Build & Weapon Advice?

[MrGrey1]

So, I've jumped in the deep end and decided to build a 'large ship.' This is what I have so far. (Yes I'm an 80's kid and it's the best space ship evA!) I'm going for an 'effective' ship as close to canon as possible but I favour function over form so am willing to diverge from canon if necessary.

I'm pretty good at the building and scale side of things but I'm having troubles with the weapon configurations and to a lesser extent the power setup. This is the first ship I've built that's hit 2mil power and I'm a little lost on the auxiliary side of things.

Guns
There are 7 tri barrel main guns and 4 dual barrel secondary guns as well as 8 small turret mounts each side. If I stay true to canon then the main guns should probably be B/B and the side turrets will be C/C for anti missile. I'm trying to make the main and secondary guns power self sufficient so I can use as much ship power for the 'Wave Motion Gun' as possible. The idea was to have the main guns as the big hitters with the secondary guns as Power Drain or possibly Ion. There will also be a missile battery in the smoke stack (probably M/M as I'm confined to solo play and it's nice to waste all the pesky pirates in range) and two forward facing M/B batteries (maybe torpedoes if I can figure it out) up the front on each side. I'd like any sage advice on my weapon combinations, particularly tertiary combo and ratios for the main turrets? (I'm leaning to pierce?)
Any advice on what combos to use for the Wave Motion Gun would also be greatly appreciated? Again I was leaning to a whole bunch of beams in a grid pattern with pierce or maybe even pules but I have never used or tested pulse yet so..?

Power
I've gone and run 16 straight line cores through the middle of the hull for testing purposes. By a happy coincidence this comes out to be just over 2mil e/sec. I'll likely modify the straight line run later to accommodate other systems and internal crew areas that I'd like to add but I'll try and maintain the 2 mil level. The ship is currently 387 x91 x79. Question I have is what sort of auxiliary power system should I be looking at? My understanding is group size somewhere between 8000-9000 blocks is optimum? I know I should separate the groups so they don't chain react, what sort of shielding between groups is sufficient to contain the damage if they detonate? I was going to put a layer of advanced armour between the groups. Is that enough or too much? Do I need to space them more?

Cheers for any feedback guys. I'm sloggin' up this learning curve slowly slowly.
MrG.

 

[kulbolen]

if youre confined to solo play against pirates, your idea of effective will be really easy to pull off with almost any weapon combos you like

 

[MrGrey1]

if youre confined to solo play against pirates, your idea of effective will be really easy to pull off with almost any weapon combos you like

Ok, understood... but say if I were to post this to the dock on completion so others could do some Starblazin', what armament then?

 

[kulbolen]

i see what you did there, but ill give it a whirl anyway. dependso n the sector size, if you play large sector sizes, b/c/exp triple output self powered in the main stacks and c/c/od or b/c/od self powered in the small guns, make each main turret 2m e/s and eah small turret at least 1m e/s w embedded or gyro bases.

if you play crap default sector size, sub b/c/e main for for b/b/e and use more caps. 2ndary guns c/c/od or c/b/80%ion for decent shield dmg while still breaking blocks, or a small metagun if you know how.

 

[jayman38]

For solo play, I'd recommend NO tertiaries, to help keep the turrets small like on the show.

Despite the need for smaller turrets to look like the show, I would plan to have barrels at least twice as big as they look on the show. (On the show, they are simply barrels with an ammo linkage; in Starmade, the entire weapon system needs to fit in the barrels.)

To keep the turrets self-sufficient, I'd recommend making the turrets large, tall structures that sink into the ship. Underneath the visible turret will be the turret's system blocks and docker. Just like a real-life battleship turret.

The wave motion gun will be tricky or weak, because if you have multiple weapon outputs on the same computer, each output increments the power requirement of the weapon by 10%. So even just a tiny 3x3 output square will nearly double the power requirement for a weapon system (1.8x).

One way to limit this power requirement is to make a ring of outputs around the outer edge of the weapon, leaving the "core" non-emitting. That way, you only have enough outputs for the circumference of the wave motion gun output, not the entire surface area. Another way to limit the power requirement would be to make all the outputs around the center output only one weapon block big. So you have a wide wave motion blast, with a center beam in the middle that does almost all the damage, and the rest of the beams doing almost no damage at all. (This is the version I recommend for single-player.) Or you could make a hybrid, with outputs only in the middle and at the circumference.

Alternatively, you can theoretically put all the outputs on their own computers to prevent out-of-control power requirements, and then fire them all at once with a logic controller. With this system, you cannot aim, so it will be strictly a close-range weapon, and you need to be awfully careful and sure with your shot, just like on the show. (Assuming you use nothing but a beam primary, that should keep it simple enough....)

I think you'll want to stay away from pulse secondaries, even on the wave motion gun. Pulse secondary would match the show's long recharge time, but in Single Player, it can really help to be able to shoot often with lesser damage limit. However, to help match the show, I would recommend punch-through as a tertiary on the wave motion gun (even if there isn't a secondary). Punch-through makes sense on a super-weapon designed to plow straight through enemy ships. On the other hand, I simply don't think a wide-beam Wave-motion gun in Starmade will be powerful enough to punch very far in, simply due to all the necessary weapon outputs, and also considering the armor on the average isanth. Suddenly 2m recharge doesn't go very far on a wave motion gun. It will partially depend on capacity storage. (Running out of power capacity vs. recharge may be what ultimately keeps your weapon from firing often.)

