7 replies to this topic

[Breoghan]

Is there a minimum amount of hull plate needed per ton of ship's components? Or can a ships design be a simple skeleton made up of components? --- ok, unlikely,. But I'm just trying to get a feel for the basic mix before I start designing my bigger ships.

[Coconutheads]

Breoghan,

You do not need any standard hull plate to build a ship. Ship design is 100% flexible. The only requirement is that the design must be 1000 tons minimum. I don't think there is a maximum tonnage.

[sir smeg]

Coconutheads is correct, the only rule that you should worry about is that your ship must be at least 1000 tons, if for some reason your NUD didn't come to 1000 tons then standard hull plate will be added to the design until it is at a 1000 tons.

Beyond that very simple rule there are several other considerations when designing your ships. The first of these is that only ships can have drive systems installed, orbitals and surface forts are simply not allowed these usefull systems. Offcourse this does not mean that a ship must have propolusion and jump drives, but exept for a few very specilised designs I would recomend having at least one of each, as it will greatly improve the stratigic mobelity of your ships.

Sir Smeg

[ali-t-akua]

In addition every item that goes on a ship, orbital or suface installation has a certain amount of integrity which is the damage the ship can withstand. Hull plate has and integrity of 3 per ton I think (you can ANZ it and get the number) and so the more you put on your ship the more integrity it has.

Higher generations of armor have more integrity points.

Orbitals and surface installations have multipliers with orbitals being 3x and surface installations being 9x.

[Breoghan]

I suppose what I'm looking at is the designs "down the road", when I start planning for mega-million ton craft for various purposes. This said, I reckon the logical extension of my original question is.....

Is there an Excel spreadsheet available out there that helps with ship design?

[ali-t-akua]

Breoghan, on Sep 30 2006, 09:54 AM, said:

I suppose what I'm looking at is the designs "down the road", when I start planning for mega-million ton craft for various purposes. This said, I reckon the logical extension of my original question is.....

Is there an Excel spreadsheet available out there that helps with ship design?   

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The comments above even apply to smaller ship designs. Here is a website with some spreadsheets that might help. Phasedragon's page

My cautions are that some of the spreadsheets have bugs and some only work with Acrobat 6 but the ship design spreadsheet should still be OK. I don't use this spreadsheet for ship design but I do use it for keeping track of existing designs.

[orin]

ali-t-akua, on Sep 30 2006, 03:58 PM, said:

My cautions are that some of the spreadsheets have bugs and some only work with Acrobat 6 but the ship design spreadsheet should still be OK. I don't use this spreadsheet for ship design but I do use it for keeping track of existing designs.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You need th have the code and the ship sheet.. and link the ship one to the code for it to work.. and update the code values for the weapons to get the right numbers. I have been keeping it up for my empire manually and use the ship disign to see it and to have it down when(if) I need to refer to it later.

[SargonKingOfSlith]

A ship design spreadsheet is available at:
http://geocities.com/batkins23/

Along with some additional opinionated material.