building fighters

[RyuShihan]

So after doing a couple of the pvp events. I had a few questions, where can we go to get accurate info on how weapons to armor works? Also how does weight affect thrust, specifically directional thrust. I noticed all of the player made ships could 1 shot all the ship shop ships if they hit near the engines. Got shot once and killed, I assume by an autocannon since I never saw the shot.

I also noticed shooting plasma and autocannons I could shoot player made ships a few times and looked to do no damage. i assume the player made ships are using different materials and are able to absorb more dmg. I noticed the reference sheet that was done back in December with shots absorbed per material, even if the numbers are not correct, does the damage reducing per type seams to be close?

 

[cranky corvid]

The ships in most ship shops are also made by players, the exception being the red ship shop found beside the ship design hangar on origin station (and its counterparts on other stations), which is stocked with developer-made ones.

Before the implementation of the plate material system, the only plates available were made of bastium, which is a poor material for armor. It's possible that some ship shop combat ships that originate from before that haven't been updated to use the better materials, and if they were, they probably aren't equipped with multiple armor layers since the bastium armor sucked so badly that there wasn't much point. More state-of-the-art ships can potentially be equipped with much tougher armor.

 

[XenoCow]

Recently, there have been changes

Material density now affects voxel and fracture damage depth

... to the damage model and as far as I know, there is not any updated info on how the new armor behaves besides the recent events anecdotally.

Also how does weight affect thrust, specifically directional thrust

I think it's proportional. As in more weight requires an increase in thrust proportional to the increase in weight. I could be wrong. I build my ships by dead reckoning for the most part.


Another factor of survivability you should consider when building fighters is redundancy and placement of explosive components. All armor will fail eventually, but what happens to the functionality of your ship when it does? Will it all explode if one battery is destroyed through a chain reaction? If one fuel tank is destroyed, will there be more fuel somewhere else to keep on flying?

Design of where you place things is especially important on smaller fighters since a few inches one way or another can be the difference between being one-shot-able and being robust. I plan on making a video about exactly this pretty soon.