Advice for designing and building ships

[RB98]

Good evening everyone,

I've played a lot of Space Engineers over the years I've owned it. I see all of these beautiful ships on the workshop but I can never seem to build anything that isn't a box. Additionally, I often have difficulty fitting everything I need into my ships. What are your tips for designing decent looking ships along with ensuring that I can fit all the necessary systems into it. I'm referring to both large ships and small ships.

I appreciate any help you can provide to me, I'm honestly quite envious of all of your amazing builds on the workshop.

[Lander1]

Miniaturise anything to do with timer blocks by placing a rotor with a small rotor head and building small ship timer blocks. Won't work with some Programmable Blocks as some scripts require being run on the main grid of the ship.

[RB98]

Thanks Lander! That'll help some! I'll also keep that in mind as I do some scripting and programming and am hoping to start creating some scripts for my ships.

[Lander1]

Use angled armour sections attached by rotors for your square hull to round it up a bit. Some of the best ships in the workshop have a square or rectangle box at their core.

For Example;
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1444566856

This ship uses the miniaturised timer block technique as well as the sloped armour technique to dress up what is essentially a heavy armour rectangle.

[RB98]

I'll download that and take a look here in a moment. My only concern with using so many rotors is how unstable and laggy it might make the ship. I've seen rotors rip ships to absolute shreds before. Especially in multiplayer.

[Dan2D3D]

Hi RB98,

I like to create in this game and like to reproduce the space ships I find on the net.

I usually search the NET when I want to Repro, to find images of the ship or station and open those imges in my second monitor and do my best in game next to it.

+

Sometimes I do a large "canvas", a large rectangle box where I will do the exterior shape of the ship first and complete gradually.

"Canvas" - Box like this :

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252753595

and lookiing at the images found helps me a lot for the proportions.

[RB98]

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

Sometimes I do a large "canvas", a large rectangle box where I will do the exterior shape of the ship first and complete gradually.

That's neat! I never thought of that! You use the box to lay out the basic dimensions of the craft correct? How did you define the basic dimensions? Additionally, how do you manage to take it from a box into a nice shape like that? Also, stellar work on that ship by the way. I'm extremely impressed.

[Lander1]

Learn what surfaces merge and what surfaces do not merge (1x2 tips will be airtight but won't merge allowing them to be connected and disconnected at will), and about clearances and tolerances of various blocks. This will help you add interest like airtight docking collars, Missile and torpedo tubes, emergency escape systems vehicles, detachable ship components, etc.

This ship splits in half, I'd suggest taking a look and reverse engineering the mechanism.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930736395

[RB98]

Thanks again! I'm going to start tearing these ships apart after I eat dinner. I'm especially interested in the airtight docking collars idea. Some friends and I play this quite often and having a standardized mechanism that we can use to dock will save on O2 and help with several other issues.

[Dan2D3D]

Originally posted by RB98:

That's neat! I never thought of that! You use the box to lay out the basic dimensions of the craft correct? How did you define the basic dimensions? Additionally, how do you manage to take it from a box into a nice shape like that? Also, stellar work on that ship by the way. I'm extremely impressed.

you said it with better words >> "basic dimensions of the craft correct"
Yes the basic exterior shape like if I would cute it in half, first drawing.

____

"How did you define the basic dimensions?"

With my eyes, I am good at this "the proportions/dimensions" = and realized that when verifying after the ship is completed, if I do the Math (1:5, 1:10 .. ) counting the blocks gives a 1% error on my creation.

Ships that would have 200 blocks long = 190 blocks completed when I create without counting so just with my eyes.

Some of my friends prefer to do the Math tho I don't need.

________

"Additionally, how do you manage to take it from a box into a nice shape like that?"

1 - I will do a first shape, the one we see if you cut the ship in half in center from side and front view.

2 - By trying different shapes till it matches the one I see in my second monitor.

That's it!

[RB98]

Thank you so much Dan! I think that'll help me out immensely! I never thought about cutting a ship in half and working at it from one side so you could see how it would look. I'm not great at the whole dimensions/proportions thing but that sounds like a lack of experience more than anything else. Thank you so much!

[Dan2D3D]

You're welcome!

I think the Box helps me to focus more on; its 3D shape, where the wings the front/back will go, etch ...

[RB98]

I'm going to give it a try tonight when my friends and I play. We've been wanting to build a carrier of some description. I think the basic design can be based off of another ship and we can modifiy it from there.

[Lander1]

This one also has a missile lab that might provide useful hints;

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1176290295

[RB98]

Downloading that one too! Thank you so much!

[Lander1]

some of those are old designs so might throw up script warnings/errors, but the technical design aspects should still be sound.