u/BloodBornAngel

Hello, Engineers!

I'm back with another update on my first ever Large Grid ship design! This time with a short video of me flying around the exterior. Forgive the awkward tilting -- xbox controller has an odd layout that takes some getting used to.

Last times I asked everyone their opinions on weapons, and I got some great advice. I reshaped the hull in some places for better firing positions and focused on the three main weapons I wanted to fit the ship with: Rockets, Artillery, Assault, and Gatlings.

I plan on adding some interior turrets here and there, but that will be closer to when I do my finishing touches.

So let's talk about her specs now!

Weighing in at a whopping 4.3 million kg, she's definitely put on some weight from my initial estimates. She can still break atmosphere, but I'll need to rework thrust after I pipe everything up.

There are 24 fixed Rocket Launchers split into 4 groups of 6 centered around the bridge.

36 Artillery Turrets staggered around the top and bottom dorsal, and with a few spread out on the inner part of the wings.

26 Assault Cannon Turrets straddling the Artillery and spread out a just a bit more.

And lastly 34 Gatling Turrets to fill in gaps and serve as PD where I had space.

That's a lot of firepower in my opinion. Too much, actually. So I've come to the decision that I'm going to shelf this layout, and start designing custom turrets instead.

The reason being is that this isn't going to be my flagship in a survival game. This is supposed to be a Destroyer-class vessel that would fly alongside a fleet of other ships down the line.

Will I use this in a survival world? Possibly, but I think that's something I'll work out further down the line. For now the goal is to make it as close to my vision of a "fully crewed" naval vessel that I can. So this is getting blue-printed as is and branching off as a variant later.

So, question time!

I've messed around with small grid turrets, but obviously this will be my first go at large grid. I'm curious if there are any design philosophies or possible problems I'll run into with rotor/hinge strength down the line. If anyone has some more experience in the matter for making main battle-cannons and such, I'd definitely appreciate your advice!

And even if you don't have much in this area, I really appreciate everyone's perspectives and general advice with regards to building in SE. 😁

I've been learning lots of little things here and there, and getting lots of new ideas. Some things might not make it into this build specifically, but everything helps fuel my creativity and keep me thinking about what I wanna do next~

As always, thanks for reading the wall of text. Lemme know what you think so far!

And TLDR; Too many little Dakka. Me change to bigger, Custom Dakka. What Think?

It's almost fine for my next stint of staring at my ship for 5 hours and working on it for 30 minutes~

Last time, I asked about the thrusters. I'll probably do another pass on them before I finish the interior, but I figured I should knock out the most important systems next -- weapons and power.

As you can see from the attached images, I've laid out potential areas to place my hard points, but as I did so, I realized how little space normal turrets take up. If I only use the vanilla turrets, there could be a lot more guns than I originally intended.

So once more, I'm asking for opinions and advice from more veteran community members! I have a list of ideas I've been thinking over, and want to know what you think are the pros and cons before I begin my layout.

The ideas are as follows:

- Spam Vanilla Turrets

They aren't that big, so I could potentially add a lot of firepower. More than likely, a mix of artillery, autocannons, and gatlings.

- A Few Medium-to-Large Custom Turrets

I've never designed a custom turret for a large grid, but I have some experience making tank/rover turrets. Could be fun to learn and practice.

- Modded Weapons

At the end of the day, why shouldn't I download some cool weapon mods? Probably Assault Weapons Pack, Star Wars, or maybe even Consolidation?

- Custom Missile/bombs

Maybe fit some bomber bays on the bottom? Make rooms to print all my explosive desires and either drop them or launch them at my enemies. I've made a missile once. Never tried to make a dedicated platform for them, though.

Some things I want to mention for context on the build if that helps with any feedback people can provide:

This build is on Xbox, with very few DLC blocks. I planned on mostly using vanilla blocks, but weapons are easily replaceable, so I'm making an exception here.

Performance is a medium-issue with consoles specs. It's not all bad, but I will say it struggles with complex builds; especially things with lots of subgrids, but it's not impossible to play around.

I am not going for 100% efficiency, but for something closer to an RP ship that still functions as a playable warship. Imagine that its competition would be other things I design rather than meta-builds on PVP servers. I would like it to be able to handle the limited PVE elements SE provides, though. Maybe not factorum level, but we can shoot for it if there's room for growth.

Class-wise, this ship is looking to be a Destroyer based loosely on my other designs. It's a bit too big for a corvette, in my opinion, but still on the smaller end of future projects I have in mind when I get back to PC. So I'd like to plan its armament appropriately for its role as well.

That's pretty much it, I think. I'm hoping I can learn some more from you guys based on what kinda weapons you would build on this thing! I learned a lot from your comments on my last post, and hopefully I'll get some more inspiration on this one too!

And thanks for taking your time to read this and your opinions if you got any!

TLDR; what kinda guns should I add?

After finally getting a chance to continue my project Sunday night, I've begun to run into a problem I've been fearing since I measured out the wingspan... the overall mass of the ship.

Measuring at around 116.5 blocks from tip to tip (I forget how big Large Grid blocks), and at a little over 2.4 million kg in mass, I'm uncertain if my current thruster plan is enough to get this thing off the ground once it's filled in/weighed down with cargo.

At this moment, I've roughly made space for 4 Large Hydrogen Thrusters going forward, backward, up, and down. And two for lateral thrust.

I gave myself a scare when I decided to try and lift the ship a bit higher with my thrusters off and using only a singular piston... you can guess how I felt when I realized my mistake and I watched the thing snap like a toothpick, lol.

Before my next pass, I'm hoping to get some advice on the approximate amount of thrusters and hydrogen tanks I am going to have to consider making room for. With how she's looking, I'm expecting the hull alone to be between 2.5 to 3 million kg. Nearly all light armor blocks.

Am I hoping too much to make this able to fly in atmosphere? Are there any tricks I can use to reduce mass once I'm finished with the shaping? I'd really appreciate any feedback I can get~

Just thought I'd share my latest progress on a project I'd been cooking up for some time now. This is the first Large Grid ship I've ever done, and I'm hoping to learn things as I go and make further iterations with the knowledge I gain from the experience.

I've recently begun to play SE on my Xbox in my spare time. I melted my poor computers guts a few months ago, and I have not been able to replace it. Meanwhile, SE has been updating and making me gnash my teeth in frustration that I can't continue my saves with the latest additions and all that. XD So I loaded up my console and decided I'd learn how to play with a controller. It is less than ideal, but I've gotten pretty deft with maneuvering and cycling blocks and tools.

This ship is around 4-5 hours of work in Creative, with no mods or DLC so far. I've put forth a set of loose goals I'd like to accomplish and actually share with the community as I make further progress on this and other ships.

The first goal is to create a completed hull as the prototype and template for this ship. Then, work out its role, build the systems, and a full interior -- finishing off by fleshing out some lore and sharing the completed project!

Ideally, I'd like to post it to the workshop when I'm finished, but I've never published anything on PC, let alone from console. That'll be a problem for future me to solve. In the meantime, I'll periodically share some screenshots here and see what everyone thinks!

Feedback and advice is appreciated as well. At the moment it's more or less cosmetic work, so greebling tips and tricks for Large Grid would be amazing. Also, any possible flaws that more seasoned players may spot creeping up on me that I might not be expecting. (I'm already preparing for this thing to be too heavy to lift off the planet. XD)

In any case, thanks for stopping by to take a look and have a read! Expect the next post to be the nearly finished hull~