HowTo build a ship in the new dev build

[Zoolimar]

So the argument here is that unless you're filling a shell, meeting a mass or volume requirement, one should place stabilizers at 100% efficiency?

Yes.

Otherwise more stabilizers will equal more power for the same mass, but less volume, especially when armor is included?

Only if you wrap your whole ship in advanced armor, the ship is more or less cylindrical and your reactor is smaller than 15k blocks (I think that was the cutoff for saving mass on armor or something around it). Ships that don't use advanced armor as plug for each hole, that have more complex shapes and don't care so much about volume of the bounding box or ships with reactors of 20k and more blocks would be always better off to place stabilisers at 100% efficiency.

 

[NeonSturm]

If you use motherboard or no hull at all the benefit per mass for 100% efficiency becomes even more extreme. Advanced armor is next to totally useless so I don't see why you'd use it in a ship

Advanced armour is for around the core or critical systems, not for the whole hull.
Standard armour is what you would use as normal armour if your ship armour tanks
Hull should be used mostly where armor isn't needed.

If that's good or bad should be another topic. So sad that it influences the meta here and thus is ontopic too.
But we should assume one would use armour if the issues are fixed.

On Brierie you need 10 meshes for hull, but 25 capsules which are exactly fertikeen for hardeners, thus standard armour should be significantly stronger.
For advanced armour, you need so much fertikeen, that it should be significantly stronger than standard armour.

Considering that weapons are focused on a target and armour is spread among targets, armour should hold targets*60seconds of weapon fire from an equally sized gun - and advanced armour should hold at least 3x as much whereas hull needs to hold about 1/5 considering mass and production difficulty.

When I covered them each with hull the full distance one was undoubtedly lighter, by 30 or 40 mass. (I think it was roughly 180 vs 215)
With standard armor the shorter one was lighter by about 10 mass, total mass being about 330, so the difference was pretty negligible.
Because the shorter one was already lighter at standard armor, it would probably be lighter with adv armor too.

What happens if you have actual systems?
The mass difference gets even less relativ to the total.

So the argument here is that unless you're filling a shell, meeting a mass or volume requirement, one should place stabilizers at 100% efficiency?

Otherwise more stabilizers will equal more power for the same mass, but less volume, especially when armor is included?

There is a break-even point.
I dunno at which percentage for standard or advanced hull with system's and gun weight included.

Usually you can make bigger reactors and more stabilizers when you notice you need more energy and have space left.
I wouldn't go below 50% because of mass, but that is without knowing the exact math jet.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Okay, [bad supernatural being]'s advocate time... YOU ARE ALL LOOKING AT THE [NOT RIGHT] METRICS FOR A MINER!!!

Mining ships don't give a [bag of fiddle sticks] about mass since there is virtually no situation where they should begin to approach server max sizes. This leaves three metrics that actually matter: Cost, Turn Rate, and Hit Area.

I don't know the resources that go into stabilizers off the top of my head, but I assume they are more expensive than hull per mass, and as mentioned, you don't need to do a continuous hull. You could float your stabilizer or connect it with ultra lightweight scaffolding if you want the RP element. So this is a win to the longboi.

More important is turn rate. Bigger miners can often eat rocks faster than they can re-aim (barring a certain exploit); so, if playing fair, the shorter ship with more stabilizers gains the much more important aspect of turn speed which might easily double efficiency without adding a single extra module because it wastes less time not mining.

The the Grand Cup is hit area. A longboi is a terrible design for a mining ship. Unless salvagers changed in the 2.0 system, you should ideally be about 60-100 blocks long and 200-400 parallel beams to make a decent miner. Breaking these boundaries in any direction causes significant losses on you ROI. This makes a good heavy miner require a system block that is roughly 100x29x29 (or 100x31x31 for a cylinder). To optimize turn speed, you'll want to fill the gaps with as much shields, thrust, chambers, etc as you need, then slap some stubby reactors and stabilizers to the front and back. As of last I checked, you can not get 100% efficiency out of that distance for a salvage block that size; so, unless it's changed again, this is another win for the <100% idea.

*EDIT: potentially offensive language removed*

 

[Zoolimar]

The the Grand Cup is hit area. A longboi is a terrible design for a mining ship. Unless salvagers changed in the 2.0 system, you should ideally be about 60-100 blocks long and 200-400 parallel beams to make a decent miner.

They changed. Salvagers are 5 times more powerful.

 

[Nosajimiki]

​

Advanced armour is for around the core or critical systems, not for the whole hull.
Standard armour is what you would use as normal armour if your ship armour tanks
Hull should be used mostly where armor isn't needed.

If that's good or bad should be another topic. So sad that it influences the meta here and thus is ontopic too.
But we should assume one would use armour if the issues are fixed.

