This is (yet another) guide focused on building ships for performance. We’ll look at some of the quirks of the blocks that make the move and spin around and touch upon some other blocks that are commonly used to build a ship for surviving battle.
소개
예, this is yet another guide to “how make ship go zoom,” and to be honest is mainly a spot for me to keep track of tips and tricks I’ve learned from building as I go through the game. Most of the information here is probably repeated in the other guides on Steam, but hopefully organized in a way to allow for quick Referencing.
Linear Movement – 엔진, Dampeners, and Thrusters
The primary blocks for forward movement are none other than the Engine block and the Inertia Dampener block.
Engine blocks:
- Produce 20MN of force per unit volume.
- Higher tier materials only decrease power used.
- Iron engines are the least efficient in terms of produced force versus added mass.
- Trinium engines are the most efficient.
- Only contributes to forward acceleration, and does not contribute to rotation.
- Changes in speed and acceleration logarithmicly are less per unit volume.
- Listed acceleration in the build menu is the acceleration when afterburner is on.
- Requires Engineers.
Inertia Dampeners:
- Produce about 54MN of force per unit volume
- Is only available for Iron and Avorion.
- Avorion dampeners produce about 100MN of force per unit volume.
- Provides brake force for every direction, but only when stopping or going against retrograde.
- Don’t require engineers.
The blocks for lateral (left/right and up/down) and backwards movement are the Thruster and Directional Thruster blocks.
Thrusters (Omnidirectional):
- Produce 15MN of force per unit volume
- Higher tier materials only decrease power used.
- Iron thrusters are the least efficient in terms of produced force versus added mass.
- Trinium thrusters are the most efficient.
- Provide lateral and reverse movement in addition to rotational movement (more on that in the next section)
- Divides the total available force among the 3 directions according the the surface area of the face normal to the respective axis. (Larger face = more force, smaller face = less force)
- Require engineers, but at a less rate than Engine blocks.
Directional Thrusters:
- Produce 12.5MN of force per unit volume.
- Higher tier materials only decrease power used.
- Iron thrusters are the least efficient.
- Trinium thrusters are the most efficient.
- Provide lateral or reverse movement according to which direction it is facing.
- Provides less total force than a Omni thruster but are far easier to control amount of force in a particular direction.
- Don’t require engineers.
Linear Flight Dynamics
Thrusters automatically assist in turning to reduce “sliding” and do not need to have the respective key pressed down to fire. The Inertia dampeners likewise assist but only when the desired movement vector is close to the retrograde vector (they only fire when you’re trying to go almost exact opposite direction the ship is currently sliding in).
An interesting note about thrusters is that they don’t contribute to forward velocity at all, but do still provide braking force. They can be used instead of inertia dampeners but will require about 4x as much volume to achieve the same effect.
Omni thrusters divide their available thrust according to the surface area of each block:
(x = left/right, y = top/bottom, z = forward/back)
T_x = Area_yz / Area_total * 추력
T_y = Area_xz / Area_total * 추력
T_z = Area_xy / Area_total * 추력
Where:
T is the thrust in the given direction
Area is the area of the block (예: 와이 * z)
Area_total is (Area_yz + Area_xz + Area_xy)
Thrust = 15MN * volume of the block
Omni thrusters can be manipulated by carefully merging cubes together into rectangular prisms to tune the amount of thrust for a given axis. This tends to be rather inconvenient for more intricate ship designs, and reduces the advantage of having redundancy in case thruster blocks are getting destroyed.
Directional thrusters are far more convenient to tune a specific axis, but produce less force per volume than what an Omni thruster can provide. Their saving grace, in this regard, is that they don’t require more engineers.
Rotational Movement – Gyro Arrays and Thrusters
For controlling rotational movement, there are Gyro Arrays, Thrusters, and Directional Thrusters.
Gyro Arrays:
- Provide rotational force (torque) in a specified direction.
- Provide a strong amount of torque per unit volume vs. Thrusters.
- Consume much more power than a respective Thruster for the same amount of torque.
- Very convenient to tune a specific direciton.
