Looking for feedback

[dwwojcik]

I've been making good progress on my latest ship. It's the first one I've gotten this close to completing. Aesthetically, it's inspired by some EVE Online ship I saw a picture of around here, mainly the basic shape of the bridge and the curved front armor piece... after that the similarities end.

It's armed with two slow-fire antimatter cannons (with a slaved explosive effect to compensate for the lack of missiles) and a pair of small turrets, mainly to harass enemies outside of the firing arc of the main cannons. I've only tested the main guns on asteroids but the damage seems to be quite substantial.

Spoiler: Exterior Pictures

Front

Back

Turret Close-up

The ship doesn't exactly have a full interior, but it's a functional one. There's a spacious bridge with a great view and several (obviously non-functional) consoles, a core room protected by a blast door, and couple of spare rooms to be filled with whatever the owner has a need for. (storage probably, an infirmary maybe, perhaps some crew quarters for role playing) There's also a transporter room.

Spoiler: Interior Pictures

Bridge

If anyone has any suggestions on any of that, that'd be great, but I'm mostly looking for some idea of how my ship's specs stacks up against similarly sized ships other people have built.

Mass: 5,612.5 (48,016 blocks)
105m long, 32m tall, 31m wide
Power reserve of 5,300,827,8 with 1,082,734.1 e/sec generation
7,060.5 thrust
233,149 shields capacity with 9,674 regen per second

2,949,859 structural hitpoints
1,225,325 armor hitpoints

Do you think that'd be enough of everything? Right now I'm pegging this as a Frigate, or maybe a Destroyer. There's actually a fair bit of spare room towards the front under the main hull, I could add some more shields or something if needed... or, if not, maybe something more interesting.

There's also a scanner, a radar jammer that can stay on all the time, an overdrive system that can boost the top speed by a little over a third, and a jump drive that charges rather quickly. Overall it's a pretty mobile and sneaky ship.

 

[Kij421]

I like the nice and rounded look of the front. But from the picture you posted in the back, it still looks kinda boxy. Not that you haven't wedged everything (though the turret probably should have some), but like the smooth curved look you started with the front kind of got abandoned. I think it'd be cool if maybe it flares up in the back kind of like a tail. You know, that way the top and bottom of the ship aren't just this perfectly flat surface. I do like that armor plating look on the side, though. The broken up look is very nice IMO.

The interior is nice and spacious too. It's a little dark for my taste, but that might be what you're going for. But the colors are cool. Having the symmetrical screens at the top of the bridge gives a nice look. If you want to fill some of the space, you could maybe try putting "server racks" in there, with maybe some cables running along the floor to different parts of the ship. That'd all depend on how clean or industrial of a look you want, though.

As for the actual stats of the ship, I'm no good to you there. Sorry

 

[dwwojcik]

Here's a quick sketch of the look I was going for.

I tried to recreate this in blocks as best I could- I wanted a sort of sleek upper shell that would curve up and over the top of the ship and just form a smooth protective surface, with boxier more industrial-looking shapes underneath. I know it's not visually interesting, but I like flat armor, because it's practical. (or it would be in real life) Also if I were to actually put this ship to use in a fleet, I'd want some flat space to put markings and lettering. I'm a fan of tail fins and wings on my ships, many of my previous false-starts have featured such things, but I'm not going for an aircraft look with this one.

I am going for a cleaner look for the interior, and a darker one so as not to overpower the view outside... but i was considering putting some conduits under the floor or something, that'd be cool.

 

[jayman38]

 

[dwwojcik]

Oh, and here's the fictional brand I made, for roleplay purposes I guess.

 

[Yrjosmiel]

Oh, and here's the fictional brand I made, for roleplay purposes I guess.

​

holy shit how do you even make this

Photoshop? paint.net? MS Paint?

 

[dwwojcik]

holy shit how do you even make this

Photoshop? paint.net? MS Paint?

I used Inkscape, vector graphics are perfect for this sort of thing. Although, it'd be totally possible to use a bitmap editor for my logo in particular, since it's just a standard Unicode flag symbol.

 

[Raisinbat]

Since there's still not much feedback on the actual stats, i thought i'd pitch in, although i'm not exactly an expert:

You've kind of landed yourself right in the worst spot for e/sec, the sweet spot is around 850k, then the power per block goes south really fast. Power is fine for the size class, just would be better slightly less or more; if you can move power into turretbases that usually helps, but that's hard to do with cannon/pulse since they need so much capacity. One thing that is definitely lacking for ship is shield HP; 5k mass should not have <500k shield, and sounds like no ion effect either.