On Brierie you need 10 meshes for hull, but 25 capsules which are exactly fertikeen for hardeners, thus standard armour should be significantly stronger.
For advanced armour, you need so much fertikeen, that it should be significantly stronger than standard armour.

Considering that weapons are focused on a target and armour is spread among targets, armour should hold targets*60 seconds of weapon fire from an equally sized gun - and advanced armour should hold at least 3x as much whereas hull needs to hold about 1/5 considering mass and production difficulty.

FYI:
Soaks Mass
HULL | (50+50)*1 = 100 | .05
ARMOR | (75+75)*2.5 = 375 | .15
ADV A | (100+100)*10 = 2000 | .25

Heavier armor blocks more dam/mass as you go up unless hit by pierce weapons. Also, if a weapon fails to break an armor block, it waists all of the punchthrough meaning that an adv a block can actually stop well over 2k damage; so, adv armor IS useful on very small or very large ships, but is often considered too heavy for the mid-sized and low-density ships that are more common today.
[doublepost=1512065332,1512065237][/doublepost]

They changed. Salvagers are 5 times more powerful.

this would make an ideal array more like 20x29x29 reinforcing the longboi = bad miner hypothosis

 

[Snowtiger256]

Unless salvagers changed in the 2.0 system, you should ideally be about 60-100 blocks long and 200-400 parallel beams to make a decent miner.

Salvager power consumption and other metrics have changed.

I can get 25.7blocks per second from an array that is 80% smaller it used to be in the old system. The array is an elongated diamond in shape.

The array used to be 69x17x100 in masurements, with 51449 salvage modules, in double-stacked staggered array, with 1029 groups, 50 blocks long. It consumed around 800k of old power while active.

Now the same array is 69x17x20 in measurements and contains only 10290 salvage modules, in a double-stacked array, with 1029 groups, 10 blocks long. It consumes less than 200k of new power when active, and has an upkeep of some 45k new power.

Both of these arrays have the same 25,7 blocks/sec efficiency, and are capable of eating asteroids in seconds.

With what I know of salvagers, both of these arrays are perfectly acceptable and usable, so I think I know what I'm talking about when it comes to building salvagers. Please don't tell me that I know nothing of salvagers.

Edit: Also, both of these arrays fit into a 130m salvager just fine, fully powered and functional, so its not a long ship by any means.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Please don't tell me that I know nothing of salvagers.

Ehhh... I was not aware that I was saying you don't know how to make a salvager, but since you bring it up, 1029 is way too many outputs for most servers.

Effective mining is all about meeting but not beating the lag threshold on the server you are playing. For most servers, this threshold is right at about 400-500 outputs for a mining ship using salvagers at the length you described. Once you beat the threshold, the lag of every waisted beam actually slows down how quickly you can mine; so, your ROI drops. The added modules also make for a bigger ship that turns slower which is part of why I don't suggest going much longer that 100 (old system).

I'm not trying to undermine your opinions about miner sizes since they are actually the more popularly held belief, but all the side-by-side testing I have done have consistently shown the drawbacks of too-heavy mining rigs.

 

[Snowtiger256]

I know for a fact that this rig is not something they actually use on most servers, but it was built before output limits were put in place, and it still works very well outside those limits, depite the drawbacks. I can perfectly well build miners according to the restrictions on servers, but currently I'm not playing on any Survival servers, and therefore haven't seen a need to scale it down. If I move on to a Survival server sometime in the future, I will definitely build a miner that conforms to the restrictions.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Many servers allow 1000+ salvagers, but that is not what I mean. What I am talking about is a symptom of the way that the server (or your local computer if playing solo) processes data. Without getting too technical, removing a block is a process that the server must perform. Calculating a beam's path is a separate process that takes additional system resources. If you (as an extreme example) fired 20,000 beams, the system would consume so much resources calculating beam paths, that you'd be lucky to pick up more than a few hundred blocks per shot because the game engine is designed to drop processes rather than crash when things get overloaded.

You can optimise for a server by running tests during normal or minimal times of activity. If you fire a standard salvager array, you'll notice it often continues to pick up blocks even during its "reload" phase. If your array is mathematically capable of picking up more blocks than it can finish calculating during the reload before firing again, that means you're getting fewer blocks per second than you could with a lighter array. Having tested this on various servers, I find this tipping point to normally be somewhere between 300-400 100-block salvagers.

Given the smallness of this number, is also why I prefer an un-interlaced mining rig, because it helps spread out your target area better.

 

[NeonSturm]

400 outputs is 20x20, which is about the size of the miner I build

 

[Jojomo]

Only if you wrap your whole ship in advanced armor, the ship is more or less cylindrical and your reactor is smaller than 15k blocks (I think that was the cutoff for saving mass on armor or something around it). Ships that don't use advanced armor as plug for each hole, that have more complex shapes and don't care so much about volume of the bounding box or ships with reactors of 20k and more blocks would be always better off to place stabilisers at 100% efficiency.