- Perform worse the further they are from the ships center of mass (which is also the center of rotation)
- Higher material tiers affect torque, power efficiency, and power consumed per block. (More power is consumed for same volume, but more torque/MW is provided)
- Max rotational velocity is a function of the torque, similar to Engines vs. max velocity. (Effectiveness reduces as gyro block volume increases)
Thruster (Directional and Omnidirectional) 블록:
- Provide rotational force according to their distance away from the ship’s center of mass. (Further away from center of mass = more torque)
- Rotational Performance may be affected when the thruster is being used for braking.
- Don’t get as bad of a performance hit as gyros when the ship is scaled up.
Rotational Flight Dynamics
TLDR: When using thrusters as the primary means of rotation that you should get roughly the same rad/s as you scale up. Gyros on the other hand will produce less rad/s as you scale up.Thrusters produce torque as a function of block volume and distance from the center of rotatation. 이 때문에, they don’t suffer as bad of a performance hit as gyros do when the ship is scaled up. As the ship is scaled up, the thrusters produce more force and are put at a further distance away, which both increase the amount of torque.
Mathmatical Illustration:Torque = Thrust * 디
Thrust = block volume * 씨
Torque = (s*x)(s*y)(s*z) * 씨 * (s*d)
Torque = s^4 * (x*y*z) * 씨 * 디
d = distance away from the axis of rotation
s = a scalar between 50% 그리고 200%
C = Thruster constant, either 15MN or 12.5MN
This equation doesn’t include the game’s “space resistance” which counteracts the available force from thrusters as they scale up. It does however illustrate the effect of scaling the ship.
Where forward and lateral movement has mass counteracting the force provided by the engines and thrusters, rotational movement has moment of inertia, 또는 “rotational equivalent” of mass. This essentially subtracts from the torque provided by thrusters and gyros so that the remainder is the rotational acceleration that the ship actually obtains. Like with thrusters, the moment of inertia is affected by s^4.
Since gyros only increase their torque by block size (and thus s^3) they become less effective per unit volume as does their equivalent in thrusters.
Building Grids
Before moving on to talking about them we should first touch upon the importance of the snap grid.
The most used snap grid modes are Middle and Local modes, followed by Global and Voxel.
Middle Snap mod will attempt to place the middle of the block that you’re placing down onto the middle of the block that your mouse is hovering over.
Local Snap mode will place down an invisible snap grid on the face of the block you’re hovering over, with the origin of this grid centered around the block’s center.
Global snap mode will also place down an invisible snap grid, but will use the root block’s middle as the origin.
마지막으로, Voxel snap chooses the corner of the block as the grid origin.
Selection of the grid size is important because when trying to align stuff together for intricate curves and the like, it makes it tons easier. The smallest unit the grid can go is 0.001 단위, but I recommend powers of 2 since its easy to scale up by 200% or down by 50% and be at the next power of two. 이들은: 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 그리고 8.
Building for Hull and Shield HP
When building up your ship’s hull HP, the blocks to use are Hull, Smart Hull, and Armor blocks.
Hull Blocks:Used to fill out the ship’s HP and for aesthetics without increasing the processing power of the ship. Use these blocks to
tune downa ship’s slot number to make it available for a particular material tech grade.
Smart Hull Blocks:Use these blocks to fill out your hull’s aesthetics while increasing the processing power a bit.
Armor Blocks:These should be applied immediately around your functional tech blocks (engines, 발전기, thrusters, 등.) to protect them from damage. Armor blocks stop railgun projectiles from penetrating through to the underlying techblocks, and are highly recommended for late and end-game operations.
Since armor blocks are the third heaviest block, it is recommended to make a comparatively thin shell of armor that is essentially shrinkwrapped around the vulnerable innards. I’ve seen recommendations of 1u thickness for armor of end-game vessels, with mid-game being between 0.25 에게 0.5 thickness.
To minimize the effect that armor has on the flight dynamics, it is recommended to have a convex shape as much as possible to reduce the amount of nooks and crannies that the armor has to shrinkwrap around.
