Is there a way to streamline arming ships?

[Joseph Sneed]

I am at the point in the game where I have a small fleet of a few ships other than my flagship and am able to gather resources fairly quickly to build new ships but having to find and mount the turrets and subsystems every time is a bit of a pain. Is there some way to streamline this process to help build a proper uniform fleet?

[Cy]

not without "cheating".

the only easy way would allow you to basicly copy and paste.

activate devmode by typing "/devmode" in chat. than restart game and press f4 to open the devmode console. With it you can copy selected ships. Copying will not cost you anything. This is entirely a cheat.

for regular gameplay there is no auto arming option. Building turrets from a turret factory is probably a step in the direction of making it easier. But then you need money to build the turrets themselves and buy required goods for said turrets.

What sounds tedious at 1st is however also an aspect of the game that makes it interesting.
You can produce all required goods for turret crafting with factories. So in other words there is a lot to do in this game if you want to.

Personally I use a mod that allows to loop sector commands so I don't need to maintain my miners anymore at all. But that is probably off topic for your question.

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by Cy:

not without "cheating".

the only easy way would allow you to basicly copy and paste.

activate devmode by typing "/devmode" in chat. than restart game and press f4 to open the devmode console. With it you can copy selected ships. Copying will not cost you anything. This is entirely a cheat.

for regular gameplay there is no auto arming option. Building turrets from a turret factory is probably a step in the direction of making it easier. But then you need money to build the turrets themselves and buy required goods for said turrets.

What sounds tedious at 1st is however also an aspect of the game that makes it interesting.
You can produce all required goods for turret crafting with factories. So in other words there is a lot to do in this game if you want to.

Personally I use a mod that allows to loop sector commands so I don't need to maintain my miners anymore at all. But that is probably off topic for your question.

I am open to a mod that might help. I have Custom Turrets V to allow me to buy turrets with cash and produce uniform turrets it is just an issue of having to repeatedly arm the ships. The thing is I am at the point in the game where I only have like 4 ships. (my flagship, a miner, a trader, an escort/general use) so I am at the point I want to start scaling a bit and get some trading and production automated but I am not at the point I can automate a full turret production line. I am nowhere near being able to afford my first station as I dont think I have yet to go over like 2m credits.

[D3matt]

This is probably my main complaint about the game... Being able to build a ship with turrets already attached would be great. Barring that, showing all the turret bases in the ship screen or at least making turrets auto-center on turret bases (and highlighting them when you have a turret selected) would reduce the tedium. I hate trying to align a turret on a turret base and struggling to see it through both the ghost of the custom turret and the ghost of the turret itself is horrible, especially if the lighting is bad.

[Tachyon_100]

You can pretty much do that in the editor already, you can set the filter to only show turret bases and set the snap to "middle", it's a bit wonky if you use angled turret bases tho.

[Scrounger]

I just got done scanning mods that clean up the UI. And the only thing I discovered is that the modding scene for this game is as sloppy as the UI is.

The entire set of current mods needs to be wiped. Or rather, at least dated. Like, make a new section, with new and more modern, and more accurate descriptions of all the categories. Leave the mods there, as they are. But let the old trash that never got updated sink to the bottom. Modding is really all this game has in 2025. And it is a bloody mess.

Game's got thousands upon thousands of mods. 99.9% of them are garbage. I just took down all my old ships. None of them could fly the way they were built to fly. So they are/were useless.

So, so, so many mods like this. And when you search the mods too many of the mods that should have sunk to the bottom float to the top.

[shogunsmurf]

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

I am at the point in the game where I have a small fleet of a few ships other than my flagship and am able to gather resources fairly quickly to build new ships but having to find and mount the turrets and subsystems every time is a bit of a pain. Is there some way to streamline this process to help build a proper uniform fleet?

You can order a ship to buy the products needed to produce the turrets with a purchase mission, that will at least cut back on you halfing to fly around visiting several types of mines and factories to get all the parts needed.

[rickcarson]

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

The thing is I am at the point in the game where I only have like 4 ships. (my flagship, a miner, a trader, an escort/general use)

One of the reasons you're struggling is because you should add an explorer to that list.

Explorer increases effectiveness of both mining and trade operations (if you explore the region _before_ beginning the other map operation).

I wouldn't have leapt so quickly into making a trader - are you getting at least 1 mil profit per leg of their trade route? If not, something's wrong. Possible causes might include the trader being under-capitalised (e.g. if there's lucrative legs you have to pass up), your ship being too small (more than 3 legs is pretty much guaranteed to fail in vanilla) (solution: beef up the cargo space, which might require unlocking some more material tiers).

