Ideal Block Numbers

[ZyChrome]

On this thread,​

I hope to find all the ideal block counts for various mechanisms, feel free to post any information regarding

1. Ideal block counts for
   1. Shields, I.E. blatantly ignoring a pirate raid team (npcs)
   2. Power blocks, I.E. lasting x seconds cloaked, or ignoring power consumption ('cause generation is so ridiculously high)
   3. Weapons, to break thru shields on a pirate's home station
2. Advisable ship dimensions, and what might fit in them
3. Good aesthetic areas, I.E. how much room the core's room should have, how big the doors should be...
   1. (all opinions, of course)

And anything else that might aid in manufacturing the perfect ship!
I've already (with help) deciphered a group of numbers that let a ship lie in proximity to a pirate station unharmed:
Shield: 20x20x10 (4000)
S-Capacitors: 16x16x10 (2560)
Power: 15x15x16 (7200)
P-Capacitors: 15x15x20 (4500)
with near cubic factors to give you a little perspective. (I thought it was way off at first, it helped me at least..)

If you have ship blueprints with ideal-numbers installed, you should post a link!

 

[Mork2]

Tricky there are tradeoffs.

Some things are easier to figure out and perfect may just mean efficient which is not the same as best as.

Shield rechargers and shields are linear so more blocks means stronger.

As for ignoring pirates npc ships it depends. You can set the pirates to spawn with what ever ship blueprints you want so there depends on what the admin sets pirates to have available. I've set them up to use 5million block titans in some of my combat testing.

For power to weight ratio 596 power generators in one system without doubling up on any of the box dims. Note this is not the most power just the most power per block average.
There is a setups for maximum power in a certain cube size but I don't have the plans for those since I just use a couple of long lines.

Power capacitors are store more power the more blocks are connected together so only have 1 continuous set of power capacitors for maximum power storage for the number of power capacitors you have.

As for cloaking and jamming it all comes down to how much power you generate and how many total blocks you have. Plus you need enough power storage for power spikes and lag.

Best turn rate is the shorter ship dimenions. So a cube ship has the best overall turn and roll rates. A long needle like ship has horrible turn rates but great roll rates comparatively.

To design a perfect ship requires it to have a singular purpose that you can then design to. Without the stated purpose its hard to do so.

 

[ZyChrome]

This is exactly what i meant!
Heres a request (for me): a ship designed to house many many turrets, and basically mimic a moving station. ignorant to pirates of all VANILLA types i.e. insanth.
as well as enough thrusters to maintain an acceleration rate of 20 km p/sec

and what kinds of turrets and what their numbers should be for the ship, and where. all towards the ideal ship per/purpose theory!
i put 160 000 power generators on my ship, dividing it up into 20 peices of approximately 8000 each
and 1000000 capacitors
and i tested it with a cloaker, it drained me empty in 3 seconds. cloakers are b.s.... all in all...

 

[Az14el]

Use Box Dim for your power gen! Get rid of like 98% of those damn reactors lol

Yeah the Cloaking system is pretty much A) You can Perma-cloak or B) You can't Cloak at all
Never seen a particularly viable short duration cloak, as to even get anywhere near the ratio required you have to sacrifice too much, and then become a cloak ship that can't cloak, which is the worst of all 3 options :/


An Isanth-Proof Ship is pretty simple stuff, but assuming you wanna be able to ignore the stations as well (I'm looking at you Alpha Station Missile Turrets...) then 200k+ shields with 20k regen is enough to let you afk kill waves of the things while tanking station hits. Worth noting that Shield Regen gets knocked down to 8% efficiency in combat, meaning if you wanna be able to tank hits for an extended fight, or ignore smaller vessels, you need to spam the stuff.

As for the turrets, rails patch made things just WORK, small overdrive turrets are now very worth taking, fit 20 missile tubes, 20 beam modules & 10 overdrive into a tiny little turret (since they no longer need their own shields), and just look at how absurd the damage is for its size. These will one shot all default Isanth ships and station turrets, even able to destroy some stations, and it's easy to fit dozens or even hundreds on a relatively small warship. Regardless of what weapon type you wanna use on your turrets, a good rule of thumb I've been introduced to since the last patch is Overdrive at 1-100 Mass, Explosive at 100-1000 Mass and Punch-Through at 1000+ Mass.

Not super specific but I hope it helped

 

[awesome270]

The best core rooms i found have a space above the core, two blocks or more. When the player exits the core the game currently looks at the closed empty space above the core, and to my knowledge hasn't been changed yet. If you do not have that space above the core the player will exit the core above the ship which is certainly annoying if the ship only has doors on the bottom.
For rooms and such, there are many ship builders out there that have great detailing in their interiors. They have rooms that you can tell what the purpose is immediately such as a storage room, medical station, engine room, bridge, and so on. There are so many amazing builders in this community that it would be hard to name them all. Just download ships that you think might be interesting and take notes on what you don't like, what you would change, and what you don't like and make it into your own style.

 

[Mork2]

Permacloak and Jamming Ships have very high power requirements. You need pretty much 150 energy per second per block including docked entities to hold cloak and you need a decent sized battery for lag spikes or you decloak.

Typically this requires a very good reactor setup not those efficient cubes that won't work. The efficient cubes is max power in a small cube not max power per block which is what you want for perma cloaking.

Since there is a softcap on power regeneration where around 900k or so the power per block starts to come down reguardless of boxdims to at worst 25/block which is less that what is required for cloaking. Once you hit around 1mil or so energy per second large blocks of power generators work since there is no further bonus for laying them out properly. I usually for capitalships layout around 1m e/sec of power generators then mirror the layout to absorb a bit of battle damage.

