Post your designs here!

I edited my post right before I saw your new one, oh well.
A quick repost of those examples.
The neon and HD NTRs were both stolen from goduranus in the 100mc Fleet Challenge thread.

Right, that's a very light armor schema. I suspect my cost will go *up* if I change propellants but not the armor, but I will keep playing with it.

Edit: down to under 2 Mc without changing the armor layout.  Changes include switching to Methane, just making the NTR plain better so I can use only one, reducing crew size because now there is only one engine, and reducing the overkill on the ammo capacity (still plenty).  As a side benefit, it also has way more acceleration now.

I'm using MPDTs to have much smaller tanks than other forms of propulsion would require for a given delta-v budget. These are orbital ships so that requirement is actually only around 5km/s, but it was only a minor concession for them to have a lot more in order to move between asteroids and moons.




Argon is denser than neon and not much more expensive (~850mc versus ~550mc), while xenon is denser and afaik a better propellant than either, but the price is quite high. I originally used mercury but it gets very expensive.

Unique? Like what didn't I take from the standards thread? Well that would be everything.
I made the crew module max length and sized all the modules to fit inline.

Here's the engine and reactor at least. Propellant tanks are 1x100t on the laser and 2x200t on the trawler.
They have five engines each but you could probably use a single 50MW one for higher velocity... at which point I could spend the extra delta-v on a bigger reactor for an even more powerful thruster and so on, but I don't want the thrust to be too terrible either, and this reactor is shared by basically all my ships (though I might move up to 300-500MW after the patch).

I'm using PTFE, the minimum 1cm of which can only just keep the atmosphere out on a long module, but should be a bit more thermally resistive than polyethylene which is the lightest thing you can effectively use. UHMWPE can easily handle the strength requirements of any shape of crew compartment while being very light, and the cost isn't particularly high for the amount required, but is greater than other options. I might go back to it for light crew modules; I haven't shot these things much to find out if the PTFE actually makes a difference.

Another thing I might interest you in is this nonporous fiber which I will start using: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/14393/thread

You can keep the headcount and size (and therefore cost and mass) of the crew compartment down by minimising the number of systems (weapons, engines, radiators) and using RTGs instead of reactors.

What these guys said, but with Magnesium for the walls to further save up on cost.

I find polyethylene and UHMWPE to be lightest, but UHMWPE is too expensive for me.
Calcium and magnesium are cheapest.
Earlier on, I used boron for its thermal neutron blocking abilities and nice armor value.

Most of the time nowadays I pick polyethylene, because crew modules are really heavy, and I no longer plan to put crewed vessels in combat anyway.

From what I've seen homogenous single armor layers don't really do well with anything but fragmentation unless they're multiple centimeters thick, which drastically increases weight for crew modules. I've had good luck using thick radiation shields made out of armor materials as bulkheads.