Common improvements for beginners ships

Here is a list of things that can commonly be improved upon. If you want to experiment with the ships shown the first iteration and the finished ship are available to download. For more detailed information check out the Ultimate Ship Design and Part Guide (offsite link):

1. You should not put your storages on the main combat ship. Using a sperate cargo ship allows your flagship to much more compact which in turn increases efficiency.
2. Try to prevent Corridor spam. Think of your ship as more of a railroad system than a big place where you can freely move. Your corridor paths should only be one tile wide and your walkway paths only 2 wide. This will make the ship more compact.
3. The ship should not have an isolated block of crew quarters. Try to put the crew close the reactors (or storage for weapons). That way your supply will happen much more quickly.
4. Also put your reactors close to the systems that need them so that they get supplied more quickly.
5. Too much armor in places that don't need it. Only use little-to-no protection for the sides and the back and move internal armor to the outside instead.
6. Try to use the bigger reactors. Using one bigger reactor is way more cost-efficient than using many small ones. (Though in career crew efficiency may be the limiting factor.)
7. The ships crew should have assignments. This is most useful to prevent crew from walking across a reactor and losing a ton of time.
8. The ships reactors and storages should also be assigned. Otherwise crew will sometimes bring energy from another reactor on the other side of the ship.
9. The ship's crew should be separated into operator and supplier crew. This allows you to place the operators far away from their workplace without losing efficiency. There is also more space for suppliers next to the reactors for example.
10. You should use engine rooms. They are too strong not to be used on bigger ships. You should try to put as many engines as possible on each engine room. You shouldn't have 2 engines touching the same room since the buff doesn't stack.
11. The ships ion setup should be efficient. For more information see this offsite guide.
12. Refer to this chart to help understand the pro and cons of each weapon.

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  1. The removal of storages make the ship more compact: The engine supply is better and less armor is needed to defend the ship.
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  2. There was a lot of corridor which was completely unnecessary.
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  3. Placing the crew closer to the reactors significantly improved the ion uptime.
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  4. Here we placed the ammo a closer to the deck cannon, the capacitor closer to the point defence and the small reactor closer to the thrust. This allowed us to make the ship even more compact.
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  5. Our armor distribution was off: We had a lot of useless armor in the middle and a bit much on the sides and back. We instead moved the armor to the front where it is required to survive.
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  6. We removed all of the small reactors and just added 2 large reactors. This gives us enough power for everything and it costs significantly less (we have some power to spare in fact)
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  7. Now we assign our crew. Crew on the top should only supply on top and the bottom crew only on the bottom. The cew will not walk across the reactor this way. The crew next to the point defence should also only supply it.
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  8. Now we assign the reactors to make sure that our crew does not make the long journey to the wrong side just to get power. We also assign the capacitors to the point defence for the fastest supply.
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  9. Now we can give roles to our crew. The white crew are operators and can be further away from the reactors. The purple crew needs to be close to quickly be able to collect energy and deliver it.
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  10. The engine rooms were very badly utilized before: They only had 2 thrusters attached and one thruster which was shared between them.
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  11. Now we finally improved the ion core. It has 2 more ions now to make a nice binary tree. We also added some more protection to the front.

Now you know the basics of efficient design but there is much more to learn! For example even the ship we built in step 11 can be improved:

• It still has one major weakness: The backwards thruster forces a gap in the otherwise strong armor. Can that be fixed?
• The ship is not designed for career. It does not have hyperdrives or airlocks. Where can they still fit?
• You might want to protect the point defence with some small shields in case a projectile comes in from a bad angle.
• Multiple ion outputs deal more damage than one single small one. You can try to redesign the ship with more outputs in mind.
• The ship has a bridge but it really does not need this many command points.