Railgun Ship Design

[TehJoker14780]

Has anyone managed to make a 8+ segment railgun ship design that is symmetrical and doesn't look like a ♥♥♥♥ or waste a ton of resources? Starting to thing it's impossible.

[TehJoker14780]

That doesn't look phallic*

[This PC]

If you want a railgun ship to be efficient both on resource usage and damage, it needs to be long and thin, I don't see them as looking phallic tho, they look kinda like 9mm bullets that haven't been fired.

edit: this my own design, maybe you will like it ? https://puu.sh/JL02H/4bfd82fd18.jpg

[TehJoker14780]

Here's what I ended up with https://imgur.com/a/4cA3ikt no defenses since the plan is to have it stay out of range of enemy ships/only attack stations and bases.

[TehJoker14780]

And it looks like a big ol penis

[This PC]

You probably need more crew, and crew can't traverse the railgun, so you need to make walkways in both directions on both sides of the rail, unless you have mods that change that. Besides that, my genitalia doesn't look like that, thankfully, but yeah, you'll cry a lot of salty tears when a single stray HE missile hits your railgun and it costs you 120 tri steel to repair so you should probably build armor. Holding sulfur and having an ammo factory is less dangerous and more efficient than holding ammo too.

[Limdood]

railguns are hella expensive....you can't make a railgun ship that doesn't cost a ton of resources just cuz you can't make railguns that don't cost a ton of resources.

As jdtuggey said, you need to protect the ship.
1) missiles compete with railguns for range
2) enemy ships that are part of missions will start moving towards you from pretty far out....ie. once their radar detects you, not just visual.
3) enemy ships will PROBABLY be able to move forwards faster than you can reverse without a TON of reverse thrusters, which is expensive and crew intensive.

All this means that unless you can be 100% SURE you can kill every enemy and enemy group in your opening salvo, before they close distance or fire back, you're going to take hits, possibly significant hits.

- Use thick armor to protect the front of the ship, use the wedge+structure blocks to narrow the opening in front of the railgun launcher.
- use at least a small shield to cover the opening that your launcher shoots out of so that one stray shot doesn't destroy the whole railgun (any destroyed railgun part blows up the WHOLE gun)
- make sure you only use railguns in pairs, with reactor access on both sides of each pair (so you can do reactor/rail/rail/reactor/rail/rail/reactor if you want) so that crew can quickly re-power the railgun each shot. trying to put 3 railguns adjacent means the middle one is useless, since crew can't cross the other guns to power it......railguns are quite crew intensive since you need available crew running batteries.
- use "fanning" to keep the narrow opening leading to your railguns out of line with the enemy ships for the majority of the time (fanning is manually setting the railgun to shoot a target, then using the "rotate" button to waggle the ship nose back and forth so that the railgun firing line crosses the target often (otherwise the ship will try to slowly bring the firing line to bear without "overshooting" which wastes an absurd amount of time between shots).
- side to side thrusters are important so that you can rotate your ship to bear on the targets you want quickly - the side to side thrusters should be at the front and rear of the ship (to rotate) and not the middle (which would be for strafing). Since railgun ships are alpha strike ships, forward thrusters aren't that important. Reverse thrusters CAN keep you away from the enemy, but the size that railgun ships need to be, and the significant power, crew, and resource investments make having ENOUGH reverse thrusters prohibitive. They also fail spectacularly vs. EMP missiles or if you are reversing through tight quarters like an asteroid field.

[The Haney]

The only thing I'd add to the above excellent advice is to seriously consider secondary weapons to cover your flanks, such as well-protected missiles.

There are several enemy ship designs starting at about lvl 5-6ish that will bumrush you and stick against your ship, shelling at point-blank range. If your railguns don't kill them before they reach you it's not likely you'll be able to get a second shot off, so a secondary weapon system that doesn't rely on your entire ship turning to face the target will be critical.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Limdood:

- use "fanning" to keep the narrow opening leading to your railguns out of line with the enemy ships for the majority of the time (fanning is manually setting the railgun to shoot a target, then using the "rotate" button to waggle the ship nose back and forth so that the railgun firing line crosses the target often (otherwise the ship will try to slowly bring the firing line to bear without "overshooting" which wastes an absurd amount of time between shots).

This is essential to properly using railguns, they go from expensive weapons that are hard to maintain to very efficient weapons that really quickly take out juicy bits in enemy ships doing this. Fanning is super hard to explain properly in a steam thread though, so I'd really recommend watching a video on it. An even more complex topic that will really elevate your play is how to properly place ion prisms in a ion core. Really suggest you look into both of these.

