Loadout for a smaller (460k blocks) capital ship?

[Tamren Shade]

I have a very pretty light cruiser that is underperforming versus the slightly improved pirates and pirate stations on the GenXNova server. Part of the problem is this is the first ship I've built larger than an escort and evidently I have no idea how to equip ships on this scale .

She has 460k blocks broken down by percentage points below.

Armor 157k Blocks 35.5% (roughly half advanced, half standard)
Shields 92k Blocks 21%
Power 67k Blocks 15%
Thrust 58k Blocks 13%
Weapons 37.5k Blocks 8.5%
Jump Drives 12k Blocks 3%

and around 300o blocks of offensive weapons divided between a dozen turrets, and another 18 turrets devoted to an anti missile grid.

I don't think I can take the armor blocks below 35.5 %, as most of those are in the skin of the hull and the hull is only 1-3 blocks thick depending on what's underneath it.

The power system generates 6 million e/s between the reactor blocks and a pair of 10K aux reactors, and holds 65 million power at full charge, but I wouldn't mind pulling one aux reactor if I can come up with a weapon loadout that would allow this ship to fight and maneuver on 4 million e/s.

I do have a full ion effect defensive system I'd like to keep.

I'd like this ship to be a fast moving cannon heavy vessel that can act as a player flown flagship for commanding and supporting small fleets of destroyers, frigates, and/or corvettes, but if that isn't practical I can be flexible .

What would be a good loadout and weapon mix for a ship like this? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[TCOne]

At GenXNova you need about 6+ million shields for fighting pirates solo.

This will not allow you to take down a pirate station in a single run, but eventually with right strategy you'll manage to do so.


As of weapons - it's a bit complicated. GenXNova have rather... unhuman weapon range set, so I use beam+cannon setup. As big as I can fit into my ship. No effect or Explosive. Range for beams at Nova is still a lot further then you can physically see your target (15km iirc), so you'll never encounter a range problem, like in vanilla game.
The other thing you might want to consider is dumbfire missiles. Missile+Cannon+Explosive (1/1/1). Superb for station destruction and close combat with local pirate frigates. Again, as big, as you can fit in.
Other thing to mention is heavy missiles. Either nukes (missile+dmg pulse) or just heavy (over 1000 tube blocks per group) setup of missile+beam. Some slow, but devastating missiles will come in handy when you take down frigate shields and need to finally kill it.

I have 2 ships that I designed for GenXNova specifically. One have 13m shields with about 100k regen, other is 20m/0.5m.
One is ~900k blocks other is close to 1.5m
Both can fight pirates solo, and the smaller may have some problems.

Other thing to keep in mind is that Nova's pirates have torpedo ships with warheads. They will ram you dealing damage ignoring your shields. If you have Aux power (you probably need it), make sure you have several separate groups of it, shielded from all other systems and from each other with at very least one layer of advanced armor. 2 layers is better. That said - I learned it a hard way, nearly loosing my 1.5m block ship, because of neglecting aux shielding.

Overall, 460k blocks might be enough to build a capable ship for Nova server, but defense and power regen you mentioned is very much below the margin.


Last thing to mention would be this ship from stardock: Deimos Destroyer
It was the first ship from stardock that was more or less capable to fight Nova's pirates. Just set turrets to attack your target, not "any".
And it'll still be very hard.

 

[Tamren Shade]

At GenXNova you need about 6+ million shields for fighting pirates solo.

As of weapons - it's a bit complicated. GenXNova have rather... unhuman weapon range set, so I use beam+cannon setup. As big as I can fit into my ship. No effect or Explosive. Range for beams at Nova is still a lot further then you can physically see your target (15km iirc), so you'll never encounter a range problem, like in vanilla game.
The other thing you might want to consider is dumbfire missiles. Missile+Cannon+Explosive (1/1/1). Superb for station destruction and close combat with local pirate frigates. Again, as big, as you can fit in.
Other thing to mention is heavy missiles. Either nukes (missile+dmg pulse) or just heavy (over 1000 tube blocks per group) setup of missile+beam. Some slow, but devastating missiles will come in handy when you take down frigate shields and need to finally kill it.

I have 2 ships that I designed for GenXNova specifically. One have 13m shields with about 100k regen, other is 20m/0.5m.
One is ~900k blocks other is close to 1.5m
Both can fight pirates solo, and the smaller may have some problems.

Overall, 460k blocks might be enough to build a capable ship for Nova server, but defense and power regen you mentioned is very much below the margin.

Ok, so 5 million shields with full ion needs to go to 6? So I'd need to find another 10k blocks to divert to shields. I'd probably have to sacrifice thrusters. From your numbers, and the numbers on the Deimos, do you run about 40% blocks devoted to shields on your ship?

How many outputs and how many blocks do you have on your big beam-cannon weapons?

And you mentioned one of your ships is 1.5 million blocks? I thought the server rules specified no more than 1 million blocks with 300k in turrets?

