Small Fighter space ships - Light or Heavy armor? (Or both?)

[v2kea504]

I'm pretty new to the game. I'm playing the "Lone Survivor" custom map on survival. I've made a mining ship that works - meaning I can fly it to an asteroid and mine it and return. I still have to attach a Connector so I can dump all the ore directly into the refinery. But I'll worry about that later.

I want to build a small fighter ship. It'll be propelled by a combo of large hydrogen thruster on the rear, and small Ion engines for everything else. I have a large reactor providing power, plus I have yet to attach a large hydrogen tank.I have 2x Missle Launchers and 4x Gattling guns. The guns are feed ammo via conveyor from the fighter cockpit.

Should I use light armor blocks or heavy armor blocks for the structure/frame? I'm concerned about weigh and menuverability in the ship. I'd like to kill some space pirates for fun. I haven't tried to fly it yet - still trying to make it look pretty.

My miner ship is all ion engines and it's super sluggish to accelerate/decelerate with 4x ion engines (each direction) to propel it. (Uses a small reactor - which might be my problem.)

[Scheneighnay]

What do you actually plan to do with it role-wise?

Small light armor blocks are about as durable as paper mache, but if you aren't going to put it into a position to get hit to begin with, it doesn't matter.

[v2kea504]

Originally posted by Scheneighnay:

What do you actually plan to do with it role-wise?

Fly around shooting at pirates. These are NPC (AI) pirates, and they shoot back! I know this because I wandered too close to them yesterday while scouting asteroids looking for ores. Within about 6km they "noticed" me, and flew over to shoot me.

I kept loading in my game save and managed to make it back to my base but the pirate never reset his position when I respawned and kept killing me (over and over again.) I had to restart the game completely fresh, having learned a lesson.

[baddoggs]

Why not just try them for yourself? Like everybody else?
Personally i prefer a "medium" CL type that suits my fighting style. But,
What works for me may not work for you.
If you don't want to build you can allways download a blueprint from the workshop..


Those that arn't locked by the dev's behind paywalls anyway*....

[zachareeh]

I would say definitely go with light armor for small grids, for a few reasons.

1. Maneuverability -- Light armor is (obviously) a lot lighter which will make your thrusters and gyros feel more responsive, which is essential for a good fighter. Unless you manage to come up with an exceptionally good design, small grids will almost never be able to handle sustained fire. Your best bet for survivability is evasion. I define this as, "how close can I get and still dodge incoming fire." Closer range means your own turrets (or your own skill, if using fixed guns) will have an easier time scoring hits.

2. Ease of repair -- Light armor only requires 1 steel plate on small grids. This means that unless the block is destroyed completely all it takes is a welder to repair damage. In addition to being more tedious to repair, you'll be doing more repairs if you're too heavy to effectively evade fire (see above.)

3. Cost effectiveness -- Light armor is cheaper. Don't forget that the goal of a fighter is to defend your more valuable assets. It's better to lose a small fighter (or a few) than it is to lose/damage your station/ship.

One more tip for fighters -- Forward thrust isn't as important is you would intuitively think, especially since it sounds like you're using fixed guns. In order to perform evasive maneuvers you would need to cease firing and turn away from your target, it's hard to evade fire when you can't see it. Since every thruster you add has weight and will reduce the effectiveness of the opposite thrusters, I prefer to place most of my thrusters in the (Up) direction. This way I can evade with spacebar and roll while keeping my target in view. This has the added benefit of increasing payload capacity on planets, if applicable. My "fighter" doubles as a small cargo launch, the thrust needed to pick 30 tons of ore off the surface of earth-like makes it very maneuverable as a space fighter.

[v2kea504]

Thank you zackareeh. That's info I was looking for.

Question - I have fixed guns (and missles.) How do I add turrets? or more basic, CAN you add turrets to small ships? Do they auto-fire at enemy ships?

[Demented]

Haven't played recently, but there was (and probably still is) a bug with small grid ships.
If a machine is adjacent to an armor block and that armor block is damaged by something strong (e.g. a 20mm gatling gun), it destroys the machine too. The irony is that this makes small grid armor more dangerous than having a bare ship, since a single stray bullet can destroy a thruster that might otherwise shrug off five or ten bullets.

If you can separate it from critical machinery, I would recommend heavy armor. It's compact and can resist stray hits. Small grid light armor is only viable against assault rifles and interior turrets, or in walls that are at least two or three blocks thick.


There are small grid versions of the gatling turret and rocket turret and they work the same as the large grid versions.

