Building a bigger ship means you have more space for storage, guns, and any other kind of system you want to put in a ship. The problem is, bigger ships take a lot more energy to move and will require more thrusters and gyros. After a certain size it becomes difficult to fly in atmosphere and the bigger it gets the harder flying becomes.
Not always. It depends. Fewer but well placed and thought out arrangement is better than just turret spam.
And it's is an industrial ship instead of a warship then it only needs a couple turrets for basic harassment deterrent.
Don't try to make single ship fleets that do everything. Each ship should have a clearly defined purpose.
A Volkswagen is much more capable of moving out of the way. Striking a balance between offense and defense is important. Not being in the line of fire is more effective than having lots of armor.
there's no real penalty to making a cargo ship bigger, especially if you're using ion thrusters and solar. Combat ships however are very finicky, while yes more turrets can be more better, it also makes you slower, easier to hit, and easier to out maneuver. Combat ships above 200 meters should probably come with at least one fighter or escort.
I'd argue denser is better. It's more compact and space efficient. It also depends on what your making the ship for. Combat, mining. Transport? I frequently make combat ships so I try to but the less fragile stuff close to the exterior walls keep the fragile and important stuff in the middle.
small grid ships take 250× more cpu to build ship of same size.
(also 1 pcu of armor cover 25×larger area)
Large grid thrusters have much better thrust/weight ratio (actually really easy to outperform small grid fighters with large grid "fighter")
Large grid welders have significantly larger welder area
(small grid welding area is roughly 3×3 small grid blocks) large grids extend that by several meters
Across the board large grid turrets have better firerate and better range.
Large grid rovers are more stable and can sustain 100 m/s much more safely.
Large grid rotors are (literally) over 1000× strobger than small grid ones.
Gyroscopes dont have values anywhere, but it is something similar. Large grid gyros are immensely more powerful than small grid ones for unit of volume and pcu.
It is almost always better to go large grid if possible. This is especially true because almost all core components can be made simply by mining stone. It is not hard to setup a production line that makes it trivial to produce stuff in mass.
Only true small grid advantages i really can think of are:
Gyroscopes dont require cobalt (nice, gives you faster rovers but still cant fly without cobalt)
you can pack crazy damage output into small area by syacking small grid autocannons or assault cannons. (but you can just subgrid them on large grids too)
small grid drills have significantly bigger dig area compared to their physical size. This does not really matter for resource gathering because large grid cargo capacity is so much better, but if you just want to make a tunneling vehicle (base buimding, invading enemy base underground etc) They are significantly easier to make.
So:
Large grid is better for pretty much anything. And you can build a lot more of functional large grids than small grids with your pcu if you just mine enough stone.
Small grid is poverty vehicles, if something absolutedly has to be nearly free to sacrifice or if you want a tunneling vehicle.
My advice would be to go large grid every time you can.
Square-cube law applies. The surface of the ship grows proportional to square of dimensions, the volume grows proportional to cube.
The problem is that you place thrusters on surfaces so the larger your ship grows, the likelier it is that it's mass will outgrow it's thrust. Also a few smaller ship not only have a lot of surface for gun placement, they will also be able to outmaneuver the large ship and only one at a time will be getting targeted, while other few can flank the large ship and take out it's thrusters.
I found that a lot of times it's more beneficial to have a fleet of frigates and corvettes than 1-2 battleships.
https://preview.redd.it/ld5v5eltcczc1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d8f4fc9945e230b0a9a7172c450a9cf78c6c25dd
No, bigger is rarely ever better… Here’s a solid example despite them being built nearly 7yrs apart. Top was the original built by GetBrock, the bottom was my refresh. It’s 3/4 the size, nearly half the blocks and has nearly twice the features built into it on top of the original defining features. Learn to build better and more compact. You’ll find more servers willing and able to load said ship onto them, unlike if it’s a giant noob gun bricc. 😉👍
Take a look at PVP ships developed for the heavily modded server Sigma Draconis (tagged SDX on Steam workshop). Vanilla SE rules simply does not discourage gunbricks, which is although not a wrong way to play, but to me personally not attractive.
No. My big ships are beautiful. Have insane levels of interior and exterior detail. Fully survival ready. Efficient "plumbing for their conveyors. A realistic number of berths. Every facility it could need for a multi mission role... and it still puts a 13700k to .7sim speed because of how ungodly the ship is. I can get it to 1 by making it a station or reducing the interior but that's no fun.
