm good on this front and I accelerate at amazing speeds. I thought this was too much, so I did replace 1000 of them with shield capacity. The thrusters still use up about half of my 75k power though. Would this get in the way of my weapon systems? I didn't seem to ever get near a maxed out reactor even with both my turrets firing. Does this imply my weapon systems aren't large enough? How much of my reactor should be dedicated to my weapon systems?

 

[Zoolimar]

Wouldn't I want to have a decently powerful cannon system to compliment my lasers? From what I've read, the lasers focus more on outer blocks. If I'm trying to destroy the core as fast as possible I'll want some cannons to penetrate the hulls deeper right?

In theory yes. In practice unless your target is immobile you'll hit at best 10% of shots. And only from close range. And your chances of hitting the place on the enemy that you want to hit are so low that you can as well forget it.

In building this ship, I accidentally built it using like 5000-6000 thrusters, so I'm good on this front and I accelerate at amazing speeds. I thought this was too much, so I did replace 1000 of them with shield capacity. The thrusters still use up about half of my 75k power though. Would this get in the way of my weapon systems?

Very much so. In fact for maximum TWR you need no more than 2200 blocks of thrusters on your 75k energy ship. And that's assuming you have 5 chambers running on your reactor.

With 750 rechargers and 1800 capacitors you will also have enough energy to use around 1800 blocks of lasers. Which could very well be split into 3 groups with 600 blocks each. I'd suggest putting each of them on their personal turrets and either allowing AI to shoot or using the direct turret control feature.

 

[momo 3]

In practice unless your target is immobile you'll hit at best 10% of shots. And only from close range.

But will beams really be able to quickly overheat the ship alone? I guess I've never used that many beams before, so I was just under the impression they would take forever stripping the outer layer of the ship before actually hitting any vital systems. I have noticed that cannons miss most of the time, so I'd go with beams either way. I was just a bit skeptical that they would be strong enough by themselves.

In fact for maximum TWR you need no more than 2200 blocks of thrusters on your 75k energy ship.

Is there not some additional secret statistic that determines how fast you accelerate (not your max speed.) I already have smaller ships that only barely meet the 2.5 TWR threshold; however, they take 20 seconds or so to reach that max speed. After putting so many extra thrusters on this new ship, I noticed that I was accelerating much faster and was more agile. This is something I kinda prefer, as it feels unsatisfying to me to have to spend 5km just for speeding up and inertial dampening. I'm quite sure this isn't something I'm just imagining, but if you have any more information on it I'd be grateful.

 

[Zoolimar]

But will beams really be able to quickly overheat the ship alone?

Should be good enough. It's better on bigger beams as they actually have a good enough acid splash to them but even small beams don't have that many problems with damaging systems. If your target has 15-20 layers of advanced armour facing you than it may be a problem but otherwise beams should do the work.

The problem with cannons is that if you don't hit you don't do any damage at all. And that means that the few hits that you score must be able to counter enemy shield regen. Which is kind of not a given. Add to it that even against even pure armour ships with no shields you probably almost never will be able to hit the same spot twice with any degree of reliability.

Is there not some additional secret statistic that determines how fast you accelerate (not your max speed.)

It's not secret, it's just that it is not displayed. While maximum speed grows only to 2.5 TWR acceleration scales up to 10 TWR.

But against Isanths it's just a waste. As well as against anyone armed with beams. Using 5k thrusters instead of 2.2k reduces your beams from 1.8k blocks to around 1.3k or almost by 1/3 of your firepower.