Good weapons for small ships?

[TheLunaticist]

So i learned how to build working ship hulls, but after placing the interior i noticed that i have absolutetley no clue on which weapons to use and where to place them.
Does anyone have a idea with which weapon i should start/which weapons i should and should not use for small ships (around 7 blocks wide)?

Also: Is it ok that i ask for help per discussion or is there anywhere where i'm supposed to ask these in?

[xchrisx88]

there is no specific thread to go,
if its just a small / narrow ship you gotta watch out for the recoil of the gun, if you make a minigun, you may end up rolling your ship on the belly / lifting your ship up so high that your gun needs to stop firing cause it cant elevate down anymore to compensate

try using missiles or something like a 150 - 250mm cannon

[nyannokonekko]

A small gun I like to use is a 179mm(I think it still works with 200mm) single barreled turret.
-8 1M Autoloaders
-add 4 inputs directly to the "Advanced Firing Piece"
-2 Gauge increasers for 179mm
-like 12 coolers to make it fire every 1.3s
-Shell: Shaped Charge(Change the slider for maximum penetration), Frag, Inertial, 2 gunpowder casings
-barrel length 12m

Is something I use on my small craft,
Likewise you can also change how many loaders you have and how many coolers you have to fit the size of the craft at the cost of fire rate..

[nyannokonekko]

Also, 1-2 small missiles at 4 blocks long are also very small, cheap, and do a bit of surface damage, which I also use on my small craft..

[gazzmilsom]

APS typically takes up a lot of space. Compact and worth having can take some time to get right. On a 7m wide hull you have very little space. So you can only really carry one APS that penetrates the deck (ie from the bottom of the boat not just tagged on the top).

Missiles are a good idea BUT since the update reloading them on a small hull is a challenge. You have little room to store large ammo reserves and cannot run huge numbers of processors.

The best thing to do is define what you want your ship to do. Is it designed to kill other ships? Yes, then a main armament of big anti ship missiles, with an APS providing some AAA might work. As your boat is small spend the hull space on the main mission or you end up with something that is bad at everything.

Decide what you want it to do. Then add a weapon that does that. Then add other weapons if you can

[Underscorecow]

Missiles, small ships need to be long range and accurate to outlast their cost.

[17thGuardian]

The advanced customizable cannons (given the tab name "Advanced Cannons" in the build menu) are excellent for smaller vehicles, along with small missile batteries.
In my experience CRAMs are a poorer choice for small vehicles because their damage, round velocity, and recoil all scale almost exclusively with caliber (only big, high-recoil guns work well), and lasers/particle cannons require either very bulky or very fuel-hungry engines to operate, making them a poor early game choice.

In terms of placement, advanced cannons should be placed in turrets near the front and back of the ship, as they require long barrels to ensure high accuracy and round velocity, so they will need lots of open space (either over the sides of the ship or over the deck itself). If you put them in the center of the ship you will end up with a lot of unusable deck space.
Missile launchers are much shorter, as they only need to be as long as the missiles they launch. This means they can be placed on turrets closer to the center of your ship. If you use a 'one turn' part on your missiles, you can even use vertical missiles silos and circumvent turrets entirely.

last note, make sure to armor advanced cannons. Their magazines in particular are somewhat frail and can explode violently if you load them with frag or explosive rounds.

[Admiral Obvious]

I, myself usually go with small missiles and an above average ammo supply for small drone-like ships.

Advanced cannons got buffed to be much more viable at smaller sizes though, so you don't need to build as huge.


Simple Weapon autocannons are pretty good too if you put them on a 2 axis turret, especially for their price.