Question - Ship Components

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Question - Ship Components - 2/4/2011 6:24:27 PM

cmdrnarrain

Posts: 89
Joined: 4/21/2010
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Question - Ship Components

When designing a ship what are typically the ship components you change? I do not edit private sector ships or bases unless they are defense or research bases and those I optimize. I add extra fuel storage to explores, construstors, and colony ships as standard but do not change anything else except to mass upgrade as new tech is available. Beyond the above I only edit Warships which I tend to completely rebuild as follows,

Add more fuel storage
Change weapons - add more and make ship single purpose e.g. all missiles or fighters, etc.
Add more shields
Reduce Armor
Add targeting computers
Add ecm

The rest I only rarely change. What do you edit on ships?

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"Good, evil... I'm the guy with the World Destroyer"

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/4/2011 6:55:28 PM

Data

Posts: 3909
Joined: 1/3/2011
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first thing, reactors...making sure they have enough energy to use the hyperdrive properly
secondly, collectors - to make sure they conserve fuel when idle
the rest depends on the context but these two are always priorities for me

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...Igniting stellar cores....Recharging reactors...Recalibrating hyperdrives....

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/4/2011 10:02:42 PM

Setekh

Posts: 178
Joined: 12/12/2010
From: Norfolk, England
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Reactors for sure, it's annoying seeing a ship travel at one third it's potential speed because the AI cheaped out on power.

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/4/2011 10:22:36 PM

cmdrnarrain

Posts: 89
Joined: 4/21/2010
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Can you give an example? I'm not aware of ever seeing that problem before.

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"Good, evil... I'm the guy with the World Destroyer"

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/4/2011 11:48:28 PM

Noble713

Posts: 53
Joined: 1/11/2011
From: Japan (US expat)
Status: offline

Fuel-sipping reactors running off hydrogen only and the fastest jump drive are my 1st edits. I'm also very proactive in upgrading the designs of my civilian ships. Your economy will be more efficient with faster freighters, and with potentially hundreds of them flying around, trimming the designs to reduce maintenance costs probably pays off as well.

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/5/2011 12:29:56 AM

Sabin Stargem

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Joined: 12/29/2010
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Noble, do you think that using freighters that has a combo-drive be cost-effective in the long run? If a ship has a fast hyperdrive, and another with a low startup time, it would use their best properties. My thought is that by giving freighters a Kaldon drive, they would be able to go into warp quicker. This theoretically would make them survive more hostile encounters, but also would speed up the economy by a small bit. Some drives can take 10 seconds to start up, while the Kaldon does so in 3.

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RE: Question - Ship Components - 2/6/2011 2:01:49 AM

Noble713

Posts: 53
Joined: 1/11/2011
From: Japan (US expat)
Status: offline

I didn't realize capabilities stacked liked that, so I haven't tried it.
....
In my current Star Trek game as the Dominion I only have Gerax and Velocity Drives, so the #'s may be a bit off for other situations. Adding a second Velocity Drive increases the maintenance cost of a small freighter by ~10%. Assuming ship speeds are in units/sec, in order for this to be worthwhile the reduced jump delay would have to decrease the average interstellar flight time by >10%.

Or

0.9 * (old jump delay + (avg flight distance / drive speed)) => new jump delay + (avg flight distance / drive speed)

cmdrnarrain: Here's an example of an obsolete frigate design, either a pirate ship that joined or an adrift vessel, with the jump drive throttled: