New Player - Advice on Scale

[HammerB]

I have been playing for about 4 days now. One of the things I'm trying to come to grips with is scale. Can some one give me a general feel for what is considered Tiny, Small, Medium, Large. I assume I've been in the tiny domain up to now because my ships would hardly scratch a station. I started with something that to me looks a bit like a Viper for BSG. Realizing that was not going to work I scaled it up about 4x and added some outboard power packs. So about 40 blocks long, 20 high, 40 wide. A lot of that would be air space as its supposed to be a single seat fighter.

Side question about pirates, until last night I had not seen a pirate ship. Stations everywhere but no ships flying about. That is until I slowly burned though all the turrets and then slowly burned into the station and started hitting the faction module. Then a call went out and I had my hands full. Is that normal behavior? Do pirate ships not patrol in free space?

I don't plan to do multiplayer servers so I'm assuming I can get by with medium designs?

Thanks in advance.

 

[MrFURB]

Both the pirates and the trading guild can be found on occasional patrols or just derping around, and pirate stations do call in reinforcements when damaged. If you know what you're doing you can 'farm' the pirates for materials and just lightly tap the station to keep the supply coming.

As far as ship sizes go, it varies greatly from server to server. The largest ships, generally called titans, tend to be anywhere from a kilometer to four kilometers on their longest axis. The average size for ships on PvP servers has been between 100 and 100 meters on their longest axis, usually quite a bit higher for focused PvP factions who have dedicated shipwrights.
For PvE, you should be fine as long as you can soak up or otherwise evade fire from pirate stations. As I recall one of the stations has a long range lock-on missile capable of hitting for over a million damage, so either use some spaced armor to absorb the explosion or save up shield capacitors for a larger ship.

 

[HammerB]

Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't see any loot drop from them but that may because most of the spawns were of my own inferior designs Should I turn that off and only allow the default pirates to spawn if I want to be able to loot them?

 

[jayman38]

I think the enemy ships have to have at least one plex storage block for loot to drop. Also, you need to be fairly close to the actual point where the ship was killed (not where it drifted to after being killed) to see the loot cloud in space. Suggestions have been made to improve how loot is dropped.

Size according to my experience:
<80m: Small/fighter
<160m: medium/frigate
<400m: large/destroyer
<1km: heavy/battleship
<10km: titan
>=10km: not worth classifying/Unicron (takes too long to build; never heard of something this big)

 

[sayerulz]

80 meters is a small fighter..... I suppose that that is a product of how hard it is to make smaller things look good. My general advice on scale is that you just want to build as big as you can, and then you can decide what to class it as. I consider isanths to be "gunsip" sized, so you may want to base things off of that.

 

[StormWing0]

more or less it varies depending on who you ask. I generally consider things under 100m small ships, 101-500m medium small size, 501-1000m medium, 1001-1500m medium large, 1501m+ large ships, 10,000m+ I'm dead before they render. XD

 

[Winterhome]

I've never seen a 10km ship before with full combat balancing. Ever.


1km is generally considered "Huge", with anything under 200m being considered "Small".

 

[Lightning312]

If you're going to stick with a medium-sized ship (what I would call 100-300m on its largest axis), you can consistently farm pirate fleets on most servers. You have to be careful how you engage though or your ship could take large amounts of damage.

 

[HammerB]

Thanks for the advice and info. I was able to farm pirates last night after disabling my own blueprints. Man those loot drops are good, almost too good. I was not able to break the faction block on the station I'm farming. At least not yet. Could be a good thing

 

[Edymnion]

There are almost as many ship classifications as there are people trying to classify ships, we have no real solid system for it.

Some people go by dimensions, some go by block counts, some by mass. Some just go Fighter > Frigate > Cruiser > Capitol, some start throwing in stuff like Corvettes and Destroyers, and its really just a big mess.

Honestly, it would be nice if Bench or somebody would just make some "official" classifications and be done with it.

 

[kiraen]

Honestly, it would be nice if Bench or somebody would just make some "official" classifications and be done with it.

Never going to happen.

The official stance is that Shine will not dictate or limit players with arbitrary classifications. It is entirely up to the imagination of the player.

I find that the most annoying part of this, is that I agree.

 

[Ian Zairon]

This may be one year old, but a ship above 10 km would probably be a Base Ship, which is what I call the flagship for a nomad faction.

 

[Lecic]

This may be one year old, but a ship above 10 km would probably be a Base Ship, which is what I call the flagship for a nomad faction.

A ship above 10km literally can not exist. The game breaks when ships are longer than around 8.25km. And I don't mean "breaks" as in "it's laggy," I mean "breaks" as in "the ship stops following the normal rules of the game."

 

[Edymnion]

Yup, it breaks badly.

See, the game only loads the sector you are in, and 2 sectors in any given direction. Beyond that, the game doesn't load anything in order to save processing power. After all, why render a bunch of stuff if no one is there to see it? Just a waste of computer power.

