Mass Saving Techniques?

[Edymnion]

So I'm building a ship that is going to be quite large, which means its going to be spending a LOT of power on thrusters just to move. So, one thing I'd like to do is to implement as many mass saving techniques as possible

These are the three I can think of right away, does anyone have more?

1. Docked Power Generators - Pretty standard thing for massive ships just to be able to generate the power they need, so this is an obvious one. Build internal docked power plants instead of using power generators as gap filler.
2. Docked Shield Generators - Less immediately obvious, but same as above. Offload a great deal of the shield recharge to dedicated internal charging stations.
3. Fixed Docked Turrets - Obviously I'll want to keep some weapons at my immediate control, but some of my larger homing missile arrays I can dock internally with actual docking stations to lock them down into looking straight out forwards/backwards so they can't rotate. They'll act the same as if they were ship mounted, only they'll auto-fire, and I can put a bit of logic in to simply have blast doors close over them to stop them from firing when I don't want them to. End up being mostly the same as if I had the array built into the main ship, but will still reap the mass reduction savings.

Shield capacitors have to stay on the mothership, and the power capacitors. Will need to keep the salvage array on-board, as well as the heatseeker arrays (never, never, NEVER make heatseeker turrets!)...

Is there anything else I can offload to a docked structure to reduce the overall mass of the ship, and hence how much energy will be required to move it?

 

[Keptick]

That pretty much covers everything. It all comes back to the same thing; overcoming the power soft cap with docked entities and saving up on mass spammed reactor blocks.

One thing you could do is also just have a lower thrust/mass ratio :P

 

[Edymnion]

Lol, there's having a lower ratio, and there's ships that size just being faster and easier to charge the jump drive to go one sector than it is to actually accelerate to it. :P

 

[SkaireKrough]

So I'm building a ship that is going to be quite large, which means its going to be spending a LOT of power on thrusters just to move. So, one thing I'd like to do is to implement as many mass saving techniques as possible

These are the three I can think of right away, does anyone have more?

1. Docked Power Generators - Pretty standard thing for massive ships just to be able to generate the power they need, so this is an obvious one. Build internal docked power plants instead of using power generators as gap filler.
2. Docked Shield Generators - Less immediately obvious, but same as above. Offload a great deal of the shield recharge to dedicated internal charging stations.
3. Fixed Docked Turrets - Obviously I'll want to keep some weapons at my immediate control, but some of my larger homing missile arrays I can dock internally with actual docking stations to lock them down into looking straight out forwards/backwards so they can't rotate. They'll act the same as if they were ship mounted, only they'll auto-fire, and I can put a bit of logic in to simply have blast doors close over them to stop them from firing when I don't want them to. End up being mostly the same as if I had the array built into the main ship, but will still reap the mass reduction savings.

Shield capacitors have to stay on the mothership, and the power capacitors. Will need to keep the salvage array on-board, as well as the heatseeker arrays (never, never, NEVER make heatseeker turrets!)...

Is there anything else I can offload to a docked structure to reduce the overall mass of the ship, and hence how much energy will be required to move it?

Moving systems to docked units that need more mass to achieve the same effect as an installed system will increase not reduce the amount of thrust needed. Docked units count as mass for movement of the primary unit.

Docked reactors work on large ships due to the power recharge bonus softcap. Shield recharge may not be so effective, the docked unit will need a shield supply beam to get that shield energy to the main ship which means more mass than just adding the shield rechargers to the main ship.

 

[CyberTao]

Dock shield supply is iffy territory, depends on how much recharge they end up supplying.

Another bonus of mass saving like this btw is reduced mass of the main ship, meaning less modules needed (Pretty sure that Modules only look at the mass of the main ship, and not turrets/docked ships, since the effect does not extend to them).

 

[NeonSturm]

Another bonus of mass saving like this btw is reduced mass of the main ship, meaning less modules needed (Pretty sure that Modules only look at the mass of the main ship, and not turrets/docked ships, since the effect does not extend to them).

Perhaps they may look to the calculated mass used for thrust :p (don't know, would be stupid for effects)

But if they don't (just look for the main ship), then modules are indeed a very nice thing.

If you could do:

• Main ship
  • Reactor
    • Turret

And the turret draws from the reactor, not from the ship, you could perhaps save even more mass if you are ready to scarify energy for other tasks.
​

Or instead of thrusters, you build (different-entity-area-trigger)-activated push pulses every 0.01 seconds.

Trigger them with a rotating entity. Should bypass the 1.5sec-limit on area-triggers because they are on different entities.

With this you can produce thrust directly from reactors => less drain beams required + less thruster mass if force applies to the main ship (not tested)?

If passive effect does not work, try it with push-pulses?
​

If your main ship has much fewer blocks, how does jammers+cloakers work?

How efficient do shield-strengthening effects work if you import the shield-recharge​

 

[Edymnion]

Depending on how long it takes me to finish the hull of this ship and start getting systems added, I might be able to use a push pulse engine.

Moving systems to docked units that need more mass to achieve the same effect as an installed system will increase not reduce the amount of thrust needed. Docked units count as mass for movement of the primary unit.

Yes, they still count as mass, but they only count as *HALF* mass. Thats where the savings come in.

 

[CyberTao]

*HALF* mass

Half mass? That is new info to me, had always thought that they were full mass added to the main ship. I just thought the savings were in the sheer efficiency increase.