PvP Anti-Player Research

[Malacodor]

If I recall correctly, basic doesn't contribute to AHP

and IIRC basic adds AHP and SHP.

Basic hull adds 50 AHP per block, standard armor 75 and advanced armor 100.

When your AHP pool hits zero, the armor value of the block no longer means squat; it all goes to SHP.

Sounds wrong or misleading. Destroying any hull/armor block always removes 5 SHP, independant of AHP. Block armor is also independant of AHP.

 

[DrTarDIS]

Basic hull adds 50 AHP per block, standard armor 75 and advanced armor 100.

Sounds wrong or misleading. Destroying any hull/armor block always removes 5 SHP, independant of AHP. Block armor is also independant of AHP.

Run test described above.

 

[Madman198237]

Really? You and your science are ruining my ship building. Now I'm gonna have to make more of an interior, with more hull blocks, so I have a more effective tank.

That or just go for the shields and deterrent tank... As in, lots of shields to scare people, and more turrets, to scare them even more.

 

[FlyingDebris]

The science and specific details of the ship are irrelevant if the end result is a good, strong ship. In fairness, I rarely test certain systems before integrating them into my ships. One way or another, pure advanced armor is better than a mixture of advanced and basic of the same size due to the sheer amount of damage it can take, hence why I only equip basic as damage mitigation on my larger ships. (For reference, the NFD Cherokee is one of those larger ships, and is available on Community Content if you want to see how I go about constructing my ships.)

I know my ships are capable, and I know they are effective. I'm merely describing my build style, and if my methods irk you, DrTarDIS, please test my end product and report your findings. I'd love to hear them.

 

[StarWars1981]

So, for a cruiser sized vessel, what's an average size turret? This thing is 241 m long, 151m wide, and currently 48 tall though that's subject to change. Empty mass of the nearly completed hull (expect an additional 2K blocks at the most) is 19,295. No systems installed except the bridge has been decorated. Also, hangars are on but that mass does not include drones or any currently mounted testbed turrets.
Currently we're looking at the 3 main weapons in the bow, and a heavy turret armament, with a few "siege" turrets on the underside given the larger plates down there, and a lot of what I'm assuming to be midsize ones (base is approx 11Lx9W or so, but could be slightly larger) plus some larger ones. What's the average weapon block count/size? (Is there an average?) Or, in your more knowledgeable opinions, what's a GOOD count? Otherwise I'm gonna do what we did when we started this project, and take a frigate-size design and build it to an 11/10 because I can, in other words build something as big as I can and shoot some armor plates til I'm satisfied with performance.

 

[FlyingDebris]

For the turrets, what I do is I just make it look good, then cram as many systems into it as I possibly can.

In these turrets, there's approximately 2-3mil damage per shot. This is only possible because of the setup; you will note that they are missile-beam-overdrive in a waffle pattern. Note that the end result is very powerful for its small size (Under 1k blocks) but draws an absolutely insane amount of power*. Were it a smaller ship, I'd elect for a larger, less space-efficient gun.

*I actually found a bypass to the power cost, but it takes up additional blocks and this specific model was taken out of service so upgrading it is irrelevant.

 

[Madman198237]

So, what's the footprint on this turret? More importantly, is this turret designed for a particular class of vessel? Or rather, size/role?

Because right now I'm considering ways to make a 160ish block turret (That I built today xD) powerful enough to be relevant on a large heavy cruiser/small battleship.

 

[DrTarDIS]

...right now I'm considering ways to make a 160ish block turret (That I built today xD) powerful enough to be relevant on a large heavy cruiser/small battleship.

Eeeh...You could specialize the turret to a couple roles at that low block count by using pulse secondary combined with a role-tertiary, but it's overal DPS isn't going to be that great no matter what you do. Additionally, if the server is anything less than .8 on the AI scale, pulse secondary would actually be a horrible thing since long reload high alpha is a very "all or nothing" build.

 

[FlyingDebris]

What's your definition of a cruiser/small battleship? Because I mounted about a half dozen of those on a heavy cruiser and they draw a good amount of power per shot. But GOOD LORD the alpha damage is great. It'll knock most frigates out of a fight in one go, and the turrets alone can handle a ship around 120k mass with ease. But, if you don't have the power capacity to fire them, they're useless. And while they're small, they draw as much power as a gun six times their size.


the only issue being they take something on the order of 60mil power to fire a single volley and if you do anything else you won't be able to fire the second volley in full. This is still pending that refit I mentioned earlier, however. With that in place, it should go down and be much more manageable.

Edit: Here's the ship I mounted those turrets on.

 

[Az14el]

One handy trick is to admin load your ship into single player (without any defense turrets on it) and get in another test ship with missiles and start shooting it.

Last I checked missiles (and ship AI in general) still targeted the areas with the most systems (after the whole doughnut ship thing), but that can be hard to figure out if you filled the ship pretty full. So get a ship with lock on missiles and start firing. Make a note of where they are hitting, and then reinforce those areas with heavier armor.

