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Most effective ship design?


Erik9631
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Hello.

 

I have been experimenting with different ship designs and currently I found the USS Enterprise design to be the most effective. With multiple layering I can easily expand the ships modules, however it can be an annoyance.

 

My question is: What ship design do you consider to be the most effective? Neglecting the ships look. As far as the ship achieves highly effective stats, looks is not important (And is kind of hard to achieve a good looking as well as effective ship thanks to how blocks work).

 

I am looking for a design that is easy to build, simple to expand, is extremely mobile and swift and can push each material level to its limits . I am not looking for anything specific, just for a general "Way" to design a ship.

 

If you have good suggestions, I would appreciate it. I would also like you to state the reason why.

 

Thanks for the help.

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Borg cube.

 

Any cube. Not having spheres, this game uses cubes as a counterpart for the perfect geometrical shape.

 

Make a cube cargo bay. That's what's most important. It's the least material spent for the most cargo space. Any material. Cargo space stays the same. Trinium for most manuverability. Avorion if you like durability. The shape of other components is less important.

 

But here's my design:

- Use 3 sides of the cargo bay to put Crew quarters, engine, shield, power,... No thrusters yet.

- Fill the corners with whatever stat you lack to make it into a cube again :P

- Divide the length of a side by 6. Let's say it actually is 6, will make things simpler.

- On each side (excluding front and back), place 1x1x8 thrusters, facing the front, aligned with the front side. These will provide thrust, breaking force, pitch and yaw. Delete the ones at corners. You should be left with 16.

- Add 8 1x1x1 thrusters in place of each of those deleted, facing the corners (64 total). These will provide strafing and rolling. And help with the rest.

- There should be a 6x6x2 hole in the back and 1x1x8 holes in the four corners.

- Fill the back hole with something. A big engine is what I did.

- Check how much health your ship has. Divide that number by 4. Call that number "plate health".

- Place an 8x8 panel of best material you can afford on the front. Make it thick enough so it almost reaches "plate health". Copy-paste around.

- Fill in the edges so it looks like a smooth cube of the same material. Merge the edges with panels. Be careul not to select all. That will merge the strafing thrusters.

- Remember that 1x1x8 hole in the corners? Each corner can have an Integrity Field Generator. Smallest possible. Each plate gets an IGF and has 3 redundant. You actually only need 2 of them, but symmetry is nice.

- Plop in a few flight recorders

- You can use 2 opposite corners to place fighter storage instead of IGFs. Make those stick out through the back plate. Efficient, effective but ugly imo. Doesn't fit into the smooth cube design

- Make some formation with the turrets you'll be using. Best if they all looked the same ;)

- If you ever need to remove the turrets, just delete the plates under them and undo. Viola! Smooth cube again :D

 

To expand it, dig into it from behind or front. Gouge it out so nothing remains between the thrusters. To be safe, copy-paste it all onto outer plates before deleting. Take a look at what stat can you spare. It's most likely the cargo bay :P Shrink that component and expand on whatever else you need. You can also just scale the whole thing up.

 

P.S.: core health has to be 40% of the total. The six outer plates 10% each. That's why you divide by 4. IGFs spread the damage a part takes over other components of the ship, up to 10x of the part's health. With this design, as soon as you lose a plate, you die. But that also means each of your sides is as thick as your whole ship! If your health bar is low and you survive, your ship will fully auto-repair over time for free. No weak spots. Functional and stylish.

 

Edit: for temporary expansions, stick a tumor of the needed block on the back side. Probably a jumpdrive for a trip over the galaxy or a cargo bay for a mission. Delete after it's no longer needed.

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Borg cube.

 

Any cube. Not having spheres, this game uses cubes as a counterpart for the perfect geometrical shape.

 

Make a cube cargo bay. That's what's most important. It's the least material spent for the most cargo space. Any material. Cargo space stays the same. Trinium for most manuverability. Avorion if you like durability. The shape of other components is less important.

 

But here's my design:

- Use 3 sides of the cargo bay to put Crew quarters, engine, shield, power,... No thrusters yet.

- Fill the corners with whatever stat you lack to make it into a cube again :P

- Divide the length of a side by 6. Let's say it actually is 6, will make things simpler.

- On each side (excluding front and back), place 1x1x8 thrusters, facing the front, aligned with the front side. These will provide thrust, breaking force, pitch and yaw. Delete the ones at corners. You should be left with 16.

- Add 8 1x1x1 thrusters in place of each of those deleted, facing the corners (64 total). These will provide strafing and rolling. And help with the rest.

- There should be a 6x6x2 hole in the back and 1x1x8 holes in the four corners.

- Fill the back hole with something. A big engine is what I did.

- Check how much health your ship has. Divide that number by 4. Call that number "plate health".

- Place an 8x8 panel of best material you can afford on the front. Make it thick enough so it almost reaches "plate health". Copy-paste around.

- Fill in the edges so it looks like a smooth cube of the same material. Merge the edges with panels. Be careul not to select all. That will merge the strafing thrusters.

- Remember that 1x1x8 hole in the corners? Each corner can have an Integrity Field Generator. Smallest possible. Each plate gets an IGF and has 3 redundant. You actually only need 2 of them, but symmetry is nice.

- Plop in a few flight recorders

- You can use 2 opposite corners to place fighter storage instead of IGFs. Make those stick out through the back plate. Efficient, effective but ugly imo. Doesn't fit into the smooth cube design

- Make some formation with the turrets you'll be using. Best if they all looked the same ;)

- If you ever need to remove the turrets, just delete the plates under them and undo. Viola! Smooth cube again :D

 

To expand it, dig into it from behind or front. Gouge it out so nothing remains between the thrusters. To be safe, copy-paste it all onto outer plates before deleting. Take a look at what stat can you spare. It's most likely the cargo bay :P Shrink that component and expand on whatever else you need. You can also just scale the whole thing up.

