Small Ship Tips and Tricks

[Gr8 Maniac]

Anybody have tips for building small fighters and such?
I have no problem building large ships but whenever I try to make a fighter to complement my fleets it goes horribly wrong. I have tried mimicking other designs, looking at reference art, etc. But I just can't make the design look smooth and polished like a large grid.

SOS

PS I am not trying to build PvP-worthy ships. Just trying to build some nice looking model ships (more or less).

[nyannokonekko]

I think its less about mimicking other peoples work and more about creating your own designs that work with the way in which you place blocks 🤔
Or atleast thats how it is with me

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

From a practical point of view, don't bother with fighters. Large grid gatlings will shred them. Stick to mining, construction and light transport with small grids.

[VelxraTV]

I enjoy building small ships and small fighters. But I use to solely build them for hydro because ion is simply too slow to be practical in combat. Now I only build small transport craft to meet the new meta of the hydro in SE. If you are going to build a small fighter then make it super simple where it is crazy light and only requires a handful of small thrusters to move. Before the release update I could build a hydro fighter which could take on larger corvettes or frigates without much trouble in the right hands. Now however the release update nerfed the small large hydro thruster, nerfed the hydro production from o2/h2 gens, and nerfed storage space for ice. Before a small hydro fighter just needed a few generators for both fuel, ice storage, with a few thruster. That is no longer the case and has been changed. So now you "have" to use more gens, hydro tanks, more thrusters, more power, and at minimum medium cargo containers for ice storage. These blocks are just too massive to make compact craft. So useful and compact combat fighters are dead.

In conclusion, Keen killed the small "useful" and "sleek" hydro fighter from the release update. Slap three o2/h2 gens on a small craft and lightly build around it. That is the best advice I can give you now. Small fighters are dead and if you want a fighter you need to either design big or create large interceptors out of small grid to fit enough blocks for the new hydro system meta.

[Gr8 Maniac]

Originally posted by VestedGamr:

From a practical point of view, .

Originally posted by Geronimo:

I enjoy building small ships and small fighters.

Thanks for the answers! However, I left out an important piece of information from my original post... as of now I am not invested in PvP at all. Haven't gotten around to playing on servers (yet) so I spend most of my time just designing cool ships for my own collection of basically models.

But, I will definitely look back at these answers when I start doing PvP builds.

Originally posted by nyannokonekko:

I think its less about mimicking other peoples work and more about creating your own designs that work with the way in which you place blocks 🤔
Or atleast thats how it is with me

Tried that one but it is even worse 🤔 I tend to build by getting inspiration for a very general layout of a ship then doing my own thing to the rest of it. Very rarely do my ships look anything like the picture I took inspiration from. It just makes it easier to get started.

[NineSevenFive]

Originally posted by VestedGamr:

From a practical point of view, don't bother with fighters. Large grid gatlings will shred them. Stick to mining, construction and light transport with small grids.

I’ve managed to successfully destroy large grid ships (Specifically stuff used by SPRTs) with my small ship fighters

[Jack Schitt]

I've had this same thing myself previously. How I managed to start being able to build smaller ships is I start with small grid blocks intending to make a small grid version copy of one of my large ships. It always ends up being a completely different ship. Try copying one of your large grid ships with small grid blocks.

[Burstar]

IMO the thing that wrecks small grid fighter design is the monster Hydrogen tanks. They're 5x5x5 vs. LG 3x3x3 and don't even hold very much. I would use a mod that contains smaller tanks.

Also, Small grids are proportionally heavier because 1 steel plate is the minimum for all armour shapes. Makes them less efficient requiring more fuel/thrust/power which makes them bulkier.