Ship models?

[kekenaldo]

I'm doing my first real run and enjoying the game, probably doing lots of mistake but that's how i like to learn, howether i've a real problem with ships design.

I'm going to be honnest, i don't understand anything in ship design and it's the kind of stuff i find annoying. I don't enjoy it and to this point i have no patience left for it. The ships i created were extremly weak while i invest a lot in projects for ship materials/weapons. The worst part is that it turned out they didn't have the acceleration capacity to leave the high orbit of earth to join low orbit, when i was sure i put enough in it to travel in space.

It's an aspect of the game i don't enjoy at all, and it's ruining my game since we're now in 2035 and my best ship has 21 of strenght and can't leave its station. Now the xenos want to land and i can't even try to stop them because my weakass ships can't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ leave the station... Autoconception also doesn't seems to work.

Is there somewhere a list already done of efficient models of ships i could just copy? Maybe even better import directly in game?

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by kekenaldo:

The worst part is that it turned out they didn't have the acceleration capacity to leave the high orbit of earth to join low orbit, when i was sure i put enough in it to travel in space.

In the ship designer, there's a button that brings you to the Transfer Planner so you can see what that ship design will do when trying to transfer. Select a start and end location and it'll tell you whether it's possible to make the transfer, and how long it will take to do so, within the ship designer itself.

[Patrus]

I don't know of any collection of ship designs to import.

Designing seems complicated, but it really isn't that bad if you get hang of it.

For propulsion - two most important indicators are "cruise delta-v" and acceleration (cruise acceleration and battle acceleration).

In simplified terms:

Acceleration determines basically how "fast" the ship is on short distances. Higher acceleration means that the ship is more maneuverable in battle and can easier intercept enemy ships if the try to flee (although dv is also important here). If you want to land on planets, every one of them also has a minimum acceleration needed for a ship to take off.
Acceleration depends on the engines. You can increase it by using engines with better acceleration or by adding more of them. It decreases when you add more weight to the ship.

Delta-V determines how "far" the ship can go. You can think of it as the maximum amount of fuel. If you have more delta-v, a ship can travel to further planets without refuelling.
You can increase delta-v by using better engines (with better dv properties) or by adding more fuel tanks. It also decreases with weight.
Keep in mind, that when you add more fuel tanks, it also increases ship weight, so after some time you will get dimnished returns, when adding more tanks doesn't really increase dv.
If your ship cannot transfer between Earth orbits, it's probably because it doesn't have enough dv.

For armor, weapons, etc. - remember, that you can test your ship after designing it. If you save the game, go to main menu, "Shirmish" and when adding a ship, you pick "Import from save", you can then use your ship against some current alien designs. That way you can check, before building them, if your ships will be efficient in battle or completely useless. That feature saved me from many costly mistakes in the past.

[Pawleus]

Patrus alraedy said basically all that's important - I would only add that "better dv properties" of engines should actually be "better EV properties" (Exhaust Velocity) as it could be misleading.

[gimmethegepgun]

Also, it didn't mention Combat Thrust Multiplier, which makes it so that in combat (and also is what's used to consider whether it can take off of a planetary surface) the ship has much higher thrust, and at the moment this extra thrust is completely free thanks to Space Magic and so your reactor and radiators are much smaller than they ought to be for such a level of thrust, and/or your EV is much better than it should be with that size reactor.