 

[DrTarDIS]

wave motion gun: LOGIC ACTIVATED grid of bem-pulse-explosive. Something like 3:1:3 would probably do what you want it to do.

Logic activation means it will "dead fire" straight-ahead instead of following your cursor, but will let you keep the CRAZY power requirements down to a manageable level. It also lets you "pack in" the checkerbord pattern to still be touching each other while having individual outputs.
I'd build it with the explosive effect out front, beam(output) in the middle, pulse near the back, and the computers grouped-together at the back of that. Copy the whole line, save as template, then paste till you've filled the area. C select a button, Shift-V onto the block of touching beam computers so they all get triggered by it. Connect that button both-ways to an inner ship remote(c button v remote, c remote v button), to make it easy to fire.

 

[MrGrey1]

Some great ideas there jayman38. I think you're right about the turrets in a deep well. I've been trying to pack the power into the barrel and cowling but it ends up being under whelming damage wise as there's not enough room left for gun blocks. They're certainly big enough to be able to hide a decent sized rotating tube into the hull. Your points on the WMG also much appreciated. Logic firing would be better for power use and make the gun more 'realistic' in that it's meant to be a big straight forward firing weapon... how useful that will be in game is the issue and I guess is the determining factor, stay on canon or make it useful in game. Decisions... thinking on it, it would be nice if firing a computer also emitted a logic signal when it was activated, no way to do that is there? If there was I could have a big single shot gun in the middle activated and aimed and then a bunch of 'slaved' logic fired decorative beams around it.

 

[Madman198237]

You COULD use logic to fire the weapon itself. You just lose accuracy because you can't "LOL" your gun into a different firing line (Because built-in weapon systems are clearly excellent at traversing)

 

[kulbolen]

all the above talk really depends on whether you want a strict adherence to your subject matter for rp, or an effective ship. a logic fired forward gun on a larger ship is a terrible idea from the perspective of usefulness in game, but itll certainly allow you to pack more damage into the weapon than a manually fired one would.

 

[MrGrey1]

all the above talk really depends on whether you want a strict adherence to your subject matter for rp, or an effective ship. a logic fired forward gun on a larger ship is a terrible idea from the perspective of usefulness in game, but itll certainly allow you to pack more damage into the weapon than a manually fired one would.

Agreed. Am also considering the idea of having it as a docked system though I'm not familiar with how the AI will handle a multi gun entity like that. Certainly have my work cut out for me with all this testing I've set myself up for.

 

[Lecic]

For solo play, I'd recommend NO tertiaries, to help keep the turrets small like on the show.

This is bad advice. Unless you are building turrets with less than 10 modules, there is literally no reason to not include a tertiary. Let's have two example turrets. Both have 30 total weapon modules in the system. One is 15:15:0, and the other is 10:10:10. The second one has the exact same number of blocks, and is also a better turret, because it has the tertiary to make it better at whatever its intended job is.

Adding a tertiary does NOT require adding more than a single block for its computer. Remove blocks from the Master and Slave to balance it out and gain a tertiary while having the same total number of blocks.

 

[JinM]

Looks darn cool man.

My 2 cents: The 3 main turrets are so big, that they would rotate the ship top into the water, if they were fired on a normal ship on earth's ocean from the broadside. Yeah ofcourse we can talk now about recoil surpressing ammunition, but that's was just my first thought when I saw the big turrets. =)

 

[kulbolen]

The 3 main turrets are so big, that they would rotate the ship top into the water, if they were fired on a normal ship on earth's ocean from the broadside.

my first thought when i read this was, "JinM must not know much about normal ships on earth's ocean."

i kid, i kid... but 2 words: recoil slide.

 

[MrGrey1]

Looks darn cool man.

My 2 cents: The 3 main turrets are so big, that they would rotate the ship top into the water, if they were fired on a normal ship on earth's ocean from the broadside. Yeah ofcourse we can talk now about recoil surpressing ammunition, but that's was just my first thought when I saw the big turrets. =)

I grabbed a pic of the interwebs of the 'Great Yamato' took the length from the wiki article of 330 something meters and did a grid overlay on the pic to get my scale. The barrel length is pretty much to scale, it's the width that's a little large due to needing a 3x3 barrel. The cowling is also a little wide but game mechanics/physics constraints and all.... and gdamnit, just found another web site that claims the 'Great Yamato' is actually 525m... grrrr. lol. Always find this information after you're half way through something.

 

[Endal]

Oh my lord, a fellow space battleship!
We should totally duel somewhere sometime.

 

[JinM]

Nah I am not an expert on this, I didn't want to say you should design them different.

There was a battleship with big or too high mounted guns in WW1 or 2 that couldn't fire them, because it would tipp over. But only one, that's why I thought of this. I think the design of yours is ok, I just got reminded of it. I just used the wrong words to express myself

 

[MrGrey1]

Oh my lord, a fellow space battleship!
We should totally duel somewhere sometime.

Would love to but being an isolated Aussie I'm likley unable to reach a server to duel on.
I was wondering about the apparent derth of Starblazers ships around actually. Glad I'm not the only one who's into them.

 

[Endal]

Would love to but being an isolated Aussie I'm likley unable to reach a server to duel on.
I was wondering about the apparent derth of Starblazers ships around actually. Glad I'm not the only one who's into them.

I am in the aussie timezone so that's even better :D