 

[TCOne]

Topic about limits at their forum is probably outdated. At least everyone in chat says it's 2m for ships and 5m for stations now. And from what I know for sure: My ship is not the biggest/heaviest at the server

Stats are the following:

Name: Jewel
Mass: 194,220.297 (199,041.797 with docked ships. 4 fighters and 1 bomber)
Total blocks: 1,654,292
Size: 452x106x213 (l,h,w)
Main power (stored/regen): 213,435,398 / 2,494,598
Aux power (regen ON / OFF): 23,098,131 / 4,619,626
Thrust: 236,612 (380,452 blocks)
Shield (total/regen): 21,047,088 / 490,050
Shield blocks (cap/rech): 247,800 / 89,100
Structure/Armour: 91,039,965 / 26,808,900

Primary weapon: Missile/Cannon/Explosive (8100/8101/8100) | Single group.
Primary weapon stats: 486,000 dmg. 1 second reload. 2,430,000 energy per shot.

Secondary weapon: Beam/Cannon/None (25204/25200/0) | 4 groups.
Secondary weapon stats (single group): 126,090 dmg/second. 1 second reload. 327,833 energy per shot.
Secondary weapon stats (total): 504,360 dmg/second. 1 second reload. 1,311,332 energy per shot.

Tertiary weapon: Missile/Beam/Explosive (25200/25200/25200) | 4 groups.
Tertiary weapon stats (single group): 17,010,000 dmg. 45 seconds reload. 87,176,248 energy per shot.
Tertiary weapon stats (single computer): 34,020,000 dmg. 45 seconds reload. 174,352,496 energy per shot.
Note: 4 groups separated in 2 groups per 2 computers, because I have not enough power to fire 4 missiles at a time.

Logic controlled autofire heat seeking missiles: Missile/Missile/Punch-Through (7920/7920/7920) | 4 groups.
Weapon stats (single group): 178,200 dmg/missile. 10 missiles in 1 shot. 15 seconds reload. 9,578,251 energy per shot.
Weapon stats (total): 178,200 dmg/missile. 40 missiles in 1 shot. 15 seconds reload. 38,313,004 energy per shot.

Ion Effect efficiency: 34.0%
Overdrive Effect efficiency: 28.5%



I will not go further and list turrets specs, will just mention that they are rather weak. This ship is station killer, and it's main armament does the trick quite well. Turrets are mostly for annoying small pirate ships swarming around.

This stats are from my SP world with vanilla blocks. Nova's stats can differ slightly, but I'm not sure.

 

[kurosawa]

Is there any point in having armor with weaponry of that size.

I mean your tertiary weapons can remove all shield in 1 successful hit, the primary and secondary in a few seconds. after that you just vaporize the hull and internals.
So would it be better to use more shield and just some basic armor?


On my own vanilla server, my own ship uses a siege cannon that goes straight true 4 layers of spaced standard armor, penetrates the inner hull (standard) and continues true count less bulkheads and modules. Im thinking swithing my inner hull to basic hull block just to save mass.

 

[Jojomo]

She has 460k blocks broken down by percentage points below.

Armor 157k Blocks 35.5% (roughly half advanced, half standard)
Shields 92k Blocks 21%
Power 67k Blocks 15%
Thrust 58k Blocks 13%
Weapons 37.5k Blocks 8.5%
Jump Drives 12k Blocks 3%

and around 300o blocks of offensive weapons divided between a dozen turrets, and another 18 turrets devoted to an anti missile grid.

I think discussing ships in terms of number of blocks, and percentages given to each system category like this is an excellent method for quick and dirty comparisons between ships.

I would also be a great way to help people with their first steps when they post here asking "How much X should I have in a ship this big?"

The only thing that would be even better would be discussing it in terms of mass instead of block count.

 

[Panpiper]

Is there any point in having armor with weaponry of that size.

I mean your tertiary weapons can remove all shield in 1 successful hit, the primary and secondary in a few seconds. after that you just vaporize the hull and internals.
So would it be better to use more shield and just some basic armor?

On my own vanilla server, my own ship uses a siege cannon that goes straight true 4 layers of spaced standard armor, penetrates the inner hull (standard) and continues true count less bulkheads and modules. Im thinking swithing my inner hull to basic hull block just to save mass.

Those missiles are indeed scary, if they all hit. Against a properly defended target however with adequate anti-missile turrets, in all likelihood, they'll be doing good if one or two hit. 8.5 million damage sounds like a lot of damage, except half of that is lost due to half the explosion venting off into open space, and the rest likely has to deal with Ion reinforced shields, so the damage actually taken by the ship will likely be less than 2 million, per volley if it has full ion. The ship and therefor it's theoretical opponent, has 21 million shields.

Is it worth putting on armor in the face of weapons as massive as these? The only reason those weapons 'are' that massive in the first place is so that they will have the power to crack advanced armor and still do damage. If they didn't have to crack pierce hardened advanced armor, they would be smaller and more numerous to do more system damage. If they hit a ship without such armor, they are likely to go right through a ship. In a fight versus a ship such as that, you definitely do want armor, you want multiple layers of pierce hardened spaced armor with 'full' pierce hardening, and then you want to keep the armor moving beneath his fire, so that it has to constantly penetrate fresh armor. If you don't rotate/turn fresh armor under his guns, he will indeed rip a ship to shreds quickly. Not having armor means you are pretty much toast the instant your shields go down.

Two well built warships going head to head to one another probably can knock down each other's shields inside of a minute. If one of them can't, he's probably under-armed. If one of them doesn't have advanced, spaced, pierce hardened armor, they better have 'much' bigger shields.