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[Girlinhat]

Do you think if i hollow out a planet i can make it a ship? Because I'm totally doing that.

Planets have a molten core that's impossible to modify.  It's not really a block.

Asteroids, however...

[LordPorkins]

Hmmm. What if i cut off like 1/2 a planet? Or better yet hollow out around the core, move the shell away then rebuild?

[Girlinhat]

Planets are pretty stationary.  However terrain is dropped as blocks, so you could recreate a planet's surface on a free-floating ship.

[LoSboccacc]

Hm. I'm having a lot of trouble planning my ship out. Any advice? Do you guys follow a certain routine when you build? Planning?

I do deck space first, then fill up with stuff, then a rough hull exterior, then smooth/shape the exterior with armor, because I can't plan so I like to just fix it after it's functional

[Girlinhat]

Hm. I'm having a lot of trouble planning my ship out. Any advice? Do you guys follow a certain routine when you build? Planning?

I do deck space first, then fill up with stuff, then a rough hull exterior, then smooth/shape the exterior with armor, because I can't plan so I like to just fix it after it's functional

I go the other way.  Figure out the weapons or shields you're expecting, a big cluster, a spinal weapon, multiple small turrets... Get the size and expected footprint of your components and where they'll go, and then fill in the space between them with hull and armor.  Your power and thruster sections should be fairly freeform normally, so that once everything is mounted you can make them up to scale you need.

A bit of pen and paper helps.  Make rough square drawings of the expected size and placement of weapons, then get the rough outline of the hull.  Fill in power/thrust.  Then perform detail work on the hull's exterior.

[Crashmaster]

Of note is that shield capacitor blocks have a lowered SystemHP value now; 25 vs 100 for other system blocks such as weapons and power. As such it is common practice to have the first layer behind your armor be shield capacitors since once shields are down, max shield capacity becomes less useful and the destruction of the shield cap blocks will subtract less StructureHP from the bar then any other system block holding off the penalties associated with StructureHP loss a little longer.

[Girlinhat]

That is some beautiful meta right there!

[Eric Blank]

For planning, I often think about a build in advance and maybe draw up something. Never turns out the way you draw or imagine it unless youre some sort of god, but it helps a little.

[NullForceOmega]

Looks like one of the updates since I last tried refitting Eidolon de-nerfed power generation, went from a few hundred thousand output to 1.3 million, more than adequate for my needs.  Sadly this seems to have been evened out by a substantial decrease in thruster power, so balancing the systems is still a pain.  Also seems to have been a slight decrease in shield capacitors and shield generators, but Eidolon didn't ever have particularly good shielding anyway.  Not sure what to do for turret construction, twelve mid weights and four heavies (comparatively, she only masses 14k or so), probably try to come up with a decent mid-range damage dealer for the mid-weights and heavy sniper guns for the heavies.

Any suggestions for weapon combos for those or the secondary guns?  The big spars will be heavy beam guns (probably beam/beam with ion, pierce, or punch, not sure which yet), but I'm not sure what works for lighter weapons right now.

[Crashmaster]

Missile/beam is popular since the AI can get an instant lock-on.

Pierce is good on missiles since it's downside of 'less-to-no damage to shields' is not present for missiles/pulse and it ignores some armor protection helping with the fact missiles damage rays waste a lot of damage when fired at surfaces (missiles also get *I think* double damage/power to account for this).

Beams have a lot of non-obvious issues involving wasted damage;

"Once a beam can destroy a block of adv/armor every tick there is no point in making it much bigger with the following exception. If the beam can be made so powerful that it can utilize explosive effect to destroy 5 blocks of adv armor every tick then it is worth it but once again beyond that point theres not much point to making it more powerful.
Once armor is pierced beam/explosive is the best block destruction tool out there short of a missile drill.
Cannons do not have the strict ideal damage constraints of beams and can 'punch' through armor blocks meaning they can start damaging small amounts of system before much armor is destroyed but even with explosive effect they are not as effective at system destruction.
In both cases (but morso for beams) it can be a good idea to use partial ion effect to convert wasted block damage into extra shield damage e.g. if your weapon has twice as much damage as it needs to destroy the amount of blocks you want to destroy then give it 50% ion to lower the block damage and increase shield damage."

