I appreciate this immensely! I have epilepsy and honestly I get scatter minded halfway in the ship design and can’t transition from spine, to core them to rooms very well and this helps so much! Thank you 👊
👊🏼 Thank you for sharing. I’m super glad it’s been helpful to you. There’s a ton more detail through parts 2-4 and through the main series if you feel like you want more.
@@ArcusRequrosifact oh man, I get that so often as well! My ships end up looking pretty nice, as I revisit each spot a good thousand times before I complete one lol 😂
This is incredibly helpful! I'm new to the game and I keep seeing all these massive powerful ships people build and it kept blowing me away how they even got the ideas for them. I play alone and I have to keep things centerred on the fact that I need to be able to manage the ship by myself, so with this one you've got being right in the middle between medium and large, it definitely helps. Thanks!
Awesome! So glad this helped, and thank you for saying. I do have an updated ship build series in the plans too … it’ll take a while so might be early 2025.
Really like the main series, and I was curious to see the design process on this once its projection was unveiled. Most of my own builds start out a mess of conveyors and functional bits given a general form, but there are a few ideas I got from this, particularly about spacing, and a spaced outer hull. Gonna need to head off and try these ideas out now
Very helpful tips, especially when it comes to planning out your rooms. I usually start skeletonized with connectors as I stagger guns and connect thrusters/storage. Then I start adding armor around those guns/essential parts, fill in the gaps, and slowly build the ship in those essential parts such as internal command and control rooms, power, etc. By building the essentials, and filling in the gaps with a motif/style I find it easy to get a very good functioning ship. Downside is the inside takes the back seat. That’s what’s good about your technique- you can build with style and function in mind
Thank you Bill. It's these comments that make these build videos worthwhile - I'm glad it's been useful. There's pros and cons to each method - mine takes functionality over form, then relies on a bit of a eye for the future to allow for style and flair. I'm also not all that great at all the fancy armour - but these builds are great practice.
I enjoy seeing a creator's workflow. Major Jon has some great videos on how he designs his gorgeous looking ships. Luca has a lot of, ahem, strong opinions on how she thinks ships should be designed. I'd recommend both, along with yours, for some good perspectives on SE ship construction. I liked your points about ease of construction, walkability, redundancy, and a conveyor network centric design (i think of the conveyors as the circulatory system of the body). It's practical, and combines some aesthetics with practicality and actually living/playing/working in the ship. I've so often realized my creative builds overlooked some basic practicality, like how to enter the ship if I run out of H2, etc. And I see the problem a lot in many Steam workshop blueprints for creative mode ships, esp as they become more unwieldy at 50k+ PCU. I use a mix of a similar conveyor layout plus functional block layout to start my shipis. I have a bad habit of cramming them all in without leaving room for walkability or ease of repairs/reconstruction later, though. So I've more recently tried to focus more on creating functional areas/compartments within the ship. Someone else in another video mentioned using heavy armor to lay down a keel and ship's ribs, as a structural skeleton. That way, we can put down and remove any (color coded) light armor or functional blocks without worrying that we'll accidentally break the ship grid in half. (plus helps a bit with combat survivability too) I like to combine these structural frames with my compartmentalization partitions of light armor and walkway corridors. Like you, I also use tanky functional blocks like O2/H2 generators as conveyor mount points for turrets and thrusters. If you're going to need conveyors and spacing, might as well make those conveyors do double duty. Luca's a big fan of this. I also have experimented with entirely replacing ALL my conveyors with small cargo containers, since any conveyor costs PCU overhead anyway. I found that I can use Isy's Inventory on a central base or port facility but tag the ship containers as needed, so that I don't even have to actively run the Isy script on every ship (further keeping down processing overhead). It has some trade-offs, but ones I can live with. With as many as 40 small cargo containers, I only ever really need to pay attention to a handful of special tagged ones containing equipment, ammo, key components, etc. All the rest can be stuffed with ice, ores, or whatever and location doesn't matter. I think the same compulsive mindset that desires symmetry would recoil in revulsion at this lackadaisical decentralization and fragmentation of cargo space, though. :D Speaking of which, I prefer highly decentralized/distributed design for combat ships. It's obviously easier as a designer to concentrate similar functional blocks so that we can immediately count up how many we have placed down. But I've had too many ships get railed or artilleried and lost half of XYZ functionality in a single shot or barrage. AI tend to shoot out the center of the grid, so in theory an empty hole in the middle (like a donut) would be best for fighting NPCs, along with starfish-esque radial symmetry for multiple redundancy and distribution of functional blocks in regular intervals around the central hole. One of the most recent thoughts I had was to basically create multiple nearly-autonomous smaller basic sub-ships (a few thrusters in at least 3-5 directions, gyro, battery, H2 tank if needed, control station/cockpit on half of the sub-ships), with a fairly modular/flexible payload compartment that could have any functional block installed. Stick 2-5 of these almost-ships together with 1-2 conveyor connections, each one fulfilling a different larger ship function (refinery, medical room, assemblers, ship-wide thruster set, etc). That way, a single bad shot through any one section won't cripple the whole ship. And in extreme emergencies, a few quick grinding cuts through light armor hull and 1-2 connections could separate functional sub-ship sections from destroyed ones. If the ship as a whole can't fly, then cut off the least damaged sub-ship and retreat and restart with it. I also heavily compartmentalize my H2 tanks with armor block partitions between tanks. Similar for thrusters. Fully compartmentalizing every single large thruster or tank gets heavy and takes a lot of blocks/space, so I usually cut costs by doing it for about 10-30% of the ship's total tanks or thrusters in each direction. e.g. with a larger ship that has 10 large H2 tanks and 20 large thrusters, I'd try to separate every 2 tanks or 4 thrusters. Single thruster banks are just begging for collateral damage. :D I had several 10k to 20k PCU ships with massive heavy armor, turrets, etc get absolutely gutted by an H2 explosion before a fight even got going, to teach me this lesson. One of those was getting several up thrusters taken out, causing my ship to crash on a planetary surface, which set off the main H2 tank bay -- turning a minor crash into a ruinous one. Turrets, I like to space out with 1-3 blocks between the turret bounding boxes, both to give them better unobstructed fields of fire, as well as to reduce collateral explosive damage. I think Luca said 5 blocks of spacing is optimal, to completely eliminate collateral damage from vanilla missiles? Trade-off either way is density of guns to total block/PCU count. I also use the O2/H2 generators to help elevate each turret up by 1 block above the general hull surface, again for better fields of fire. The spacing also facilitates putting a welder under a few key turrets (every turret would be too cost/space-prohibitive, in many cases). I'm using one of the AQD mods (quality of life? I think) that marginally increases welder radius by something like half a block or less, so this may not apply in vanilla. But it's enough radius to put down the turret, one armor block underneath the 8 blocks surrounding the central conveyor connection, then the welder head of the welder block, and that's enough range for it to cover all the turret plus its armor/conveyor base. But as always, just b/c I have my own strong opinions doesn't mean it's the right way or only way. This is merely just my own trauma-induced response to being ravaged by waves of Reavers and other NPCs. :D I'm actually really keen to try out different approaches to mine, like Major Jon's method of carving and sculpting out a humongous block of light armor to create the hull, then populate its internal spaces. Completely different styles are the fun part about all this.