Or you just might not have explored enough. If there's a lot of green dots in your local area then of course the trader is going to be inefficient.

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For your miner are you r-mining yet? If you're in the _very_ early game then from about tech 11 onwards you should be able to buy a couple of titanium r-mining lasers with 90% efficiency, and shoving them on the miner will (probably) significantly increase yields.

Other ways to increase yields:
Explore the area in advance
Mine outside of faction territory (ie 'no mans land')
Use a better mining subsystem
Use high or higher efficiency r-mining lasers*
Make sure you have enough cargo space - 'cargo efficiency' should be in the high 80s _minimum_.

IIRC a good mid-game mining ship should be throwing off about 260k units of ore per hour. In the very early game this might be anything north of 120k per hour is 'okay for bootstrapping'.

So the mining ship alone should be generating you about 1 million credits profit per hour (if you sold the ore).

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One of the reasons it's hard to outfit a fleet uniformly is that different roles benefit from different weapon types. E.g. when I'm fighting I like to have long range weapons. But for ships on missions (trade/mining) the range isn't relevant, only DPS.

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by rickcarson:

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

The thing is I am at the point in the game where I only have like 4 ships. (my flagship, a miner, a trader, an escort/general use)

One of the reasons you're struggling is because you should add an explorer to that list.

Explorer increases effectiveness of both mining and trade operations (if you explore the region _before_ beginning the other map operation).

I wouldn't have leapt so quickly into making a trader - are you getting at least 1 mil profit per leg of their trade route? If not, something's wrong. Possible causes might include the trader being under-capitalised (e.g. if there's lucrative legs you have to pass up), your ship being too small (more than 3 legs is pretty much guaranteed to fail in vanilla) (solution: beef up the cargo space, which might require unlocking some more material tiers).

Or you just might not have explored enough. If there's a lot of green dots in your local area then of course the trader is going to be inefficient.

-------

For your miner are you r-mining yet? If you're in the _very_ early game then from about tech 11 onwards you should be able to buy a couple of titanium r-mining lasers with 90% efficiency, and shoving them on the miner will (probably) significantly increase yields.

Other ways to increase yields:
Explore the area in advance
Mine outside of faction territory (ie 'no mans land')
Use a better mining subsystem
Use high or higher efficiency r-mining lasers*
Make sure you have enough cargo space - 'cargo efficiency' should be in the high 80s _minimum_.

IIRC a good mid-game mining ship should be throwing off about 260k units of ore per hour. In the very early game this might be anything north of 120k per hour is 'okay for bootstrapping'.

So the mining ship alone should be generating you about 1 million credits profit per hour (if you sold the ore).

-------

One of the reasons it's hard to outfit a fleet uniformly is that different roles benefit from different weapon types. E.g. when I'm fighting I like to have long range weapons. But for ships on missions (trade/mining) the range isn't relevant, only DPS.

Because of a mod I am using I cant really use the scout function as I have a mod that gives me the price listings in a given system but ONLY if I have a ship go to the system directly (have posted once or twice asking around if someone can pick up the mod and fix this as others have said the mod isnt even working for them) and honestly having the price listings on the galaxy map helps a lot in setting up trade routes. My trade using the base game function would get about 1.5-2m every run but I set up the trade routes mod so I dont have to constantly reset it and doing it directly I would guess it makes about double now. I just got my second trader that I have to set up.

My miners are doing all of that I currently have 2 one I run in the T3 zone to pick up the first 3 materials and one in T4 I have exclusively picking up that materiel. One problem I am having with them though is the high ambush risk forcing me to send them on safe runs despite having decent guns.

I currently have 4 patrol ships (cheap disposable 5 turret gunships with somewhat light armor and shields but good enough to protect my home sector and act as escorts) a scout ship (cheap long range jumper that tends to get smashed when it finds a pirate sector) A frigate, dedicated boarding ship my flagship and currently 5 stations (repair dock, shipyard, equipment dock, research station and refinery station. Yes I know these are not the most profitable but I have a mod that makes them a little more valuable and I wanted someplace that I could do everything at once. I plan on having my next station be a production facility as I can wait on the turret and fighter factories as I use those much less)

[thestile]

I usually spend time on one ship (maybe two) for creative outfitting and I'm pretty sloppy and lazy on the other ships. Hehe

A lot of my ships are built to just run away if a fight is too intense.