How do you remove weapons from a ship design?

[Kzentar]

I don't want my ext range to have weapons to save cost.

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

You can't completely remove them. The light gauss cannon is the cheapest weapon. I use it for all my designs that I just want to be functionally unarmed.

That being said - you're probably falling into a trap. View your ER scouts as warships that will engage and hopefully shoot down enemy scouts. The battle over intel is critical in sots.

[Kzentar]

I see. I just ran into a battle actually, with a derelict ship, big station.

I avoided its big lasers, shot at it forever, don't know if it did anything. How do you know what damages you did or took? I can't access my ship status or the enemy, there's no info, I don't know if my ship is damaged.

[Kzentar]

Thanks for the info, actually the guns were useful in the end.

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

Originally posted by Kzentar:

How do you know what damages you did or took? I can't access my ship status or the enemy, there's no info, I don't know if my ship is damaged.

During a battle -
For both friendly and enemy ships, the game wants you to rely on visual ques. Sparks, turrets flying off, stuff blowing up, etc. For friendly ships, you can also get a very rough approximation by using the sensor view an noticing what color the cross by your ship's name is. Green for fine, yellow for somewhat damaged, red for heavy damage, and missing the crossbar of the cross means it has launched any launchable craft (like assault shuttles).

In the strategic map after a battle -
In the turn news, there will be a message saying something like "Battle at Aurelia" or something like that. Double click it and you can see some info on how friendly and enemy ships performed. Once you have repair ships, the repair screen will let you see exactly how many HP each of your ships has.

You probably won't be taking out an alien derelict with a single ER. You preferably want to shoot the guns off of those with accurate weapons.

Bonus tip -
In the strategic map there is a very useful event notification display that is hidden by default. Press the U key to toggle it on. It's much better than the dumb ticker that scrolls on the bottom of the screen. Especially once your game gets big and there's tons of notifications to sift through.

[Kzentar]

Thanks for the help, that was useful.