Tuning beams for advanced armor seems the best choice. However advanced armor has 1000EffectiveHP due to it's armor value, 2000EHP if the ship still has points left in it's armor pool, but most people roll with both pierce and punch passives with pierce increasing your blocks effective armor value putting max HP for an advanced armor block at 4000EHP.

[LoSboccacc]

I agree with the ion meta. missiles are super effective to destroy blocks anyway, so shield punching is your main concern. apart from that, all weapons do about the same damage/block/power, the real difference is in damage profile. beam being hit scan are my favorite, with cannon relegated to missile point defense role.

[Eric Blank]

Beam/pulse/ion make decent shield busters too. The alpha damage is roughly equivalent to missile/beam, you dont have to wait for lock, but the range is quite short so you do have to wait until you're in range.

Cannons are actually really good at penetrating armor and eating up the interior as soon as shields drop. Start chopping up power lines, gently caress their auxilliary power batteries into exploding, maybe get a lucky shot on a docking rail and really piss off the server admins.


I also experimented with a pulse weapon build; pulse weapons will fail to do any damage if they're "detonated" where the center is in empty space. However, if you're up against a target you know is solid through-and-through, has thick armor, and a juicy system-filled core, pulse weapons will bypass that armor by detonating in the center of their radius, which you can stick up to 40m into the center of the target (depending on server settings, I guess. Makes a nice juicy boom that can gut heavily armor-tanked or shield-depleted vessels of similar size to you.
The Eidolon's long barrels would be the perfect pointy sticks to ram into the side of a target to detonate a pulse weapon under the skin. However, getting into range is an issue. Distract a target with some other threat and approach from behind with radar jamming active, and drop their shields before you get there obviously. As a cheap tactic to weaken a vastly larger enemy, it sounds good, and I'd like to really test it on both ai and players in combat, but my computer and my internet access are not up for the task lately.

Spoiler: example (click to show/hide)

The sphere there is actually a hollow carved out by the pulse. Can't actually see my ship in this, it was an ugly brick specifically for this test. I put it in a general-purposes frigate I wanted to test at some point.

Of course you should use server-murdering quantities of missile spam at all times, there's no excuse not to. I'd recommend missile/cannon on logic clocks, there's a logic block now that you can activate from your hot bar. Aim your spam cannons in various directions. Distract their AMS with that, and 100% of your actual damage-dealing missiles will hit the target. Usually. You can employ loads of fighter/bomber drones/escorts with missiles.


OH!

The "fire at selected" turret AI setting is working kinda right now; the turrets will change targets as you do, and stop when you select no target, so using the AI to operate large weapons arrays via turret is possible. They'll still fire at friendly or neutral craft if you select one though, be careful.

[Girlinhat]

I looked into it some and I'm not 100% sure how useful turrets truly are.  Normal guns seem to have like a 90 degree arc they can aim around, so firing angles seem very open normally...

[Eric Blank]

If your vessel is very large, such that you can't turn to track a target, or your ping so high/fps so low you cant really do anything besides select a target, then turrets are really handy for keeping the pressure on enemies. I've had experiences on servers where during a fight my ping/fps was so god awful I not only couldnt aim my weapons on the target, because they werent where my screen was displaying them to be due to the lag, but couldnt reliably activate the buttons on my hotbar, so half the time my weapons werent firing, and then the shot went stray anyway.
I am kinda biased in that, since there are basically zero multiplayer games my internet connection/hardware can keep up with, so I rely a lot on the AI to do my work for me while I'm in the corner having a seizure.

Swarm missiles are also extremely popular alternatives, but then if you're flying with allied non-faction members or there are neutral/traders guild vessels in the area, you risk pissing them off with friendly fire.

[BigD145]

This makes my old carrier more doable for lag. Hollow interior for docking big ships and small ships. Unfinished missile design for massive missile spam. "Get inside!" *pushes button marked Death Blossom*