Stock ships redesign - the practical approach

The game basically contains any info needed to build a good ship from existing modules. The only really counter-intuitive thing is armor since it requires a bunch of specialized layers of proper materials properly placed.

Module building is much more complicated though, and would require a dedicated tutorial for an each module type. That's a pretty high text volume.

I think that a post of mine is relevant in this context. I won't quote it here in full, but still I'll include this:

Dear CoaDE player, whoever you might be!
If you think that some stock module is useless or has a serious fatal flaw - please tell us that module's name, reasons for modification, and possible ideas/direction for such modification. TIA.

This is relevant to this thread:
childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/3222/stock-designs-flaws-suggested-improvements



Either something is seriously wrong with your installation or you have somehow conflated 11mm Autofire with Flak CG.
The latter sucks indeed, the velocity doesn't warrant using EM gun when chemical cannon would have achieved same or better performance with much lower power consumption and much higher rate of fire, plus the low velocity cripples the gun due to flak bug.

OTOH flak CG can be very easily tweaked into hilariously superior alternative to 34mm heavy coilgun.

Almost everything turreted that has reaction wheels:
Huge, massive, very poorly optimized reaction wheels due to the way reaction wheel dimensions are determined (see turret diagram in module designer). For optimum mass efficiency barrel diameter (along with armour) should be close to maximum allowed for turret of that size, which yields thin, maximum diameter reaction wheels (which can then be made out of densest sufficiently strong available material for power optimization - remember power requirements grow with square of velocity, but momentum does not, this applies to spinning objects too).

For that turret can be shrunk OR barrel thickened (by low density bracing if needed), or multi-barrel assembly can be used.

For low powered applications actuators are almost universally better and don't inflate in mass with increasing turret/barrel assembly diameter ratio.


Staging is only broken for capacitors, though.
For coilguns there are still 3 types of good designs:

• Single stage capacitor based designs are pretty good to around 7.5km/s (can be pushed to almost 10km/s at rapidly diminishing efficiencies) and can be made very compact.
• Multi staged direct-power sandblasters/needlers can be pushed to around 40km/s when using near GW power (shared between >10 guns), with capped rate of fire (albeit with somewhat sub-par efficiency) with very long barrels, while still remaining slender, turretable and lightweight.
• Multi staged direct-power heavy coilguns can achieve near 100% efficiencies with heavy slugs with capped out rate of fire (long firing times, so no power sharing). They are good up to around 7.5km/s. Larger versions (around GW power and kg range slugs) pretty much have to be spinal (run the CG bundle along most of the hip's length), smaller can be reasonably turreted.

Most CGs benefit from slender projectiles which can also be an advantage, especially at less extreme velocities, but sucks for payloads (though very long, thin flak bomb using fuse might be workable).

I'm not sure it's a good idea to be planning to fly anywhere after getting into shooting fight. Alive & in stable orbit seems like a pretty good outcome already. And if you still have propellant, tanks, engine(s) and crew you can always cut off pieces of your ship to lighten it up.

Anyway, it really depends on how much delta-v you are exposing this way, and you really want to burn the delta-v in droptanks first and will likely maneuver before shooting starts.

Of all ship's components the propellant is by far the most problematic and self defeating to armour so deciding NOT to armour a fraction of your propellant seems like a valid option.


Droptanks occupy an intermediate niche between tanker and internal tanks. Tankers get you between battles (and carry out logistic operations), droptanks get you into battle, internal tanks get you around during the battle.

A transferable tank tanker would be an attractive way of solving the problem of replacing droptank delta-v. Instead of pumping propellant from built in tank (or even a droptank) into a warship, you'd just detach the tank from a tanker and hang it onto a warship. You'd still need some pumping to replenish internal tanks, but tanks are tanks are tanks so it would actually be lighter solution to transfer one whole tank than to pump the same amount of propellant between two.

Huge armour mass budgets and distributed CMs suggest otherwise.
The game generally doesn't have consistent warship doctrine or doctrines, and that's the problem.
My sub-kt ships on which it's genuinely hard to add survivability features have better overall survivability than stock ships and that's not for the lack of trying.

That's true. Stock ships generally have a lot of survivability features that are hard to make work or require significant sacrifices, but lack much cheaper and effective ones that would actually prevent the ones they do have from becoming pointless - weakest link and all.

Spreading CMs along ship's long axis adds significant constraints on agility and only helps if the ship hasn't been cored along long axis, had all external modules shot off or lost power generation.
Adding heavy armour doesn't help if ship is reduced just to its armoured volume by enemy fire.

Meanwhile distributing power generation or adding backup power is cheap and doesn't hamper ship's performance. Adding additional weapon systems, especially light and low power ones like conventional cannon CIWS is pretty much free as well. With high thrust engines propellant doubles as armour AND force multiplier for your guns and missiles, and so on.