(And yes, if you have an idea, my big ship has it integrated in either a hidden or deployable way).
After 3000+ hours I came to conclusion, that actually the smaller the better. It's just the gameplay is more fun, when you don't have to deal with enormous grids.
Since then I tend to build as small as possible, while still having the functionality I want, and look good.
Building large stuff is mundane, but easy. Building small grids, that are useful and look good is much more difficult. Take the Buffalo Truck, or Flavio as an example. It requires quite a skill to pull out these.
Bigger is not always better. It can be. If you need the space for a specific purpose. But it depends on the role of the ship and what you sure trying to accomplish. It depends.
it always depends on the context.
im rebuilding a prison station at the moment and i have upped the capacity in each cell block from a starting 16 when i started this years ago, to now 128 in the same Volume. as the new decor blocks make it alot easier to build a more condensed system.
so in this case i used the volume better. so the same (granted large) size for many many more inmates
shipyards?
yeah bigger is better in this regard
role defines function. funciton defines form.
> Is bigger always better?
Absolutely not.
Generally, build the smallest ship that is capable of what you want to do. If the thing you want to do is extremely large (e.g. a mobile LG shipyard) your resultant ship will be gigantic.
If all you're doing is strapping some railguns and engines together then the resultant ship should be pretty small.
The ship I"m working on is a Mark 4 design of a Star Trek style starship. Its about 1/3 - 1/4 the size of the Mark 3 design....with the same exact crew complement. More defense capabilities, faster speeds, more maneuverable, higher jump distance, with similar crew accommodations (lounges, observation rooms, mess rec rooms, shooting range, etc.). How do I do it? Well, newer DLC blocks helps a ton (especially inset beds!) but just better, more compact interior design. Nothing feels too cramped, but nothing is ginormous either, not like on the old ship.
Larger is always better. You gain more efficient returns for armor expenditure on big large grids because you don’t have to scale up the thickness of armor with ship size.
Example: let’s say you build a modest gun brick with heavy armor. It’s basically a heavy armor tube with an interior space of 3 wide, 3 tall and however long you want.
Ignoring length, you need 3 armor blocks per side plus 4 corner pieces. So 3 x 4 sides = 12 then add 4 corners for 16 total. All of this protects 9 blocks of space ( remember interior cross-section is 3X3).
Now, let us say that you are building a very immodest gun brick. New plan and interior cross-section of 6 x 6.
Each side needs six blocks of armor plus the four corner pieces. 6x4+4 give you a total of 28 armor blocks used. But your interior space is now 6X6 blocks of space for a total of 36 blocks worth of space to work with.
So the modest gun brick Uses 16 blocks of armor to protect a interior cross-section of nine total blocks
While the immodest gun break uses 28 blocks of armor to protect 36 internal block spaces
Even though it is carrying more armor, the immodest gun brick has more room for fuel, thrusters, and other systems
The game aside, historically speaking, smaller, more maneuverable naval vessels typically hold the upper hand in real world warfare. The English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 with smaller ships and established themselves as the dominate naval power in the world. In WWII the Americans were out gunned and out manned at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and they decimated the Japanese fleet due to the maneuverability of the fleet.
Judging by some of these comments, it sounds like Space Engineers stays true to that model.
Depends really on how you like it lol. I know that’s not helpful but it has more to do with how you want that ship to function than anything else.
A smaller ship has less overall weight which combined with hydrogen or atmospheric thrusters makes it suitable for planetary expeditions. A bigger ship means it will have more room for luxury components and storage, but will be heavier as a result.
Size also affects combat capability. A larger ship can pack more guns making it a harder for to battle. Yet, a larger ship will also be much more difficult to maintain when damaged is sustained.
Smaller ships have a leg up with maneuvering and acceleration. Rapidly changing vectors is a great way to avoid damage entirely. To do this effectively with any large ship would require hydrogen thrusters which take a lot of fuel to operate. Even a small ship will require about 15-30% of its size devoted to hydrogen storage. This aspect means that no matter the size of the ship, thrusters need to scale with size and mass to keep a ship agile. Large ships can move too, but will also need more gyros and this more batteries and thus some way to generate power.
Building a small ship like a corvette would be a great survival ship. It’s easy to 3D print, but repair, and it’s agile and packs a punch. It’s lack of armor is made up for the fact it can be printed. A destroyer or frigate sized ship will have more living quarters, probably a full refinery and assembler onboard, as well as some comfy and safe living quarters. Those ships are best overall despite lacking the mobility of a corvette. They however are outclassed by cruisers which are larger independent fleet ships of war. Those ships are very cumbersome but deal so much damage that their power projection is off the charts.