That is all incorrect. (I'll post a large reactor example for you tomorrow)

Here are some more example pairs (100% stabiliser efficiency vs "best" stabiliser efficiency for the given geometry and armour level.

All use the same 20x10x5 reactor as my previous example. 100% stabiliser efficiency ships are on the left, "best" stabiliser efficiency on the right.

1. Single layer of hull. "Best" stabiliser efficiency is around 95% (gains are negligible, but present).
I had to use hull on all four sides instead of leaving one open, because the cross section is only 20x10, but the numbers are there to see. A larger cross section would mean the target stab effic would be lower.





2. Single layer of standard armour. "Best" stab efficiency is around 60% (would be about 55% if the 4th side was enclosed)





3. Single layer of AA. "Best" stab effic is around 50% (about 45% if 4th side is enclosed)

 

[GDPR 302420]

1. 100% stabiliser efficiency. Mass 5.8k, power 100k e/s

2. 20% stabiliser efficiency. Mass 4.7k, power 100k e/s

Take note of how your less efficient design has a lot less interior space for other systems that actually make your ship work, such as weapons, shields and so on, making your ship overall less efficient, unless of course you decide to add stuff outside of your hull, but that ruins the entire point of adding hull in the way you suggested in the first place

 

[Jojomo]

Take note of how your less efficient design has a lot less interior space for other systems that actually make your ship work, such as weapons, shields and so on, making your ship overall less efficient, unless of course you decide to add stuff outside of your hull, but that ruins the entire point of adding hull in the way you suggested in the first place

And the simple answer to that is that you need to know how many system blocks that reactor can power before deciding whether the volume is enough.

And second, the solution is even simpler/better: to get more volume you increase your cross-section. I've used a small one of 20x10 here. A larger cross-section has the added benefit of allowing even lower ideal stab efficiencies.

 

[GDPR 302420]

And second, the solution is even simpler/better: to get more volume you increase your cross-section. I've used a small one of 20x10 here. A larger cross-section has the added benefit of allowing even lower ideal stab efficiencies.

I can do the exact same with the 100% efficiency design you linked above.

And the simple answer to that is that you need to know how many system blocks that reactor can power before deciding whether the volume is enough.

If your reactor is not sufficient to power the systems within its interior then you increase the amount of power the reactor produces by adding more blocks, because you keep your ship at 100% efficiency you need to add less blocks to get desired results.

 

[Jojomo]

I can do the exact same with the 100% efficiency design you linked above.

Cool.

If your reactor is not sufficient to power the systems within its interior then you increase the amount of power the reactor produces by adding more blocks, because you keep your ship at 100% efficiency you need to add less blocks to get desired results.

Increasing your reactor while maintaining the same stab effic also increases your volume...
If you use 100% stab efficiency you are very unlikely to be able to power all the systems that can fit in the ship - to fill the hull extreme geometry or huge excesses of redundant systems will be necessary.
(For example I have recreated a Despoiler in 2.0 with the same systems as the original - it has vast swathes of unused volume inside a hull that surrounds a power system at "best" stab effic, with a cross section similar to that of the original Despoiler)

The best course of action is to reduce your stabiliser efficiency to the "best" value, or to the point where if you go any lower volume would become insufficient - whichever is greater. (Or increase your cross section area until it and it's associated best stab effic result in the volume you want/need)
Obviously.

 

[GDPR 302420]

The best course of action is to reduce your stabiliser efficiency to the "best" value, or to the point where if you go any lower volume would become insufficient - whichever is greater.

So you solve the issue of not having enough power generated to power all systems that would be present in a volume by.... decreasing the available volume.

That is a terrible idea, simply because it creates a larger area where a hostile can inflict Reactor HP damage, making your ship more vulnerable.

The better solution is to expand the size of your reactor to produce more power while keeping 100% efficiency, because they are 100% efficient then you require less blocks placed to achieve necessary power, which decreases the area where hostiles can deal RHP damage.

 

[Zoolimar]

That is all incorrect. (I'll post a large reactor example for you tomorrow)

I'll save you the need to do it. Here.

Spoiler: Pictures

As you can see the shorter "ship" is 1800 tons heavier. And that's assuming absolutely insane use of advanced armor.

 

[kikaha]

Whats insane use of advanced armor ? 2 or 3 hundred thousands advanced armor makes for a decent medium battle ship. Easy to get on survival servers.

 

[Zoolimar]

Whats insane use of advanced armor ?

Single layer covering the whole body of the ship instead of only a couple of plates protecting critical systems and buried at least 20-30 layers under shield blocks, interiors or girders. Or all of the above.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Single layer advanced on a ship of any size serves no purpose other than to increase your mass and cost.