I am stoked about Corneroids. So damn excited I registered on one of the few forums with an active thread and community interest just to share some stuff.
My first ship:
I guess it's a 4DOF as it can't strafe. All T1, very responsive controls from the low mass even with only 2 standard hydrogen thrusters per DOF. Technically the covered engine exhaust is cheating, and it has no armament either. I decided to go for a 6DOF with weapons and without blocking engine thrust in a design I nicknamed the 'sigma' layout, with 5-directional engine balls at each end of an oblong ship, with the engines intentionally embedded as deeply as possible to make it more difficult to shoot out the engines.
My second ship (Actually oblong, this is from the front so you can see the embedded engine).
A single standard Ion thruster for each direction on each end, and more heavily armored. Only ever finished this front half of it. Those guns don't actually shoot forward. I was unhappy with the limitations on the firing angles and found that the corner quadrants had the widest (with overlap) firing angles without my cannons shooting each other. So those cannons in diagonal corners (six per quadrant) are paired and fire with 6 assault cannons I could fit on the corners. There's 4 fire controls inside corresponding to each quadrant in front of the ship.
It can fire at everything you can see without shooting itself.
In another test I found that cannons on a flat surface get the widest angles of fire without blowing themselves up if you have them in a checkered pattern. While building the Sigma2 with 2x2 of 2x2 engines I realized I couldn't embed the engines deep enough given how wide the exhaust port was. Rather than wall them and have multiple 2x2 ports I decided to extend the logic in protecting the engines by embedding and went all out with a checkerboard of 1x1x2 engines and cannons. The cannons are "adjacent" to the engines (the exhaust end anyway), which "powers" the cannons. I filled the gaps between the engines with 1x1x2 power cores, resulting in a snazzy looking control room where you could easily replace engines and power cores mid-firefight without ever leaving the control room. This gives 5 axial and 4 quadrant firing ports at each end of the ship with a LOT of overlap. I also realized I could checkerboard more engines down the length of the ship for better rotation and strafing.
Here's the partially finished mini-model before I started on a larger version.
So here's the Iron Sigma, which unfortunately was ~70% complete when alt-tabbing crashed my game and I lost everything since the last save. Rather than rebuild the whole thing, what was saved was sufficient to grasp the layout of this thing.
Maximized Dakka, minimized engine exposure. Surprisingly maneuverable, when it was more complete, with just Standard Hydrogen engines from the sheer number of them. Probably would have weighed about 1600 Tons if finished. Almost no wasted surfaces, so pretty much everything that could have did have a checkerboard of embedded engines powering assault cannons, and all corners had more cannons. I like to imagine this thing would do a slow roll rather than focusing with a single surface, such that any destroyed engines/powercores/guns could be replaced by the crew on the backside while the frontside continued to output a wall of lasers.
I liked the fantastically wide angle of fire with the guns on the corners so much I started on another ship built around that. Here's the front of the WIP:
Yes, it shoots triforces, even slightly beyond what is visible to the camera without the cannons self-destructing.
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Topic: Corneroids (Read 108526 times)