Typically a perma stealth ship is under or around 5800 blocks because of this. On the other hand as long as pirates don't hit you while shooting someone ELSE you can pretty much ignore the pirates.

An old perma cloaking ship I made. Not very stylish since it was a decent weapons load. You can make stylish cloakers but I'm not good at that, and they nerf what weapons loadout and features you might be able to fit in the remaining mass available.

Cloaking ship link

Hope this helps

 

[ZyChrome]

whats box dim?
also: i spent an hour placing power reactors with 10x10x10 and all 3 mirrors, to find out this!??!

 

[Mork2]

Not sure if i can explain this properly. Box dimensions is the largest dimension in each direction x y z for a collection of blocks added together. So if you have a collection of blocks, each block that doesn't increase the overall dimenions of the collection of blocks doesn't get a bigger bonus in the 3 axis xyz.

For instance a cube of 125 blocks is 5 x 5 x 5. So that would get the boxdim bonus of 5+5+5=15 boxdim bonus. But a line of blocks 125 long would get a box dim bonus of 125. . An L shape with 75 blocks in the x axis and 50 blocks in the y axis also has a box dim of 75+50=125

Another way of looking at it is any block that doubles up with another block in any of the 3 axis xyz isn't adding to the box dimensions.

 

[ZyChrome]

all that i needed was to know boxdim=boxdimensions
(first time dim didn't equate in my mind...)
still, i made a ship of about 100 on each dimension... and its perfect.. tho turn speed is 1.1 on all 3...
i'm now going into aesthetics.. it might be pleasing.
the block numbers i used:

1. 100000 power reactors
2. 100000 capacitors
3. 250000 shield-rechargers
4. 100000 shield capacitors
5. 1 missile comp
6. 100000 missile barrels
7. 1 jump drive comp
8. 100000 jd modules
9. a number of blue advanced armors
   not even the wedges. just the cubes.
10. 100000 thrusters

 

[Az14el]

I think a number of my friends think I'm actually mentally unhinged now, since trying (and failing) to explain optimal power reactor design to them ... Mork2 was completely right about the soft cap thing though, you do reach a point with reactors where the benefit of using Box Dims is outweighed by the space required, and a big clump becomes more viable.

You might even out the numbers on your shield caps & rechargers a bit, I prefer to use more recharge than capacity for cost/efficiency but keep in mind that recharge also takes power ("PowerCon" number to the right of your shield stats in build mode, it's 1 power per 1 point of recharge, however this might be shaped down to 0.08 per 1 in combat to match the shaped regen rate), so extremely large ships that are well beyond power regen cap, destroyers that need all their power to fire their weapons/turrets, medium-large+ jammed ships, and innefficiently designed ships will have trouble with very high shield regen, I use 1.5 rechargers per cap since the shield rework and am finding that manageable so far except for heavy jammers under fire, might go to 1;1 or even less for titan class. Also doubly important to field a defensive Ion effect system with a high shield regen set up.

Turn speed is relative to your dimensions and can't be altered as of yet.

Also try linking a damage beam computer to that missile computer (C on missile computer, V on damage beam computer)
This will give you lock on with your missile, adding damage beam modules to the damage beam computer will increase the range, damage, speed and reload time of the shot.

 

[ZyChrome]

Cool thx ill do this on my turrets. The turn speed is so low that my up-close methods are kind of useless. only turrets get the full package, shield+power+weapon+speed and I don't like sm sniping

 

[Mork2]

Just be careful with the shield rechargers during non combat situation the shield rechargers when recharging at full rated speed use 10 times the number of blocks in energy. so 100k regen uses 1mil e/second. If you don't have sufficient power for this it may cause problems. If you login or start a game your ship might start with 0 energy and 0 shields and your power might be nerfed for a few minutes on startup while the shield rechargers are using all power trying to fill the shields.

Also you can look at shield capacitors as storing 10 times there energy in defence. To break through 1million shields in general uses 10million energy assuming someone isn't using ion weapons. Your regeneration rate won't matter if someone can take a big enough chunk out of the shields initially with very low ROF weapon first. As your regen only starts after that first set of hits.

They recently doubled the shield capacitor storage limit to help reduce the chance of being alpha strike killed. Which I assume to means it happens a bit.

 

[ZyChrome]

Thanks, but power is of no concern. I generate 2.6 million per second, with a cap of 177 million and only use 4.8 million per second at 50% shields, with a cap of 21 million. OMG I just ran the numbers, 2.6<4.8 oh no! I'll fix it.

 

[Az14el]

Yep haha, thats where Box Dim loses it's efficiency and you'll need mass spammed reactors anyway, or even a "non-laggy" docked power supply beam set up

That said most larger ships are not completely power efficient, and instead rely on huge power capacity.

 

[ZyChrome]

well, when i realized this, i also realized that i could easily fix it, its still a box. and its only 100^3
plus i might ignore it for now, and make a husk that looks pretty before i stuff it with my junk. (hehe) all the blocks and reactors and capacitors.... and some missiles and damage beams with ion upgrades and lots of turrets, tho i dont get how using anything but rail turret axes (ax, axe, & axis plural, cool right?) for turrets, cause logic systems would have to be COMPLEX to the MAX for it to work, and one would have to be NOT inside the ship to enable them... but it would be cool to not be in first person when the weapons fire... like playing it for real.
You know what?! IM DOING IT! ima make a logic system, first for one turret, then for 8 probably, to steer it to every possible angle, and sheathe/unsheathe it. nope no.... wait yeah.... its gonna take work. ill do it when i cant access the internet. (I have other more internet-sensitive tasks)