Solesey's Warship Engineering Guide

Ships have a variety of defensive, offensive, and utility systems that are essential to understand if one wants to design warships.

This guide will be divided into 6 sections, as follows:

1. Planning
2. Construction
3. Shielding
4. Weapons
5. Internals

Some steps can be done in a different order, but doing so may make the process more challenging.

For all steps here, only work on either the right or left side of the ship, as you can use worldedit to //flip it later.

Planning

What ship are you building? How fast does it go? What shields, weapons, and other multiblocks does it have? Below is a table showing the attributes and requirements of every known class/subclass:

Unless otherwise specified, all ships require:

• 30% Concrete
• PDTs/ATs
• Hyperdrive
• Gravity Well
• Navigation Computer

Abbreviations:

• IC: Interceptor Cannon
• LT: Light Turret
• HT: Heavy Turret
• TT: Tri Turret
• IT: Ion Turret
• QT: Quad Turret
• HL: Heavy Laser
• AM: Arsenal Missile

Sub-Capital Ships

Info	Interceptor(150)	Interceptor(350)	Starfighter(350)	Gunship (500)	1k Gunship	2k Gunship	4k Corvette	4.9k Frigate
Viable Size Range	150-349	350-500	350-500	500-699	1012-1399	2000	4000	4893-4899
Cruise Speed	35	35	33	33	28	25	23	22
Shield amount (at min. viable size)	1	1	1	1	2	3	6	8
Primary L. Weapon	4 IC	4 IC	1 Plasma	1 Plasma	2 Pulse	2 Pulse	3 Pulse	1 Plasma
Secondary L. Weapon		1 Plasma			1 Plasma	1 LT	1 LT	1 LT
Primary H. Weapon			2 Torpedo	2 Torpedo	1 HL	1 HL	1 TT	1 Phaser
Secondary H. Weapon		2 Torpedo					1 HL	1 TT, 1 HL
Comments	15% Concrete	30% Concrete*	No PDTs	No PDTs
|	No Hyper/Nav	*To convert to SF	No Gravwell
|	No PDTs	No PDTs
|	No Gravwell	No Gravwell

Capital/Supercapital Ships

Info	6.5k Frigate	7.5k Frigate	8k Frigate	9.7k Destroyer	12k Destroyer	16k Cruiser	20k Battlecruiser
Viable Size Range	6500-6999	7500-7699	8000	9702-9799	12000	16000	20000
Cruise Speed	21	21	19	19	18	16	14
Shield amount (at min. viable size)	10	10+1c	11+1c	13+1c	16+1c	19+2c	24+2c
Primary L. Weapon	3 HT	3 HT	3 HT	4 HT	4 HT	4 IT	3 QT
Secondary L. Weapon	1 LT	1 LT	1 LT	1 LT	1 LT
Primary H. Weapon	1 Phaser	1 Phaser	1 Phaser	1 Phaser	1 Phaser	1 TT	1 TT
Secondary H. Weapon	1 TT	1 TT	1 TT	1 TT	1 TT	4 AMs	8 AMs
Comments	Core Shielded	Core Shielded		Core Shielded	Core Shielded	Fuel Tank	Fuel Tank
|	~40% Concrete*	~48% Concrete*		~35% Concrete*		Reactor Core	Reactor Core
|	*to reach 21bps	*to reach 21bps		*to reach 19 bps			Core Shielded

Construction

After getting your background information, you should be ready to start building your ship’s outer shell. Depending on how well-optimized you want your ship to be, this step could be completed alongside other steps. Below are some useful tips and design conventions.

• 4.9ks and below usually have a front-bridge for Direct Control and maneuverability.
• 6.5ks and above usually have a top-bridge for Cruise Control and battlefield awareness.
• See if you can find a similarly-sized ship to use as a size reference.
• Be mindful of surface area, especially on smaller ships. Concrete% is a major limiting factor at these sizes.
• Consider future weapon placement. Will you be able to fit enough weapons to cover all your angles? Same goes for your bridge—will you be able to see enough?
• Function isn't everything; pilot skill, numbers, or good tactics can make up for a suboptimal design. Feel free to disregard some practices in the name of creativity.

Shielding

Once the outer shell is complete, you are ready to start shielding. Almost all ships use exclusively box shields and cheth shields, although some designs will opt to use the various sizes of sphere shield to save costs.

1. Shots that impact more than one shield will have their damage multiplied. When possible, minimize shield overlap.
2. Assuming your ship is relatively conventional (less than 22 blocks tall), construct rectangles representing shields above your ship with odd side lengths. All shields have equal health regardless of size, so be mindful. Larger shields will be weaker and vice-versa.
3. If your ship can have a cheth shield, use //hsphere <block> 9.5 to create an accurate representation of what blocks it will protect. Ensure that this shield protects your bridge and as many blocks as possible to get full use of it.
4. Once shield positions are determined, place the multiblocks and set box shield dimensions to match the rectangles. You can set the height of each shield to the maximum, 21, without any consequence.

• A Core Shield is a shield that is contained entirely within the hull, not hittable from the outside. It provides a second line of defense for larger ships, and is considered somewhat necessary on some ships for survivability or speed.

Weapons

This step may be done before or during step 3. Using the information from the table above, place weapons onto/into your ship, being mindful of these factors that will affect your ship's combat effectiveness:

• Can I fire the maximum amount in every direction?

• Do I have redundancy if I take hull damage? Do I need redundancy?

• Do I have too many weapons, decreasing accuracy?

• Is my weapon shielded well? Is it split across multiple shields? (bad) Is it in a cheth shield? (good)

Internals

• Signs: If you haven’t done so already, add signs to your shield and weapon multiblocks. Be sure to add [node] signs as well, allowing for LTs and TTs to be automatically fired and creating weaponsets for your primary light and heavy weapons.
• Multiblocks: Add your hyperdrive, navcomputer, gravwell, and other multiblocks. Ensure these are well-protected, but also easily accessible for refueling. If you like, add other interior features like storage, cryopods, generators, etc. Be mindful that these additions will take away from your concrete%.
• Filling: If your ship has core shields or cheth shields, you’ll want to add internal armor around them. For the former, use //outline <block> or build the shape of the shield by hand. For the latter, use //gmask air, followed by //hsphere <block> 9.5, to create the sphere shape.
  • After internal armor is added, use //fillr <block> <range> to fill the ship up with concrete, assuming your internal/external armor has no leaks. If your ship is too big, start breaking concrete on the inside, especially near the outer shell, to get it down to size. At this point, it’s all about adding or removing concrete/armor to get the ship to its target size/concrete%.

• Thrusters: We wait until the end to do these, because they are highly dependent on mass. Larger ships will tend to have “omnicruise,” which means having thrusters facing every direction, for maximum maneuverability. Keep in mind that more thrusters will cost more and reduce your concrete%. In each direction you want thrusters, add 15-25 afterburners, adding or removing them as needed to achieve the highest speed you can.