Challenge: 750 Ton Wonders!

I have noticed the same thing. If you look under "payloads," you can actually find the fixed copies... sans most the ship. It seems to be the case that the game cannot successfully load personal models referring to imported parts; this is possibly to avoid savefile corruption when you make a design, and then eliminate the import file where the parts are located. It could also just be a bug. I will report both problems sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, I have figured out that by nudging the ring turrets back a few steps I can make saves that load successfully. They are attached.

Made some improvements to my design by reducing turret size which allows me to mount thicker armor on each turret due to lower surface area, and doing the same thing to the central PE plate protecting the ship's hull from lasing. Now I can beat 8 wheels simultaneously without losing a single turret.

Updated design: jt Laser Spider.txt (8.44 KB)

Loads of wheels:


Also 5 deep fryers simultaneously, resulting in 13 lost turrets:

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I finally killed the spider at a credit advantage. Dang those designs are hard to deal with.

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Worried about the possibility of retaliation at extreme range, command engaged in a research program aimed at finding an economical method of countering a long range laser threat. After significant development, a solution was achieved. I thus now present the "Victory" class missile cruiser



 The Victory class comes in at 655 tons, cost and 4.66 Megacredits, and has 3.89 km/s of intrinsic delta v. The ship itself is relatively unremarkable; It has two launchers and two cannons as it's only armaments, and has a thin whipple, arrowgel, and a thin profile for defense. However, the munitions it carries is anything but conventional.

The ship is armed with a set of 20 "Witch" missile busses:



The "Witch" bus contains 50 "Verge" submunitions, and is armed with an astounding 19.5 km/s of delta v. The motus oparandus for this vehicle is to engage the enemy at 1.6 Mm , accelerate up to about 17 km/s over the course of about 50 seconds, and then cruise until it reaches 1.1 Mm. At this point, the launchers on the drone launch all fifty of its "Verge" submunitions, and the drone becomes a nuclear missile. Interestingly, the missile acquired the nickname "Witch" from the troops when one of them noticed the pointed laser shield looked "a lot like a witches hat"

The "Verge" KKV submunition is the item actually expected to do the majority of the damage to an enemy:



The verge weights in at 3.06 kg wet weight, and can be expected to deliver 1.08 kg of dry mass at at least 20 km/s to an enemy target. A 150 g osmium penetrator is combined with a 50 g flak load to produce a cloud of both large and small fragments capable of penetrating a variety of hulls and radiators. In order to prevent elimination by enemy point defense, the missile features a remarkably small profile; When viewed from the front, the hen viewed from the front, the hull is under seven centimeters across. The small weight makes it practical to d
making it a remarkably cheap design for missile operations.

Also aiding in lethality is the extreme accuracy of the weapon. An explosive actually had to be added during development as it was found that only the first few Verge missiles were doing any damage: the rest went right through the hole left by the first few missiles. In one particularly notable incident, out of 50 missiles launched, 30 ended up traveling through the ship and continuing on on the far side. 

Combat tests with the Victory have been promising. Against any laserstar I can get my hands on, such as the Ring, Deep Cooker, and Deep Fryer, the deadly accurate missiles have ended up ending the foe for a credit cost far less than construction. Against the Laser Spider, a long cruise period of around 8 minutes must be sat through, but the end result is the same. The only effective defense is to either intercept the buses with large nukes, kill the Victory before it can launch a payload, or kill the Witches with fast railgun fire before they have a chance to launch their payload of KKVs. 

This ship is designed to work with AI. I would recommend testing it on "Balanced"

I have decided to do my usual thing - try to build a stock module ship fitting these requirements.

"Vanara" class is just above 600t, agile, and armed with cannons and missiles.

That's not too dissimilar from my approach to making small ships.

Finally made enough tweaks to get a functional nuke cannon, doctrine here is to burn into a retrograde orbit and intercept the target with a minimum of perpendicular velocity at as close a minimum range as possible.