So when your ship is so large that it actually stretches out into multiple sectors, the game starts having problems. When one end of your ship is so far away from you that it enters an unloaded sector, the game has no idea what to do with it at all.

Rule of thumb, keep your ships under whatever the sector size on your server is (default 2km).

 

[AtraUnam]

A ship above 10km literally can not exist. The game breaks when ships are longer than around 8.25km. And I don't mean "breaks" as in "it's laggy," I mean "breaks" as in "the ship stops following the normal rules of the game."

Can confirm, once your 4km from the core docked entities past that point will all undock everytime the ship is loaded. They will also warp 2km away from the ship along that axis.

 

[Edymnion]

Can confirm, once your 4km from the core docked entities past that point will all undock everytime the ship is loaded. They will also warp 2km away from the ship along that axis.

Yup, because the turret axis/rail they were on unloaded.

 

[AtraUnam]

Yup, because the turret axis/rail they were on unloaded.

Oh no its worse than that, the game literally isn't designed to record docking positions past that point so it just flat out stops working and throws a tantrum. Makes a pretty error too.

 

[Ian Zairon]

I meant 10km total, or width length or hight.
[doublepost=1492194925,1492194853][/doublepost]Not, not or.

 

[KiloZulu]

I have been playing for about 4 days now. One of the things I'm trying to come to grips with is scale. Can some one give me a general feel for what is considered Tiny, Small, Medium, Large. I assume I've been in the tiny domain up to now because my ships would hardly scratch a station. I started with something that to me looks a bit like a Viper for BSG. Realizing that was not going to work I scaled it up about 4x and added some outboard power packs. So about 40 blocks long, 20 high, 40 wide. A lot of that would be air space as its supposed to be a single seat fighter.

Side question about pirates, until last night I had not seen a pirate ship. Stations everywhere but no ships flying about. That is until I slowly burned though all the turrets and then slowly burned into the station and started hitting the faction module. Then a call went out and I had my hands full. Is that normal behavior? Do pirate ships not patrol in free space?

I don't plan to do multiplayer servers so I'm assuming I can get by with medium designs?

Thanks in advance.

My personal advice to new players is start small and get comfortable with building before taking on larger ships. I've seen a number of players start the game and immediately try to tackle massive ship builds (one even attempting the Destiny.) In each case, the player grew tired of constantly building without being able to use the craft they desired, and quit the game.

So, I recommend that you start out by simply building a ship that is able to get away from a pack of Isanths (or whatever is your default pirate.) Once you're happy with that, make ships that can tackle said pack. Then you can grow into a ship that can handle a station. Fighting a station is where the big fights occur - since they will continuously call in reinforcements until the station's faction block is destroyed. I've been in fights with 20-30 pirates circling my ship. The point is, be sure to enjoy the game and not get stuck with the drudgery of endless building. You need to see how ship systems work and cope with challenges to know if what you're building will even be worthwhile.

 

[JinM]

I have been playing for about 4 days now. One of the things I'm trying to come to grips with is scale. Can some one give me a general feel for what is considered Tiny, Small, Medium, Large. I assume I've been in the tiny domain up to now because my ships would hardly scratch a station. I started with something that to me looks a bit like a Viper for BSG. Realizing that was not going to work I scaled it up about 4x and added some outboard power packs. So about 40 blocks long, 20 high, 40 wide. A lot of that would be air space as its supposed to be a single seat fighter.

Side question about pirates, until last night I had not seen a pirate ship. Stations everywhere but no ships flying about. That is until I slowly burned though all the turrets and then slowly burned into the station and started hitting the faction module. Then a call went out and I had my hands full. Is that normal behavior? Do pirate ships not patrol in free space?

I don't plan to do multiplayer servers so I'm assuming I can get by with medium designs?

Thanks in advance.

What you are doing is called PVE, and is also possible on multiplayer servers vs self made pirates.

"I'm assuming I can get by with medium designs?" - yes, totally. For cracking the vanilla pirate stations a ship of 50m length is sufficient, even though it takes its time.

A tiny ship is bellow 500 mass (max 30m length), a small ship is below 1k mass (below 50m length), mediums are below 5k mass (100m length), and the typicall pvp fregattes are below 50k mass on multiplayer servers (this pvp designs are very different from pve designs) (150-200m). Everything above 50k mass is huge, typicall 300k mass ships are 250m long, and above this the ships are hardly making much sense anymore (lag, time to build, finding enemies no matter if pvp or pve).

The important fact is, and some dudes allready said this: start with small designs. Big ships take ages to build, and are really screwing the fun, as you have no product for a very long time - but you actually need a pool of ships to play with first. =)

Also: Nearly every advanced builder builds the hull first, then looks what interior he likes, like walkways or some cargo area, and then puts in the systems last. I recommend you do it the same way, even though I made my first ships with "systems first" strategies too.