Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[BurnedToast]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Layer more armor? sure. But heavy armor is heavy, and you need to cover the whole ship since you can't know what part will be shot at. Turrets and gatling guns are both *very* cheap, and reasonably light so you can stack tons of them on there.

This is a point I'll disagree on. One of the major parts of ship armor design (And really any design involving armor) is engineering yourself with limitations for your task.

If you're going to be designing a Destroyer meant for attacking a Station or other Heavy Warship, you'll likely want your Bow heavily armored for taking the brunt of punishment from Slow Moving or Immobile targets. You can afford to be less armored on your Aft side because the targets your designing around aren't likely going to be able to capitalize on that.

As just an offhand real life example, you can look at Tank design. Or, perhaps far more relevant, ship design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Naval_armour

Adding more firepower to counter heavy armor is a perfectly reasonable strategy, however (And this is extremely the case for small fighters) is every weapon is also a vulnerability.

Each Turret is a  block with less defense than a typical light armor block, and (Unless you're a masochist or only designing ships to work in Creative mode) an armor-less conveyer system beneath it.

And while each Gatling gun is a very cheap block that can en masse chew through heavy armor, you do have this balanced around fact that the Turrets you're flying into will chew through undefended weapons much quicker, at a farther range.

The problem is you seem to assume your huge warship needs to be damaged by another huge warship or base. That's not true, it's actually the opposite.

small gatling guns do *more* dps than a gatling turret (700 vs 600 rpm), and you can shove ~25 of them in the same space as a single gatling turret. You armor only the front? great, I take my utterly disposable 25 gatling wall fighter and fly behind you and carve a hole straight through your ship from out of turret range using camera zoom. You say turrets will chew through you at longer range but that's simply not true, gating gun range is ~1,000m (not sure of the exact number) while max turret range is 800m exactly and camera zoom makes it trivial to "snipe" slow moving (aka heavy armored) ships.

Also, you say each turret has less armor than an armor block. This is true - but that's kind of meaningless for two reasons:

1. you have to destroy every single gatling turret, The effective health of just armoring your ship with gatling turrets is much higher, due to the fact that I can ignore the overwhelming majority of your armor blocks but you can't ignore any of my gatling turrets.

2. every gatling gun I have is more dps that's focusing on YOUR turrets. Since you wasted resources on armor instead of turrets, I will have more of them, which means I have more dps on less targets... which means I kill all your turrets and you sit there, armored and useless.

If armor could somehow protect your turrets, or maybe if turrets were not so insanely accurate you'd have a point, but that's now how the game works.

....of course in the end what really happens is we get in range of each other and the server crashes because the netcode/optimization is so terrible

[Aseaheru]

 Eh, thats when you get missiles. When you can make programmable cruse missiles out of a turret and a drone core, and probably also a program block, and with the fact that you can disable a gun without destroying it, and the strategy of using stone armor... The list goes on.

 The fun thing about space engineers is that you dont have to rely on the simple, precreated weapons, they give you tools to make, say, a swarm of drones that home in on a target and then open up to reveal missile pods galore, or shield systems using medical components, or anything else you can think of...


And, before I forget, placing welders within the armor to repair it as needed. Make a job harder than otherwise possible.

[BurnedToast]

Eh, thats when you get missiles. When you can make programmable cruse missiles out of a turret and a drone core, and probably also a program block, and with the fact that you can disable a gun without destroying it, and the strategy of using stone armor... The list goes on.

 The fun thing about space engineers is that you dont have to rely on the simple, precreated weapons, they give you tools to make, say, a swarm of drones that home in on a target and then open up to reveal missile pods galore, or shield systems using medical components, or anything else you can think of...


And, before I forget, placing welders within the armor to repair it as needed. Make a job harder than otherwise possible.

I think you're talking about the wrong game, SE does not have drone cores or stone armor. You can make guided missiles using some tricks with the programming block, but I've yet to see one that's capable of delivering good damage + survive the 8+ seconds of turret fire required + remain maneuverable enough to track a moving target + not being insanely expensive.

Self repairing armor is also an interesting idea, but it lags servers really bad so it's a great way to get your ship deleted. It would also work just as well to self-repair turrets, and since armor blocks don't repair faster it would actually probably swing things even more in favor of the turrets.

[Creaca]

The problem is you seem to assume your huge warship needs to be damaged by another huge warship or base. That's not true, it's actually the opposite.

Well now, to be fair, it was designed to be weak to fighters, because its job wasn't to handle fighters. With the hypothetical ship design I was talking about, it was about creating

a Destroyer meant for attacking a Station or other Heavy Warship

One of the key concepts of engineering is building a tool for the task at hand, like your design for a extremely armed light ship that uses its greater range and maneuverability to damage slower, well armored targets.