[Scheneighnay]

Originally posted by Demented:

Haven't played recently, but there was (and probably still is) a bug with small grid ships.
If a machine is adjacent to an armor block and that armor block is damaged by something strong (e.g. a 20mm gatling gun), it destroys the machine too. The irony is that this makes small grid armor more dangerous than having a bare ship, since a single stray bullet can destroy a thruster that might otherwise shrug off five or ten bullets.

If you can separate it from critical machinery, I would recommend heavy armor. It's compact and can resist stray hits. Small grid light armor is only viable against assault rifles and interior turrets, or in walls that are at least two or three blocks thick.


There are small grid versions of the gatling turret and rocket turret and they work the same as the large grid versions.

Don't all blocks distribute damage to their adjacent blocks?
With the exception of blast doors.

[Demented]

Originally posted by Scheneighnay:

Don't all blocks distribute damage to their adjacent blocks?
With the exception of blast doors.

I believe only deformable blocks (exclusively armor, at this point) do. However, small grid deformation is bugged and instantly destroys adjacent machinery instead of proportionately damaging it. Blast doors (and perhaps some others) are practically immune to deformation damage, so they are safe to use around armor.

The bug may occur in large grid as well, as I've seen whole refineries evaporate despite only modest damage nearby. However, this won't be caused by traditional weapons.

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by v2kea504:

Originally posted by Scheneighnay:

What do you actually plan to do with it role-wise?

Fly around shooting at pirates. These are NPC (AI) pirates, and they shoot back! I know this because I wandered too close to them yesterday while scouting asteroids looking for ores. Within about 6km they "noticed" me, and flew over to shoot me.

I kept loading in my game save and managed to make it back to my base but the pirate never reset his position when I respawned and kept killing me (over and over again.) I had to restart the game completely fresh, having learned a lesson.

In the future if you attract the attention of a pirate you can't defeat, bail out of your ship and jetpack away from anything valuable. As far as I know, the default NPC ships can really only *see* the player, and will ignore your ship as long as they have a clear run at you. You can lead the pirates away from your stuff. If you drag them far enough, they might even despawn when they finally do catch you. You can also fly behind mountains or asteroids, which might get the NPC stuck or even crash, since they can't "see" terrain until it's right in front of them.

If you have Modular Encounters and especially the Reavers or Corruption add-ons for it, all bets are off though. Some of the Corruption enemies and especially Reaver cruisers are attracted to both antennas and ships being in motion, and will *absolutely* destroy unarmed stations or mining ships if they detect them.

[EmberStar]

Edit: One of the reason that the Modular Encounters "Reavers" and "Corruption" enemies exist is that the default NPCs are... kind of easy to bamboozle. If you're patient (and have a few cannisters of extra hydrogen and oxygen and maybe a few power kits) you can actually "disarm" many of them simply by flying to within 500m or so and just doing loops for five minutes until all the turrets on that side run out of ammo. The gun turrets will try to lead a moving target, but they don't seem to understand anything but straight lines. As long as you're constantly changing speed and/or direction, they'll almost never hit you.

It's sort of ironic that the small Raider Drones are actually more of a threat than the bigger ships, because they basically cheat. The drones run on custom scripts that constantly feed them the GPS of their target (usually you) and they'll pursue you constantly until they run out of power or ammo or are shot down. They'll try to fire at the player any time they get "close enough" (about 300-ish meters) regardless of if they have a clear shot. If they sneak up behind you and you don't notice the HUD marker, it's entirely possible that you won't even know they're after you until they're drilling a hole through your station with bullets. (Or through your helmet. Either way is fine with them.)

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by Scheneighnay:

Don't all blocks distribute damage to their adjacent blocks?
With the exception of blast doors.

They do, but they also deform. The bug is that if the armor block deforms "enough," it instantly pops non-deforming blocks that are adjacent to them. A bullet hitting a 3x3x3 block of armor will just mangle the whole brick until the center one eventually breaks. The same bullet hitting a light armor block next to a thruster might evaporate the thruster even before the armor block takes enough damage to shatter.

It can happen with large grids too, but since it takes a lot more damage so it's not quite as obvious.

All that said, I've started using a tiny and basically disposable ion drone when I'm capturing NPC ships. It can still take a few more hits than the Engineer, and sometimes I can spot the interior turret and ram it with the drone even if the camera gets shot out. If nothing else the drone dies and I can watch where the bullets are coming from as the turrets tear it apart trying to get to the small batteries hidden at the back. And twice now the turrets have done enough damage to the blocks in whatever nook they're hidden in that they got crushed by the block deformation. (yay.)