Thank you for this awesome insight. This particular ship build is interesting to me as I’m freed from the burden of having to land - utility ships for that, and we’ll have shields - although we fully expect that being a slower ship the shields could easily be overwhelmed, making repair very important and offensive capabilities even more so. In this design, port options will be plenty but many of them will be reserved for vanilla variants, while this specific ship is going very high tech. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts with everyone!
@@Psy-Prime Yeah! I'm looking forward to seeing your two ships' shakedown cruises, their evolution as you improve user-friendliness and find little things along the way, and of course the promised must-have NPC showdowns and aftermath of recovery. :D P.S. For context, Steam says I have 2000 hours in SE, and yet all my starts and bases have been on Earthlike or similar modded planets, which sounds a bit ridiculous for a game titled "SPACE Engineers." 😅At most, I'll dip out of atmosphere to mine a few asteroids. :P All my ships have a 2 G thrust requirement and rarely use reactors, so I've almost never known what it's like to design for a 0 G environment or even primary atmo/ion thruster ships (mostly just H2 ships). I think a requirement for small cargo/utility ships would be a lot of fun, and of course it opens up the mother ships with more design freedom. ...Like a radially symmetrical tetrahedron design... Or... I'll get there one day -- I just haven't gotten bored enough with all my other design wishlist projects to get as far as space and other planets. XD SE is kind of incredible that way. Or maybe I'm easily entertained by the little things, like surfing hills on hoverbikes? :P
in se i tend to make unarmed civilian ships but i do have a super ship that a mobile ship yard ive been working on for a while , thanks for the vid on how to make everthing more well easily accessible and a nice layout plan for when i rebuild parts of it as most of it is ship storage and it holds a good amount of ships
The ports on your large cargo containers are airtight if left exposed. So rather than the expense of all that PCU in doors, you could just use a standard passage way block.
You certainly could. For public servers that would be a good idea. This particular build was for a RU-vid series I was producing on a 2 man dedicated server with no pcu limits so aesthetics were more important.
I started watching your 2 idiots series and think it's the best SE series i've seen. Thanks for the effort you put into the videos. The editing is also great and the music has been on point. I hope you do stick with the videos and the subscriber count eventually catches up once youtube pushes some of the videos.
Wow, thanks. I really appreciate that. We definitely don't plan to stop making these, and of course... more subs is always good :) How far along with the series are you?
But it will be painfully long process because my ships are huge I mean 150 blocks long or something like that sometimes even longer I literally can't build small ships XDD
Keep at it! I’d love to build an absolutely huge monster of a ship but I get frustrated at having space for people who don’t exist. I build ships that can be operated and repaired by a very small crew. Thanks again for watching and sharing!
@@MrHunterPOLSKA you can place them anywhere you like. Location doesn’t really matter as they always act on the center of mass of the whole ship. But trying to concentrate them near the centre of mass can help keep the bulk of the mass on the centre axis.
So you really feel the need to put refineries and assemblers in a pure combat ship? Isn't that extra weight and size that's not needed if you have a support ship near by?
Yup. In a shield ship the extra mass adds to its durability, and the utility adds to repairability in the field. More specifically though, this model is to support our 2-man survival series so has a bigger role to play.
oh bro thats the game I forgot about. what a shame. A long time ago I started building a ship on a mp server, I never finished it. I just know there is a gigantic unfinished black hull floating in space left on this server. I wonder what happened to it lmao, I made it so big I could easily fit 3 of the neutral space stations in it lmao. I think I have to buy this game again lmao
None of them are essential - just cool to have for cosmetic reasons. Some Workshop blueprints will require DLCs because they use DLC versions of some blocks, but to get started - nah you don't need any.
Whenever I install turrets on my ships, they always automatically look around if I have power active before hand. Is there a setting to tell the Turrets to stay stationary besides having to manually set it in a control panel?
The only option for this is the Idle movement option in the turrets settings. You can set it quickly with build vision or in the settings before it's built to stop it misaligning, but unfortunately there's no master override. Maybe a script on the grid that checks every few minutes for turrets on the grid and disables the idle movement automatically could save you from forgetting. I bet ChatGPT 4 could code that for you.
