Post your designs here!

The designs as text:

The M1 Thor AP:




The M2 Atlas:

It may have been made by one of the alpha/beta testers and just never removed from the release build of the game, like the 1200mm gun which was made to help Q with some bugs with guns at large scales.
If it was reworked for the current version to use one laser with a turret in every direction making it look like a jack, it could be reasonably effective (as stock lasers go).

Newbie here (little over a week playing the game).  I'm kinda proud of these two ships, even if they're frankly nothing spectacular.  My main goal was basically just the beginnings of a "fluffy" Imperial Nippon Navy.  The Nagato pretty much fills the role her 20th-century namesake did, simply being a bastion of overwhelming kinetic firepower with an equally overwhelming effective range.  She's complimented by 1-3 Fubuki-classes, designed to screen for the Nagato by counter-sniping lasers and pretty much anything else that could harm her.  Next in line is filling out the fleet with a good carrier design and some support ships.

Nagato-class

Fubuki-class




These are basically WIP, since I'm still learning the finer points of shipbuilding - especially armor - and haven't even scratched the surface on module design outside of conventional cannons (and I better be good with those since I'm a bloody gunsmith).  As a result, I've been using a lot of modules I've picked up while lurking here.  With any luck I'll eventually be able to swap them out with my own designs later on.

Ooooh another Nippon primer.

At first glance they look like drones.

Now i see that they look like oversized drones.

FYI the flares on your destroyer are not going to work without turning some systems off or retracting radiators

I got frustrated with dealing with missile homing and flares, so I made a missile that can work wonders with just a high-speed intercept from the system view. It only needs homing for larger swarms or when launched from combat view, which also works as long as the enemy doesn't pop flares that can mask their signal.

It's a multi-purpose design with nuclear, cluster fragment and KE penetrator payloads. After a 4-5 km/s intercept, the missile will coast to 40km, where the front-facing 3 km/s 1kt nuke blast launcher will fire. Due to the high intercept velocity, using a nose forward order guarantees a hit within 100m of the target. This nuke is most useful in salvos of >5 missiles, since the nukes will be fired in a ring formation and detonate on all sides of the target, cooking all of its surface area evenly. This will ensure that any lighter guns or radiators will be fried before the missiles reach the most effective PD range.

After the nukes have fired, the missiles must be changed to homing behaviour, unless you only fired one missile. This will guarantee that the missiles will collide with the target, and will maximize the cluster frag warheads' effectiveness. At 1 km, 20 5 kg cluster warheads will be deployed in a grid pattern. This ensures an even spread of fragmentation along the target's hull and if the missile misses the target, the wide spread of the frags still occasionally does some minor damage to it. the 100kg fragment mass means that pretty much all radiators will be gone with a good hit, and lighter (that is, under ~10cm of VCS) armor will be turned into swiss cheese.

Finally, the missile has 300kg of dry mass moving at ~6 km/s, which makes for a significant KE penetrator. If the nukes and frags fail to penetrate the target, the missile's hull will do that every time. When tested against a target with a whipple shield on top of a 20cm VCS layer with a spall liner, the missiles penetrated the armor both entering and exiting the ship. The heavy armor that doubles as a KE penetrator also means that the missile is close to immune to PD weapons. At best my ship with PD railguns was able to destroy one nuke launcher out of a salvo of six missiles, and even that missile wasn't completely disabled.

Below is a youtube video showing the missile's performance against the target ship with 20cm VCS layer, as well as more detailed images of the target ship and missile.




target ship


missile

So after playing around with some apophys  Electronics modules, I've made pretty good progress on my idea of a dedicated combat laserstar.



You'll notice that the primary feature is spaced "laser booms" that ring the hull. It's an idea I messed around with a lot during the update that made lasers hyper-fragile. At the time I used a ring of redundant 1MW point defense lasers that were able to quickly outgun heavier enemy lasers and gain las superiority.



This is the same concept but scaled up.

It is armed with 20 [AE] 100MW lasers, each with a triple redundant turret. Against non-laserstar warship it will quickly attain las superiority and proceed to snipe enemy turrets at leisure. The secondary battery of [AE] based 50 km/s railguns allow for killshots or for point defense. It carries my standard spam cans of NEFP (or brimstone) equipped 105t micro-missiles, along with two silos of heaver missiles (soon to be replaced upgraded hyper-velocity KKVs)



In practice, the booms allow for a greater amount of weaponry to be brought nose-forward while open volume allows rounds to literally pass through them. The heavily sloped forward hull is effective at deflecting sandblaster rounds at Mm ranges while allowing for large droptanks to be stowed behind the armor's shadow. Duel NTR/MPD propulsion allows the ship both strategic and (limited) tactical maneuverability. I attempted to use large lateral resistojet thrusters, but they proved problematic and more mass than they were worth. The primary [AE]1GW reactors are housed in the rear engine module while a secondary 1MW reactor is housed in the rear section of the forward hull. If needed, the ship can "go dark" and operate under the 1MW reactor while still able to launch missiles, so decoy flares to be added at some future point.

*edit add* One major drawback in my opinion of "standard" laserstars is that if the enemy manages to get off a burst of KE fire, the ship is practically defenseless. No armor sloping means that even a modest KE burst can puncture the laserstar hull through the middle. This hull design is intended to combine the best of needleships and laserstars, with lessons learned in broadside design. While a basic laserstar is certainly fare more economical, it's my hope that further development of hypervelocity missiles may shift the meta back towards mixed-battery warships/capital drones. 



As a side note, this idea is why I am very much in favor of parallel staging. I could easily see the truss, laser booms, and rear engine modules being a "first stage" for a smaller more conventional ship. If sufficient damage is done to the "tail", why not jettison it fight onward with the armored bullethead?




*edit 2*
If the use of spaced armor in this way is seen as an exploit, I could easily add groups of stand-in radiators to simulate the mass of support structures or high tension cables.