If your CAN/PUL setup is eating the full 5mil energy per shot, consider dropping the slave effect to 50%; you'll have 7.5 second cooldown between shots, but you can raise the main and effect count to keep DPS the same. This will let you replace half your power capacitors with shield ones. You didn't give any specs on your weapons though, so its hard to say there, but i'm also worried you have too much damage per shot; a 500k damage bullet goes in one end of a ship and comes out the other, wasting a lot of it's damage. Explosive effect shots need 30k+ damage to be strong enough to destroy adjacent blocks, but if its 500k+ it might be overkill.

Your stats generally seem low for a 5k mass ship, are you using advanced armor or inefficient reactor setup? Armor is very poorly ballanced and cripples your ship's ability atm:

• Shields/power/weapons/speed makes your ship more likely to win
• Armor makes you lose more slowly; By the time it kicks in your ship is allready falling apart; losing turrets, power and systems. It is also extremely expensive in terms of mass.

One last thing that appears to be missing is anti-missile turrets. No missile defense + very low shields + less than 200% speed = missile kibble. Consider replacing the low damage turrets with some of these; your ship isn't large enough to require full coverage, you'll be able to strafe and turn against most smaller vessels without trouble.

One last thing is the CAN/PUL setup. I've been working on a ship around the same size that uses these and i find that slow firing guns are virtually impossible to lead against even moderate speed targets. Consider linking them to a logic trigger and adding a clock linked to seperate cannon computers with a single module so you have two weak cannons constantly firing. Use the weak cannons to lead your fire, and use the heavy guns when the weak but fast shots are hitting.

 

[dwwojcik]

If the stats seem low, then that's probably because the interior hasn't been completely filled yet. I wasn't sure if I had enough shields, (good to know that I don't) so I just left the space empty and focused on aesthetics. I'm not relying on armor with this ship, it's just Standard Armor, and it's only one-thick in most places.

I'm open to reworking the weapons. The turrets were meant to be just general-purpose guns to harass enemies out of sight, but I can see how point defense turrets would be better, since with enough shields any incoming damage other than missiles could just be absorbed. I assume rapid-fire is a must for these, do beams or cannons work better for the primary weapon type? The main guns are actually just straight cannons, no slaved secondary computer (aside from the explosive effect) which I figured would give me a nice balance between fire rate and damage. Is this not a good idea? Also I didn't see where it shows how much damage per shot the guns put out, when I get back to my desktop I'll look through the menus more closely and see if I can't find out. Edit: 6042 cannon blocks in 2 equal groups, plus 1035 Explosive effect blocks in one group (idk if it matters for those) making for 17.1%.

The power reactors aren't particularly efficient, I just made straight lines the full length of the ship (with some L-shapes as space permitted) until I reached 1 mil... I was under the impression that the soft cap was 1 mil, is it actually 850k? If so I'll take it down to that and put in more batteries instead. The main guns only take up about a fifth of the battery when they fire, and it's fully recharged by the time the cooldown/reload period has elapsed.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Actually, at the time you designed it, the softcap was indeed 1mil.
It has been raised to 2mil, but what the other guy was saying, is that the bonuses to power generation had, at the time, had a sweet-spot of 850k, after that, the bonus per block started dropping, but that's all changed now.

As to the "sweet-spot" for Cannon damage-vs-refire rate? That is actually overall best with a Cannon/Cannon set up where the slave gun is about 75% the size of the main gun. This gives "decent" fire-rate, without totally screwing over the damage output.
On the other hand, if you're not having problems hitting the target with your current gun, then there's no need to change it, since it is hitting far harder per shot than that auto-cannon set up ever will.

As to "PD" guns, only a 100% Cannon/Cannon system will do any good, since only the Cannon weapon can shoot-down missiles, and only a 1-to-1 setup will put out bullets fast enough to actually hit the missile.
In fact, you'll probably want the over-all smallest machinegun. 1 cannon module for each computer. (normally written as 1/1, 1-for-1 or 1-to-1 cannon/cannon)
(Damage is irrelevant at the moment, since missiles have no armor, no shields, and all of 1hp. A sneeze could kill it, were sneezing a valid weapon.)


Now on to the finiky bit of Shields.
This is hard, because I want to argue quite strongly that you REALLY don't have enough, but then I like shooting up Titans and Battle-cruisers, so massive capacity is practically mandatory for that.

This one all comes down to the intended role of your ship.
If it's role is "similar size or smaller targets" then more recharge is required, as machineguns and auto-cannon are the main weapons on "most" smaller vessels.
If it is hunting bigger ships, then "YOU REQUIRE ADDITIONAL CAPACITORS", literally as many as you can cram in, probably by first optimizing the power generation, then cutting out part of the power storage, untill you have around 3x as much storage as you expect to be using.
(and that mostly as "protection" from EMP and drain weapons)
Of those two, power-gen optimizing might free up the most block-space for conversion to other uses.

And I like the overall look, excellent job keeping to the theme you set.