And yeah, don't underestimate armor, it's your best way to mitigate damage. ;p

Originally posted by The Haney:

The only thing I'd add to the above excellent advice is to seriously consider secondary weapons to cover your flanks, such as well-protected missiles.

There are several enemy ship designs starting at about lvl 5-6ish that will bumrush you and stick against your ship, shelling at point-blank range. If your railguns don't kill them before they reach you it's not likely you'll be able to get a second shot off, so a secondary weapon system that doesn't rely on your entire ship turning to face the target will be critical.

Yeah, these ships are also a legitimate concern. I've addressed this with fast PD ship escort myself. Flak will take out laser blaster shots and missiles, laser PD will take out cannon shots and missiles, afaik, nevermind that I use this to bumrush and physically control these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ myself. You can do the same bumrush strategy by huuh.. holding the right click when you choose to attack until you can adjust the vector, then make sure the "shadow" of your ship is within the structure of the other ship. If you angle the vector a bit, you'll send the enemy ship into an immobile spin.

Nevermind that ships with a lot of point defense can eat enemy ships surprisingly fast lol. It's really satisfying to watch, they "peel" enemy ships like onions.

demonstration: https://puu.sh/JKWa5/3a7b071341.gif
Armor weaving is also a legitimate thing you want, I've since updated this design by weaving the armor, but you can see it on my railgun build up there.

[Aldehydra]

If it looks phallic, you just need more and longer railguns. Eventually it'll look more like a skyscraper. It's going to be very expensive, but useful railgun ships always are. By the time you can afford one, you should have other ships that can keep enemies busy, so defense isn't really a concern.

[Definition Rules]

Not the best but here is mine. It certainly does not have 8+ accelerators but when you see it you'll understand that you can make it longer as you wish by just copying some parts.
https://imgur.com/bvGbJHP

[dude]

I was going to upload it to workshop but kept forgetting to do so. This is the one I used early game. Simple cheap flying railgun.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002389016

[Aldehydra]

Not the best screenshot, but it shows the general idea of a late game railgun artillery ship (148 crew). It's decently durable from the front, but won't survive a sustained bombardment (fortunately, most enemies die before that's a problem).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002671841

[ha_ur_dead]

These are my Rail Gun Destroyers. Gun Length 13 + 2 for the loader and firing piece.

The Type 98 light Destroyer and the Type 99 Heavy Destroyer.
Speed 30-32 m/s


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004514139
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004513993

[This PC]

Originally posted by ha_ur_dead:

These are my Rail Gun Destroyers. Gun Length 13 + 2 for the loader and firing piece.

The Type 98 light Destroyer and the Type 99 Heavy Destroyer.
Speed 30-32 m/s


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004514139
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004513993

With all due respect, something I learned after I designed mine, 13 segments is wasteful, nevermind the fact that you get diminishing returns from additional segments, you stop getting range benefits after 8 segments (range caps at 600m/8 segments), and having too much damage in a single shot is wasteful. The only real benefit you get from more than 8 segments is penetration power. If you're dealing 45000 damage to a part that has 10,000, you've just wasted 35,000. At 8 segments, you're one shotting pretty much everything.

You're better making 6 railguns with 8 segments and fan than making 2 railguns with 24 segments or 4 with 16 segments.

30m/s is not enough thrust too, incredibly frustrating when 4 out of 5 ships will outrun you.

[ha_ur_dead]

Originally posted by jdtuggey:

Originally posted by ha_ur_dead:

These are my Rail Gun Destroyers. Gun Length 13 + 2 for the loader and firing piece.

The Type 98 light Destroyer and the Type 99 Heavy Destroyer.
Speed 30-32 m/s


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004514139
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3004513993

With all due respect, something I learned after I designed mine, 13 segments is wasteful, nevermind the fact that you get diminishing returns from additional segments, you stop getting range benefits after 8 segments (range caps at 600m/8 segments), and having too much damage in a single shot is wasteful. The only real benefit you get from more than 8 segments is penetration power. If you're dealing 45000 damage to a part that has 10,000, you've just wasted 35,000. At 8 segments, you're one shotting pretty much everything.

You're better making 6 railguns with 8 segments and fan than making 2 railguns with 24 segments or 4 with 16 segments.

30m/s is not enough thrust too, incredibly frustrating when 4 out of 5 ships will outrun you.

I built them before I learned of the length drawbacks and don’t care, I think it looks better.

As for speed. It’s fine. I got faster ships that I use. The versions that lack the rail guns go 50-60 m/s. 30m/s is the slowest combat ship speed I will build to.