Armor blocks should also be used for aesthetic scaffolding parts that bits of the ship use to attach to each other or the main hull of the ship. The theory here is that, should the scaffolding get destroyed, it will instantly destroy everything that was attached to it as if it were deleted with safe-mode off in the Building mode.
Integrity Generators:Integrity generators are an essential addition to the hull, before shields become available. For a relatively minor amount in power costs they can increase the survivability of the ship by reducing the damage taken by blocks within its field of influence to 25%.
Integrity gens differ from shield generators in that they have a box-like field of influence that is a function of the integrity generator’s dimensions. Larger integrity generators have a comparitively larger volume field than multiple smaller integrity generators of the same volume (One 2x2x2 integrity generator has a larger field than 8 integrity gens bunched together).
A common practice is to have many smaller integrity gens evenly spread out across the inside of the ship, just inside the armor shell. This is less efficient power wise but ensures redunancy of the integrity generators — should some of the smaller gens get destroyed, the other generators are still protecting the ship.
대안으로, builders can have a few large integrity generators deep inside the ship to cover the entire ship in a few, larger fields. This is better power wise but a well placed railgun strike or two can make the entire ship vulnerable.
A balance between the two practices is also an option.
Shield generators:Shield HP is only affected by total volume of the shield generator blocks, and is not affected by its geometry like the omni thrusters are. As with everything, try to build essential tech blocks close to the center of rotation to reduce the amount of added moment of inertia. Having the shield blocks seperated from each other by a fair distance theoretically makes them less likely to be all taken out by a lucky cannon or railgun shot.
결석, Rich Stone, Super Rich Stone:Late and End-game ships predominantly use Tesla and Lightning Cannons. These are absurdly strong turrets, especially against technical blocks as of 2.2, and can be difficult to defend against.
Since stone is immune to electric, a common tactic is to make a very-thin venier of stone on top of the armor layer (또는 그 반대도 마찬가지입니다).
Stone however is also extremely heavy, and is rarely seen thicker than 0.5 단위.
Building for Agility and Speed
Building a ship for agility largely boils down to how well you can place your thrusters and how smartly you can merge omni thrusters or place directional thrusters to tune a specific rotational axis.
Placement of omnithrusters can provide all axes of rotation with just 3 blocks in a triangle shape or 4 blocks in a rectangle shape, at the extreme end of your ship’s design. Horizontal plane is the most common for airplane-like ships while vertical plane is more attractive to boat-like ships.
Early game low-cost ships can get away with only one or two omnithruster blocks for the rotation by making use of stone blocks to move the center of mass away from the centerline of the omni thruster. 또한, very thin omni thrusters may be used as the wings of a dart-like ship to get decent pitch and roll while providing up/down braking ability.
Building a ship for speed is mainly from how many engine blocks you are willing to slap into your ship. Having an equal acceleration and decelleration rating is as easy as having the volume of inertia dampeners be roughly 1/3 that of engines, although keep in mind that the dampeners only fire when trying to thrust towards retrograde or otherwise have hands off the any of the thrust/throttle keys. Combat craft instead may be more interested in using cubes of omnithrusters to provide the braking force, but be advised cubed omni thrusters are about 1/11th as effective as iron dampeners.
Civilian craft (miners and freighters) may be more interested in stopping than going fast since they’ll largely be doing maneuvers around asteroids and other ships at safe speeds. At the most, they’ll be jumping out of sector and out of harms way.
End-game (Ogonite, 아보리온) ship agility seems to average around 0.3 rads/s and tends to lean towards high HP, high DPS, and long range builds.
Mid to Late-game ships (Trinium, Xanion) seem to average around 1 에게 1.5 rad/s and tend to lean towards fast and agile ships that can quickly close into and out of range for the chainguns, bolters, and plasmas while dodging the cannon fire.
Early to Mid-game ships (철, 티탄, Naonite) seem to lean towards a balance of 1:2 of hull HP and shield HP. 0.5 에게 1 rad/s is acceptable but burst speeds to dart out of range of chaingun fire and evade the slower pirate ships.
Build a cheese wedge.. slap on engines/weapons.. put an integrity field gen in it. 상관없어. Design in this game is 100% aestetic.