Shield bugs (as I call them, ablative armor is another good term, basically docked sheets of armor with their own shields) are good as the AI likes to try and pick off exposed turrets, and every shot they waste on a shield bug when your main shields are down is a shot that isn't ripping into your hull.

Layer your systems in the order in which you want them to be lost. For me, thats usually Armor, Shields, Thrusters, then Systems. If they have chewed through my armor, it means my shields are already down, they're not doing anything for me anymore directly, so let them soak up some damage before it can hit anything more important (this changed for me when they fixed blue asteroid spawning, before my shields were in the middle because they were so damned hard to come by). If they've chewed through my armor and the shields, next I want them wasting shots on my thrusters, because at that point running isn't really an option and clearly I haven't been dodging worth a damn. Then finally in the middle is my power, my main weapons, my jump drive, etc.

Also, don't think you only have to armor the outside of your ship. You can armor up your interior systems as well. If you have reactors inside your ship (not just docked, but things like actual reactor boxes), wrap some armor around them inside the hull. And for PvP, it never hurts to give your docked reactors their own shields.

Oh, and distribute your systems whenever you can. Especially on things like power, you want to make sure that if some of your lines are cut you have enough spread around that it doesn't cripple you in one lucky shot.

Some damn good ideas. And very seconded on having armor interior to your ship as well, all my systems on ships larger than say 50k mass/ physically large enough to let me are "onion layered", IE I place my systems, then I armor it, then place more systems, then armor them etc etc, leading to a big criss-cross of adv armor bulk heads throughout the whole ship, this stops explosions in their tracks and is even pretty damn helpful against high penetration (cannons, beams, punch effect missiles). I'd almost consider it mandatory on weapons groups for a functional capital ship as smart players will absolutely try to target & split your weapon systems to reduce effectiveness/increase power costs.

Also on your "Shield Bugs" (I'm gonna start using that lol), you can also give them passive effects, turn them on manually and as long as the entity is loaded they will stay on, a several block thick adv armor piece with full passive punch effect (pierce as well if you plan on shielding them, to turn more of that sys hp damage into armor hp dmg) makes a mockery of smaller missile hits and unfocused cannon/beam fire.
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So, what's the footprint on this turret? More importantly, is this turret designed for a particular class of vessel? Or rather, size/role?

Because right now I'm considering ways to make a 160ish block turret (That I built today xD) powerful enough to be relevant on a large heavy cruiser/small battleship.

Pulse/Beam support & Overdrive effect are your friends here, can make a very small turret put out a LOT of alpha dmg (And overdrive even directly increasing the total dps well beyond the block count would indicate), but yeah the power cost is extreme for its size & with extra outputs just increasing it even more. Multiple computer set ups individually controlling each "output" will fix the extra grouping cost as AI will simply use them all as a single shot burst if they have the power supply for it, and in this way there will be no extra cost per group, you can make some pretty monstrous multi output missile turrets like that and cut their power cost massively (its like 5-10% more cost per group usually)

 

[AtraUnam]

Dammit guys now I have to go and try to build a small pvp ship.

 

[Madman198237]

Yeah, 160ish weapon blocks, should've made that clear. Right now I've got no citadel built for the turret, but I'm considering the possibility of making a larger citadel than planned in order to squeeze in more blocks for the gun itself. I'm aiming for a fully protected turret assembly, especially since it's going to be almost entirely dependent on the mother ship for its shields (To save space for more killing capability, while remaining self-powered)

The ship itself is a size beyond anything else I've yet built, at 240ish blocks (Drive section is not entirely complete) long, 140 wide, and a height presently at about 50 meters.

That said, my largest vessel to date is a 140 block long (To scale!) Charger C-70 Republic Frigate that comes in at just under 50000 blocks and probably 8000 weight? I can't remember the mass. Anyway, that frigate is meant to do anything that needs speed, so it has crappy lightweight turrets and standard armor, and very little logic or anything else. It's all about speed, really.


The turret is going to be a multi-version sort of thing, so I'm going to try and make versions of it to fit every role, if possible.
Any larger on the turret's size and it's going to start looking absurd against the size of the ship.

 

[Edymnion]

Its important to keep a good mix of turrets too.

X/Pulse on your turrets will give you great damage output (at a great energy cost), but also gives them a huge reload time. Long enough that if the target survives the first shot, their shields are going to start coming back up before you get to fire again. So remember that its not just about having the biggest shots possible, you'll want some X/Cannon in there as well to keep the pressure on while your BFGs reload.

One of my current favorite general purpose turrets is one I call a T Cannon (purely because squeezing some extra systems into it resulted in a big T made of slabs on the top of the turret). Its a double barreled cannon turret, but each barrel has a cannon/cannon/stop in the center, and then 4 cannon/overdrive arrays surrounding the stop array. Steady stream of Stop bullets to help hold the target still while the slower overdrive bullets blast hallway sized holes into them.

They're not huge (under 50m, I think it was), but they're used in large numbers for a constant stream of eroding fire. Helps keep the pressure on while the bigger guns are reloading, and helps stop them from being able to get any defenses back up.