Of course, what makes this game as fun as it is, is there's no 'gotcha' perfect design. A ship covered with 25 Gatling guns will find itself in dire straits when faced with far more maneuverable interceptors with only one or two Gatling weapons or a Missile launching system.

Though, as you point out. Most of the meat of this game is rotting on the bone when PvP is all but impossible outside of small groups of 4 or so.

[Mattk50]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

The square-cube law means armor is absurdly impractical at protecting your ship. Doubling the guns will double your firepower... but in order to double your protection you need to multiply your armor by *8*.

Without a shield generator of some sort the optimal ship design will always be "a wall of gatling turrets as large as your computer can handle" because the only thing that matters is firepower.

This provides the motivation for building more than just the biggest monolithic capital ships you can. More smaller ships become more effecient but don't rule out the possibility of a flagship. All this would be really nice if you could have enough ships ingame actually functional without everything lagging to a halt.

[Icefire2314]

I loved space engineers but it stopped working on my computer like 20 updates ago. I've tried looking up why (It starts but my screen goes black and then nothing happens. It's still responding, however and will close on command) but nothing conclusive came up.

Any other GPU intensive game works? If not it could be your power (PSU dieing) being too low. Also on another note.... I had a similar issue but the problem wasnt my computer, it was my whole damn power system in the appartment that was defunct, if i start the microwave i blow a fuse, if i start the oven and im streaming my computer to the TV it goes out sporadicly, not enough amps flowing in my appart so either something blow up or stop working a few miliseconds.

I would say so but off the top of my head I can't say.

[BurnedToast]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

The square-cube law means armor is absurdly impractical at protecting your ship. Doubling the guns will double your firepower... but in order to double your protection you need to multiply your armor by *8*.

Without a shield generator of some sort the optimal ship design will always be "a wall of gatling turrets as large as your computer can handle" because the only thing that matters is firepower.

This provides the motivation for building more than just the biggest monolithic capital ships you can. More smaller ships become more effecient but don't rule out the possibility of a flagship. All this would be really nice if you could have enough ships ingame actually functional without everything lagging to a halt.

I'm not seeing how this is true. Armor is terrible on large ships, but that just makes it even more terrible on smaller ships. If it takes me 4 seconds to punch through the armor of a large capital ship, than it only takes me two seconds to punch through your smaller ship's armor. If my large ship has 25 turrets and your small ship only has 5, then I disable your ship's offensive power even quicker, and render you helpless.

If turrets were less accurate, maybe you'd have a point since they would miss smaller ships a lot... but they are incredibly accurate even at max range, and at mid to close range they are damn near 100% accurate.

Just forget small ships, unless you are using them to snipe from out of turret range (which is something that should be removed from the game, I think). They can't last against turret fire at all, small armor blocks just don't have enough integrity and turrets are too accurate to "speed tank".

[n9103]

Just forget small ships, unless you are using them to snipe from out of turret range

Well, that's exactly what I interpreted his posts as addressing. *shrug*

[Aseaheru]

I think you're talking about the wrong game, SE does not have drone cores or stone armor. You can make guided missiles using some tricks with the programming block, but I've yet to see one that's capable of delivering good damage + survive the 8+ seconds of turret fire required + remain maneuverable enough to track a moving target + not being insanely expensive.

By stone armor I am talking about projectors that emit stone, which is then kept with the ship via a gravity field.

Self repairing armor is also an interesting idea, but it lags servers really bad so it's a great way to get your ship deleted. It would also work just as well to self-repair turrets, and since armor blocks don't repair faster it would actually probably swing things even more in favor of the turrets.

Surely they wouldent lag the server when off. Just turn each bit on as needed, and there you go.

[TheDarkStar]

So I made a warp drive, went 200km away, and almost immediately ran into not just on but two derelict ships about 100m apart.

One was smaller (but still a big ship), but it was full of resources and had an active antenna when I found it. I'll probably replace some small engines and reactors with their larger variants to help it's acceleration and then use it for exploring.

The other ship was gigantic. It had dozens of thrusters and was very asymmetric. Although it had lot of things in it, it had no spare parts or ore in storage. I'll probably use it for spare parts.

[Aseaheru]

Please do.

[TheDarkStar]

And an image.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Th yellow ship is my modified starting ship, the middle one is the smaller exploration ship I found, and then the gigantic ship (facing backwards) is to the left.

[zombat]

How well do jumpdrives work with big heavy things on the end of pistons?

[Sergius]

That derelict has inspired me.

My next ship is just going to be a sprawling mess where I put all my stuff and machines and add engines as it grows. Kinda like my bases, but mobile and airtight.

[TheDarkStar]

How well do jumpdrives work with big heavy things on the end of pistons?

I haven't tested that particular case, but jumpdrives don't appear to cause any actual force; they just cause a visual warping and then change your location.