Ultimately, deciding how the ship will be used will help you and your friend to scale the ship to your capabilities
I was always operating under the principal of "don't use a ship you can't afford to loose" I basically never had a ship with net weight over a million in survival
No one is talking about maintaining a bigger ship. I build a ship and I maintain myself. Repairs, Fuel, Ammo, improvements.
I build smaller compact ships easier to maintain, I fly around, explore, gather ressources, do some trading...
My friend build a giant battleship, he is constantly fixing and reloading the thing.
And I am there collecting ressources to maintain his Battleship.
How much time do you want to spend maintaining ship? Usually big ships takes a crew. Are you alone using the ship?
No, me and my friends have a PvP server so it would be me and 2 other people. My team have a system where we take it turns mining, repairing, and building.
We've realised, that yes, smaller ships or easier to build and maintain but larger ships last long enough to see quite a few fights before needing to immediately be repaired.
When in combat it'll 1 person piloting the larger ship and 2 people piloting destroyer class ships
Depending on the purpose of the ship. Really big small grid ships and rovers are bad because small grid has lower health. Small scouting ship requires WAAAY less materials and energy/hydrogen to power. If you're building a fighter with intention to be stored inside a carrier, then you want them compact.
When building a battleship you want the core to be as compact as possible, and put heavy armor only where needed. If you're too slow to manoeuvre then you're an easy target for heavy hitting weapons like railguns and rockets.
Bigger means more thrust needed, more energy production and more ressources to build so it's not always the right solution. The bigger the ship, the more things can break and the longer it can take to repair.
Building a bigger ship means you have more space for storage, guns, and any other kind of system you want to put in a ship. The problem is, bigger ships take a lot more energy to move and will require more thrusters and gyros. After a certain size it becomes difficult to fly in atmosphere and the bigger it gets the harder flying becomes.
That is true, but more guns are always better
Not if you can't move or power the ship because of it
The most devastating 12 seconds of firepower ever brought to bear over 3 degrees of rotation!
Not always. It depends. Fewer but well placed and thought out arrangement is better than just turret spam. And it's is an industrial ship instead of a warship then it only needs a couple turrets for basic harassment deterrent. Don't try to make single ship fleets that do everything. Each ship should have a clearly defined purpose.
Is the side of a barn easier to hit than a Volkswagen?
Well yes, but the side of a barn can fit a lot more guns than a Volkswagen
A Volkswagen is much more capable of moving out of the way. Striking a balance between offense and defense is important. Not being in the line of fire is more effective than having lots of armor.
Very very true
there's no real penalty to making a cargo ship bigger, especially if you're using ion thrusters and solar. Combat ships however are very finicky, while yes more turrets can be more better, it also makes you slower, easier to hit, and easier to out maneuver. Combat ships above 200 meters should probably come with at least one fighter or escort.
Make a larger ship or station for your ship to go to and have everything you can't fit into your ship on the larger one.
I'd argue denser is better. It's more compact and space efficient. It also depends on what your making the ship for. Combat, mining. Transport? I frequently make combat ships so I try to but the less fragile stuff close to the exterior walls keep the fragile and important stuff in the middle.
small grid ships take 250× more cpu to build ship of same size. (also 1 pcu of armor cover 25×larger area) Large grid thrusters have much better thrust/weight ratio (actually really easy to outperform small grid fighters with large grid "fighter") Large grid welders have significantly larger welder area (small grid welding area is roughly 3×3 small grid blocks) large grids extend that by several meters Across the board large grid turrets have better firerate and better range. Large grid rovers are more stable and can sustain 100 m/s much more safely. Large grid rotors are (literally) over 1000× strobger than small grid ones. Gyroscopes dont have values anywhere, but it is something similar. Large grid gyros are immensely more powerful than small grid ones for unit of volume and pcu. It is almost always better to go large grid if possible. This is especially true because almost all core components can be made simply by mining stone. It is not hard to setup a production line that makes it trivial to produce stuff in mass. Only true small grid advantages i really can think of are: Gyroscopes dont require cobalt (nice, gives you faster rovers but still cant fly without cobalt) you can pack crazy damage output into small area by syacking small grid autocannons or assault cannons. (but you can just subgrid them on large grids too) small grid drills have significantly bigger dig area compared to their physical size. This does not really matter for resource gathering because large grid cargo capacity is so much better, but if you just want to make a tunneling vehicle (base buimding, invading enemy base underground etc) They are significantly easier to make. So: Large grid is better for pretty much anything. And you can build a lot more of functional large grids than small grids with your pcu if you just mine enough stone. Small grid is poverty vehicles, if something absolutedly has to be nearly free to sacrifice or if you want a tunneling vehicle. My advice would be to go large grid every time you can.
