Pre-Warp Ship designs

[TheSAguy]

Does anyone have some good pre-warp and early post-warp ship designs they could share?

Pre-Warp I usually go for barebones to get them out ASAP.

Any advise on what to add/remove form the standard designs would also be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Unforeseen]

As you said, bare bones. As soon as i make first contact I retrofit with weapons. Nothing special.

[Aeson]

If you really want to build warships before acquiring warp capabilities, I would suggest using long-range guns (or railguns, once you research them) as your primary weapon, because these can bypass the shields of your probably more technologically advanced pirate opponents and damage the components of the enemy vessel, and a ship that starts taking damage to its components is likely to flee soon afterwards. I would also suggest researching boarding pods and energy collectors, and adding these components to your designs, as soon as you can. Boarding pods allow you to capture pirate vessels, which can then be scrapped at your spaceport to give you a leg up on research or, since the pirate vessels come with hyperdrives, used to form your own defense fleet that can actually respond to attacks in a reasonable amount of time, and the boarding pods additionally provide a bit of defense against pirate boarding parties. Energy collectors are useful for reducing your fuel consumption, which can be a rather big deal if your nearest source of caslon is not a gas giant orbited by your homeworld. After boarding pods and energy collectors, I would go for shields and armor, as these components will slightly close the gap between your small ships and the pirate raiders (though construction size increases are also good); if you're still on the starting ~160 size, I wouldn't put more than 1 shield generator and 1-5 armor on any designs.

If you want to design civilian ships, I would strip out any components that aren't required for the design and push the cruise speed up, if possible. Don't arm them, probably don't put defenses like shields and armor on them. Without hyperdives, they're not going to escape from any pirates that attack them, and your navy can't get to them in time to help fend off pirates unless your warships are already very close to the civilian. Thus, keeping the civilian ships cheap and fast is more useful than giving them defenses.

As far as explorers go, I would strongly consider upping the number of engines on the ship until the cruise energy requirements becomes similar to the excess reactor output and also strip off any unnecessary components. Explorers should perhaps be scrapped once the system is mapped out, so you could consider not including energy collectors on your explorers to save a bit on the size and cost of the vessel, and anyways the explorers shouldn't be allowed to idle until you know the system resources anyways.


For designs in the Warp Bubble Generator era of hyperdrives, I would strongly consider not adding enough reactors to fully power the hyperdrive, unless you're already looking at size-300+ ships. Fully powering the Warp Bubble Generator just takes too many reactors on a small ship, and small ships using early-game weapons and engines just don't need that kind of excess reactor output (I would nevertheless want the hyperdrive to have at least half power, as the ship's hyper speed is equal to [listed hyperdrive speed]*min(1, [excess reactor output]/[listed hyperdrive energy requirement])). You may find that you need to cut out some components to make a buildable design. At this point in the game, it becomes possible for your military vessels to respond to attacks on civilians, and your civilians at any rate will not be making long trips across the system at sublight speeds that leave them vulnerable to attack once they get their hyperdrives. The Warp Bubble Generator is nevertheless still too slow to respond to attacks on anything outside of the system, and there's a fairly good chance that it'll be too slow to properly respond to attacks within the system unless your ships are fairly near the attack to start with. Remember that a 1-sector range is about the bare minimum range required to travel from one star system to the next, spend some time on station, and return home without running out of fuel, and your first colony is likely to require something closer to two sectors range just to visit, spend a small amount of time, and return home; 3 or 4 sectors range is about the minimum requirement if you expect to see combat and don't want to have to immediately return home for fuel. Thus, you should try to keep your mining operations as concentrated as possible, preferably within systems with a source of caslon so you can station a fleet at a caslon mining station, and the fuel source should probably be your first mine within the system.

One last thing to remember is that if you create any pre-warp designs and build some examples of these, and then upgrade that design with a hyperdrive of some sort but do not ensure that the design is buildable, you may end up stuck with ships lacking a hyperdrive until you research enough construction tech to upgrade them to the new design. If this is done with a civilian design, those ships will continue to sit around in your system, possibly slowly making runs between your homeworld and mining stations within your home system, and generally wasting the private sector's money; state ships with the same problem should probably be scrapped if you don't want to do a redesign, although if ship size is to increase shortly it may be worth keeping them around until you can upgrade them. Ships that do not have a hyperdrive are almost useless, except when defending a specific point within a system. Do note that upgrading military ships with Warp Bubble Generators can significantly reduce their firepower as you sacrifice components to make the new hyperdrive fit, so it is arguably not a bad idea to keep a design or two around that doesn't include a WBG in order to have a high-firepower defense vessel that you can move around within your home system. Still, if you're that concerned about defending things in your home system, you're probably better off turning your mining stations into fortresses or building a large collection of WBG-equipped ships than stationing slow ships which aren't hyperspace-capable around your system.

[Erik Rutins]

Personally, I enjoy fighting it out with pirates in the pre-warp era and seeing how well I can do. I still try to get hyperspace drives quickly, but I generally build a couple of fleets, one for my homeworld and another for my most important mining station.

Pre-hyperspace ships are significantly less expensive than hyperspace ships, so you can have a lot of them and without the space taken up by the hyperspace drive, you can give them decent defenses and firepower. Your disadvantages are speed and responsiveness.

You need some kind of defense ASAP, shields or armor. I often go for armor first and include a good helping of it on each of my pre-warp military ships. Speed and maneuverability are not a major priority until I have larger construction sizes available. I use a combination of rail guns and missiles to give them long range and shield piercing abilities. I have a few designs that are fully "monitor" ships. Very slow to save some more space, very heavily armored, with plenty of weapons.

Regards,

- Erik

[TheSAguy]

Thanks for the feedback!