 

P.S.: core health has to be 40% of the total. The six outer plates 10% each. That's why you divide by 4. IGFs spread the damage a part takes over other components of the ship, up to 10x of the part's health. With this design, as soon as you lose a plate, you die. But that also means each of your sides is as thick as your whole ship! If your health bar is low and you survive, your ship will fully auto-repair over time for free. No weak spots. Functional and stylish.

 

Edit: for temporary expansions, stick a tumor of the needed block on the back side. Probably a jumpdrive for a trip over the galaxy or a cargo bay for a mission. Delete after it's no longer needed.

 

I think I understood most of this.  Do you have a blueprint you can share?

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Nope.

I've reworked it. Now, it's not based around the cargo bay anymore. I decided that if I want a scalable ship as I progress in the game, it would be a good idea to make it as modular as possible. So I went for a "salami" design. Initially, the insides of the ship are slices of iron hologram. And you can transform each slice into another block of your choice.

 

Here is what I'll upload to the workshop, with the "lid" open:

 

20171230142617_1.jpg

 

To upgrade/downgrade, you only need to press the eye icon to show you the holograms (or another slice you want to replace). Replace that with a block of choice.

 

To edit something about it, delete the top (or bottom if top has turrets) and 3/4 middle thrusters. You leave the fourth thruster for snap-to-middle when returning the 3.

 

20171230161119_1.jpg

 

Top and bottom covers are identical 16x16 plates. If you select both, you can center all the axis on them (or use thrusters for centering).

Behind the covers are "hinges" used to snap a cover back. Just copy from the other side and snap to block middle.

 

When upgrading, use Trinium for blocks that don't scale with materials, Avorion for the ones that do. Trinium or Ogonite for the armor plates. Armor is so rail shots don't pierce on first shot. If you have Avorion turrets, place an Avorion Hull plate on the armor plate. Lower materials are good for when you want to filter out specific connection points or holograms.

 

Here's an example of the "final product". After this point, feel free to scale the whole thing up:

 

20171230145042_1.jpg

 

Notice that on the back side, there are 4 hangars. Usually, you'd also want them cube-shaped, but I like this for my build. There's space for 15-120 fighters. 120 is the maximum a ship can hold. That would require upscaling or fighters the size of 1.

 

As for the cargo bay...

NPCs tought me to glitch the blocks and now I'm just glitching my 5 cargo bays in. Non-cube. Like this:

 

20171230151556_1.jpg

 

Actually, any other module can be glitched like that. A block can go 25% inside another block.

Now, if you're feeling REALLY abusive, you could make 3 "salamis", one on each axis. Make one consist only of thin cargo bays, forming a cube. Merge them xD

And fill in the thruster corners with whatever you'd like. More thrusters, I'd suggest.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

But I'm sure there are better ships out there. Good-looking, even. If anone is willing to share theirs, I'm curious, too!

 

 

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Thrusters work better the further away they are from the center of mass. So with a cube design, you end up requiring a lot more thrusters for the same maneuverability. The pro's - as you mentioned - usually far outweigh this con for most people. Other potential issues might be firing arcs, especially so with the upcoming combat update and the obvious extreme vulnerability you have against hull piercing weapons but if you manage to keep your shields up, that's a non-concern.

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Ignoring aesthetics, effectiveness is basically defined by efficiency in application of the required task. For instance a combat oriented ship maybe incredibly inefficient at dealing with trading and vice versa.

 

As a result effectiveness is necessitated by what task is at hand. I have ships for all round use that aren't spectacular at anything but good at everything and can accommodate different tasks such as trading and combat and salvaging and mining etc...

 

Currently I'm experimenting with TESLA's latest two creations which are probably two of the best looking designs I've seen but for me personally were pretty under-equipped module wise from a size perspective of the ship, both are perfectly functional, but I felt should have better shields and power generation as well better flight handling as both rotate too slow for my tastes. After reworking the smaller of the two (Duke?) I gained 50% more shields 100% more engine thrust, 100% more counter-thrust and a much better ship overall. Fully armoured too instead of

 

From a general perspective though I find many ships fall into the same traps, lack of engines/inertia dampening, lack of thrusters and lack of gyro's from a handling perspective. For most ships I aim for a minimum of 100m/s2 and at least 1.0 Rad on Yaw, Pitch and Roll. Without that getting on target is slower and you'll spend more time waiting to target your enemy or rock.

 

Combat wise, don't underestimate Armour, Railguns are scary if you don't have it and will penetrate many blocks deep if you fail to use it or the Railgun's take your shields down. Shields are also a cheap form of defence, I'd rather stack more shields than add stone to a ship as the shields come with little weight gain and can regen whereas the stone doesn't do much other than block lightning and slow your ship down a lot.

 

Learning the quirks of the building mode is essential for this game, as getting 6GW extra shielding on a 4 slot ship is a HUGE difference at that level with just correct use of the blocks.

 

Oh and there are only certain modules that benefit from Material Type. Otherwise use Trinium as it's the lightest weight.

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Quoting my last post here but whatever xD

 

"When upgrading, use Trinium for blocks that don't scale with materials, Avorion for the ones that do. Trinium or Ogonite for the armor plates. Armor is so rail shots don't pierce on first shot. If you have Avorion turrets, place an Avorion Hull plate on the armor plate. Lower materials are good for when you want to filter out specific connection points or holograms."

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