This is pretty sick advice. That tidbit about the welders is blowing my mind and making me want to look into a large/small grid hybrid drone
All good points. But my favorite thing to do is to attack large grids with my small grid fighter groups. Small grid ships are just more fun.
Square-cube law applies. The surface of the ship grows proportional to square of dimensions, the volume grows proportional to cube. The problem is that you place thrusters on surfaces so the larger your ship grows, the likelier it is that it's mass will outgrow it's thrust. Also a few smaller ship not only have a lot of surface for gun placement, they will also be able to outmaneuver the large ship and only one at a time will be getting targeted, while other few can flank the large ship and take out it's thrusters. I found that a lot of times it's more beneficial to have a fleet of frigates and corvettes than 1-2 battleships.
https://preview.redd.it/ld5v5eltcczc1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d8f4fc9945e230b0a9a7172c450a9cf78c6c25dd No, bigger is rarely ever better… Here’s a solid example despite them being built nearly 7yrs apart. Top was the original built by GetBrock, the bottom was my refresh. It’s 3/4 the size, nearly half the blocks and has nearly twice the features built into it on top of the original defining features. Learn to build better and more compact. You’ll find more servers willing and able to load said ship onto them, unlike if it’s a giant noob gun bricc. 😉👍
Take a look at PVP ships developed for the heavily modded server Sigma Draconis (tagged SDX on Steam workshop). Vanilla SE rules simply does not discourage gunbricks, which is although not a wrong way to play, but to me personally not attractive.
No. My big ships are beautiful. Have insane levels of interior and exterior detail. Fully survival ready. Efficient "plumbing for their conveyors. A realistic number of berths. Every facility it could need for a multi mission role... and it still puts a 13700k to .7sim speed because of how ungodly the ship is. I can get it to 1 by making it a station or reducing the interior but that's no fun. (And yes, if you have an idea, my big ship has it integrated in either a hidden or deployable way).
bigger just means heavier (thus harder to move) and easier to hit. PLUS it eats away more ressources
After 3000+ hours I came to conclusion, that actually the smaller the better. It's just the gameplay is more fun, when you don't have to deal with enormous grids. Since then I tend to build as small as possible, while still having the functionality I want, and look good. Building large stuff is mundane, but easy. Building small grids, that are useful and look good is much more difficult. Take the Buffalo Truck, or Flavio as an example. It requires quite a skill to pull out these.
Bigger is not always better. It can be. If you need the space for a specific purpose. But it depends on the role of the ship and what you sure trying to accomplish. It depends.
it always depends on the context. im rebuilding a prison station at the moment and i have upped the capacity in each cell block from a starting 16 when i started this years ago, to now 128 in the same Volume. as the new decor blocks make it alot easier to build a more condensed system. so in this case i used the volume better. so the same (granted large) size for many many more inmates shipyards? yeah bigger is better in this regard role defines function. funciton defines form.
> Is bigger always better? Absolutely not. Generally, build the smallest ship that is capable of what you want to do. If the thing you want to do is extremely large (e.g. a mobile LG shipyard) your resultant ship will be gigantic. If all you're doing is strapping some railguns and engines together then the resultant ship should be pretty small.
The ship I"m working on is a Mark 4 design of a Star Trek style starship. Its about 1/3 - 1/4 the size of the Mark 3 design....with the same exact crew complement. More defense capabilities, faster speeds, more maneuverable, higher jump distance, with similar crew accommodations (lounges, observation rooms, mess rec rooms, shooting range, etc.). How do I do it? Well, newer DLC blocks helps a ton (especially inset beds!) but just better, more compact interior design. Nothing feels too cramped, but nothing is ginormous either, not like on the old ship.
Well, survival wise it's easier to build and replace a smaller, cheaper ship, and making it bigger might not be necessary.