I've also become an increasingly large fan of Missile/Cannon turrets. They let out a huge amount of missiles that act like big cannon turrets with the added benefit of helping to overwhelm point defense. Missile/Beam and especially Missile/Pulse are slow and easy to pick off by PDT, but they're much more likely to hit if their point defense is busy chewing through 50 other decoy missiles, all of which pack enough explosive punch to hurt should they get through. And turrets are quite good at aiming those things with enough lead to make them hit even at a distance.

 

[StarWars1981]

Sounds like this is on a scale a little more than Mad and I planned on that cruiser.
I came up with the initial design (you know, the one discarded within 20 minutes) for a frigate-sized vessel, bumped it into a cruiser grade size (my estimates, but it seemed big enough to fit that class), and then we just took it to an 11 (on our scale, must need a bigger one) and built what we THOUGHT was nearly a small battleship. At nearly 90K blocks on just the hull alone, and that missing large sections of the hull, well, it seemed a sufficiently big ship. Its main arsenal is turrets, given that it's a flat, blocky hull in something of an arrow shape that will allow for dozens of turret emplacements for midsize turrets. Plus a couple underside "siege" mounts that I was gonna make stupid big. I have ideas for that... none of them good for the receiver, but all good for me . But you guys are talking a scale I wasn't thinking about. I thought this ship would be good, but noooo, you've got 50m turrets and those are midsize, and giant ships you call cruisers ... lol, I'm gonna need more engine space. This is gonna be another slash-run ship. For Titan-size Trench Run Disease. It's sounding kinda small now xD.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Mind posting some pictures of what you're working with? Might make it easier to gauge what sort of guns could be reasonably fit on it.

 

[Madman198237]

Yeah, we intend to have a good mix of suppression and heavy turrets. Not decided on the exact means of suppression, but it'll probably be a cannon-cannon-ion setup in a large turret mount.

Right now, however, I have to make an actual ship-killing turret that isn't ineffective. I suppose it's time to break out the blockship made of advanced armor and start shooting at it with different combos of stuff.

The smaller ship above is a corvette prototype. Sorry about the logic pipes, I wanted centralized logic, where it could all be easily found and changed, so the drone bays' logic ended up like that. Ignore the point defense turrets on top of the superstructure. (Can you even see them in this image?)


Sorry about the mirror line. Here's one of the turret prototypes. I'm working on changing the top in increase internal volume. This one has no point defense mounted on top.


And finally one of the turrets mounted on the ship, with a midsize AMS/PD turret on top:

 

[Edymnion]

Sounds like this is on a scale a little more than Mad and I planned on that cruiser..

Eh, it depends on how much you want the turret to do. You can make a surprisingly powerful compact turret.


Thats my T cannon (I checked, its only 28m long, smaller than I thought it was).


That is the smaller turret I use on my current cruiser (well, that one is attached to my station, but same turret).

Not counting the stop machine gun in the T cannon, they do roughly the same DPS. The little one there is doing about 1100 damage per bullet, two bullets per shot. The T cannon up there is only doing about 260 damage per bullet for it's overdrive cannons, but has a total of 8 of them. All the extra space in the larger turret is being taken up by the machine gun with tons of Stop on it (damage from that extra set of guns still puts overall dps of the t cannon higher than stubby, just not as much as the increase in size would indicate it should though). Lower damage per bullet on the t cannon means it will actually end up being less powerful per hit (less blocks destroyed outright per shot), but pure block destruction wasn't it's intended goal (the hybrid stop was).

I'm a fan of having a pyramid scheme to my turrets. Lots of small ones, a fair number of medium ones, and a few large ones.

 

[Madman198237]

The pyramid scheme is logical and necessary.

You will face more missiles than you will fighters, bombers and corvettes, and you will face more small ships that you will battleships.

And if you see a titan when you're in a cruiser, turn around and run. No questions asked.

Edited that last statement. It was worded so that it sounded like the titan was inside the cruiser.....which means that one of the two builders has a REALLY screwy scale for size xD

 

[Edymnion]

You will face more missiles than you will fighters

Oh yeah, you can never have enough PDTs (Point Defense Turrets, aka anti-missile turrets).

Its also important to remember that if your turrets have more than one barrel that the AI fires them unfocused. So if you've got a huge turret with 50m between barrels, then its going to try and point dead center on the target, and a small ship will be able to fly straight through between the lines of fire. So single barrel turrets, or acknowledge that a multi-barrel turret is only going to be effective against ships it's own size or larger, they'll have a lot of trouble against smaller ships due to the aiming issue.

 

[Madman198237]

Oh, so the four-barrel AMS is probably not going to work?

Yeah, I spent probably 30 minutes yesterday designing and building 3 AMS mounts of differing sizes, all on the same design. The most minimal rapid-fire AMS barrel possible, mounted on a neat platform, a double-barrel version, and the quad monster. Why a four barrel AMS? Because WWII American .50 cal halftrack quad mounts, that's why.


Any decent/experienced builders have ideas for my ship's turret solution? I'm looking for the most effective module ratios on one turret, and then an idea of peoples' ideas as to ratios between turrets meant for shield destruction and turrets meant for armor/hull destruction.