Specialized ships or one giant omni-ship?

[GC13]

I'm quite new, just coming to grips with things, but I'm curious: is there anything driving you in the direction of either a fleet of specialized ships or a single huge ship that does everything, or is neither option more beneficial than the other?

[Nordil(Hun)]

Well more ships mean more between ships traffic. (logistical nightmare:P)
Also more ships mean more possible places to board. (multiple places to defend.)

So currently one big ship is better.
But you can let lose with omniship. For instance make a ship that is actually four small ships. Separated and only a corridor connects them and so forth:)

[Parallax]

Initially I thought multiple ships and ports would help ease logistics since shuttles can do bulk transport. It's unfortunate that boarder defence counteracts ease of logistics.

Here's my list of cons against multiple ships:

- PDTs require someone on the ops console per ship. That means you need 1 crew for 1 ship, or 2 for two ships, etc. More ships is wasted crew here. Similar wastage for shields or navigation, you can just centralize weapons or research anyway.
- Defending against a raid in a combat situation or rallying to attack a craft is easier if combat crew are all in the same ship.
- Distributing crew areas into separate ships from work areas seems cool but sounds like a lot of commuting
- One large ship is simpler to defend since you have one kill-zone and a longer distance between the raiding airlock and any hiding crew. Injured crew are immediately on the correct ship for treatment, or prisoners for incarceration.
- While you can place your combat ships "at the front" this doesn't apply if more hostiles warp into the sector after you arrive.

[Kayedon]

One ship is meta, multiple ships is fun(ny).
It's a chore to set up all the various storage filters and crew settings. A 1x1 ship is really small, and the caveat to individual ships is the amount of hull space needed to be spent on engine(s), power, air locks, nav station, utilities, crew area and amenities, storage. Your shuttles will endlessly zip around with 1/20 inventories picking up and dropping off supplies. Airlocks will get overwhelmed by the shuttle queue, gods forbid you want to do any trading. The game will frequently require a reload to move supplies around that get stuck in some unclearable queue.

But it's way more fun than "here's a 9x9 boring-ass brick". (I'm currently running a 1x1, 2x1, and 2x2)

[Flavalicious]

I almost always end up with a main ship and a secondary ship in most of my runs.

The main ship holds all the good stuff, main production, main food generation, all the weapons/systems/etc needed to play the game. And then at some point I like the design of my main ship so much I don't want to expand it, then I usually make some ugly flying brick and put the remainder of the crew on it. This is very late into the game, I normally have like 12-16 crew at this point.

Secondary ship is always just a specialized prison barge with mass recyclers to help melt down scraps into usable cells. Logistics ain't a problem at that stage in the game because you have so many workers/shuttles/robots that stuff flows freely. 2nd ship always gets one of those jammers that stops enemy ships from firing directly on it, and anyone boarding gets met at a chokepoint and dies before they can do anything.

Doing multi ship before end game can be pretty mentally draining.

[neo5apien]

Everything ship evolves to giant ugly brick over time. It's just Space Haven natural selection at work.

[Cmdr Lee]

i usually only get 2 ships, 1 for all my functional crud, and one for sleep. both are still armed to the teeth with guns and robots and shields however.

[Alex_D]

One meta ship for me

[][Mr.Brodzi]]

have you seen Stargate: Universe? <--- this will answare your question

[locoparentus]

if you split up your ships you can put jammers on some but not on others,

this stops all your industry and food getting busted in the shooting match and you can cram al the guns and a tiny crew in a different one that has the best min max footprint for shields, hull and weapons and a tiny crew,