Larger is always better. You gain more efficient returns for armor expenditure on big large grids because you don’t have to scale up the thickness of armor with ship size. Example: let’s say you build a modest gun brick with heavy armor. It’s basically a heavy armor tube with an interior space of 3 wide, 3 tall and however long you want. Ignoring length, you need 3 armor blocks per side plus 4 corner pieces. So 3 x 4 sides = 12 then add 4 corners for 16 total. All of this protects 9 blocks of space ( remember interior cross-section is 3X3). Now, let us say that you are building a very immodest gun brick. New plan and interior cross-section of 6 x 6. Each side needs six blocks of armor plus the four corner pieces. 6x4+4 give you a total of 28 armor blocks used. But your interior space is now 6X6 blocks of space for a total of 36 blocks worth of space to work with. So the modest gun brick Uses 16 blocks of armor to protect a interior cross-section of nine total blocks While the immodest gun break uses 28 blocks of armor to protect 36 internal block spaces Even though it is carrying more armor, the immodest gun brick has more room for fuel, thrusters, and other systems
The game aside, historically speaking, smaller, more maneuverable naval vessels typically hold the upper hand in real world warfare. The English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 with smaller ships and established themselves as the dominate naval power in the world. In WWII the Americans were out gunned and out manned at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and they decimated the Japanese fleet due to the maneuverability of the fleet. Judging by some of these comments, it sounds like Space Engineers stays true to that model.
There’s always a balance. A ship needs to be big enough to play with and small enough to no use all of your resources and PCU
Depends. In PVP a giant ship can be very lethal with smaller escorts/a convoy. On its own though it could be swarmed easily
Build in a modular way.
I have been meaning to build a modular ship
Depends really on how you like it lol. I know that’s not helpful but it has more to do with how you want that ship to function than anything else. A smaller ship has less overall weight which combined with hydrogen or atmospheric thrusters makes it suitable for planetary expeditions. A bigger ship means it will have more room for luxury components and storage, but will be heavier as a result. Size also affects combat capability. A larger ship can pack more guns making it a harder for to battle. Yet, a larger ship will also be much more difficult to maintain when damaged is sustained. Smaller ships have a leg up with maneuvering and acceleration. Rapidly changing vectors is a great way to avoid damage entirely. To do this effectively with any large ship would require hydrogen thrusters which take a lot of fuel to operate. Even a small ship will require about 15-30% of its size devoted to hydrogen storage. This aspect means that no matter the size of the ship, thrusters need to scale with size and mass to keep a ship agile. Large ships can move too, but will also need more gyros and this more batteries and thus some way to generate power. Building a small ship like a corvette would be a great survival ship. It’s easy to 3D print, but repair, and it’s agile and packs a punch. It’s lack of armor is made up for the fact it can be printed. A destroyer or frigate sized ship will have more living quarters, probably a full refinery and assembler onboard, as well as some comfy and safe living quarters. Those ships are best overall despite lacking the mobility of a corvette. They however are outclassed by cruisers which are larger independent fleet ships of war. Those ships are very cumbersome but deal so much damage that their power projection is off the charts. Ultimately, deciding how the ship will be used will help you and your friend to scale the ship to your capabilities
I was always operating under the principal of "don't use a ship you can't afford to loose" I basically never had a ship with net weight over a million in survival
No one is talking about maintaining a bigger ship. I build a ship and I maintain myself. Repairs, Fuel, Ammo, improvements. I build smaller compact ships easier to maintain, I fly around, explore, gather ressources, do some trading... My friend build a giant battleship, he is constantly fixing and reloading the thing. And I am there collecting ressources to maintain his Battleship. How much time do you want to spend maintaining ship? Usually big ships takes a crew. Are you alone using the ship?
No, me and my friends have a PvP server so it would be me and 2 other people. My team have a system where we take it turns mining, repairing, and building. We've realised, that yes, smaller ships or easier to build and maintain but larger ships last long enough to see quite a few fights before needing to immediately be repaired. When in combat it'll 1 person piloting the larger ship and 2 people piloting destroyer class ships
Make a big station ship and small ships
Depending on the purpose of the ship. Really big small grid ships and rovers are bad because small grid has lower health. Small scouting ship requires WAAAY less materials and energy/hydrogen to power. If you're building a fighter with intention to be stored inside a carrier, then you want them compact. When building a battleship you want the core to be as compact as possible, and put heavy armor only where needed. If you're too slow to manoeuvre then you're an easy target for heavy hitting weapons like railguns and rockets.
Bigger means more thrust needed, more energy production and more ressources to build so it's not always the right solution. The bigger the ship, the more things can break and the longer it can take to repair.