I have been looking for and been unable to find what I would like in a CV. I tried to build one and instead had a monstrosity that was HUGE and barely had any room in it, and was almost too expensive to take off. I see some "starter" CV's but they generally seem small hangar and want to get you out of system, and then warships, before ending in the grand flagships. I want to find a CV to be able to carry 2 HV's and 2 SV's, warp of course, and a little crafting. So many have so much space added for bed rooms, and social areas or greenhouses. I have to have a base somewhere as I have not figured how to repair a CV well without repair bay, so since having a repair bay may as well have a farm at a semi-base area. I have been using the Kriel-Shade but its hangar is very small but I love the ship to no ends. Is there a low level CV with plenty of hangar space and not a lot of fluff?
let me know if you find one. Some times you have to just settle for a ship and make it your own. My buddy and I have been running the GigaCore-EX2 created by jrandall with a lot of modifications to "make it your own" but it is not a low-level CV. Good luck
Try this https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2199430575 We had a couple of funny moments on this ship when we got to a planet with high gravity (3g), but we managed to upgrade and save ourselves on the go I recommend first loading it into Creative mode and removing the Growing Plot blocks from it. Then it will be quite easy to build it from scrap materials, even without a large starting base.
I know a lot of people will tell you to build a new ship from the outside in. What they don't seem to realize is that you can only do this kind of eyeballing in you have enough experience already. If you're just starting out, you're not going to know what kind of spaces machinery needs, how much cargo room they need, how to arrange thrusters, etcetera. Instead of trying to envision the end product before starting, I recommend building the ship from the inside out, one carbon substrate room at a time, starting with whatever part of the ship does its main mission. Just about any mission section will do. It just depends on what capability you need the ship to provide for you; a cargo hold, a weapons array, a drilling rig, anything. You say the CV needs to carry four or so small craft and not be too expensive? That's an excellent design doc to start from. The hangar is a great place to start. Think about how SVs and HVs will board, launch, and be stored in the hangar. Think about just how many you think you'll need to carry. Once you've got those rough ideas scratched out, it's time to make a box out of carbon composite blocks and stick one or more hangar doors on it. If at some point you decide to add in a large cargo hold, replacing the floor blocks of your hangar with it usually works very well. The next job is the machine spaces, crew support spaces, and bridge. How you arrange these rooms will roughly define the body shape of the ship, but it doesn't really matter as much as you might think where they go. You need to see to steer from the bridge, and keep in mind how a ship's machinery effects its center of mass, but these are easy to accommodate. The most important thing is to visualize what it's like to inhabit these spaces as you play. If the rooms doesn't perfectly align or lead to odd shapes, so be it. You can always greeble a steel cozy around it later. For this build, I recommend starting the crew space directly off the interior door of the hangar. This is the living area, providing all the functions a players personally needs after returning from a survey or mining trip. Bare minimum, you need medical chamber for respawns and healing, O2 station for suit oxygen, and a refrigerator to store food. Other considerations include a bed for passing time in single player, an armor locker for swapping space suits and mods, shower and toilet facilities, additional medical equipment and/or medicine storage (important if you plan on exposing your person to hostile aliens), storage for small arms and gear, equipment repair station, even a garden and food processor for long-duration journeys. Decorative furniture blocks are also a good idea for making the ship feel less like a large piece of equipment and more like a player character's home. Think of the dinner table from Firefly. A ship's engineering room can go just about anywhere, but a central location is usually preferable. A ship's machinery is likely some of the most massive, and thus will do a lot to define the center of mass , and thus the turning axis, of the vessel. Plus if it gets shot up, the ship is dead, so it's good to have less important part of the ship in the way to get shot up first. It's probably best to place it above the crew space and/or hangar and access by elevator, since the hangar needs to be low to accommodate HVs. Machinery space can be troublesome because you'll likely have to rejigger it some both during the design process and when making future upgrades or refinements. You can accommodate both by leaving extra space in your machinery/engineering room. Keep your ceiling at least three blocks high. Play around with different positions for the warp drive, generators, pentaxid tank, gravity generator, and fuel/oxygen storage. Generators in particular should be positioned to be easily supplemented or replaced by larger versions, especially if you plan on having a shield at some point. A cargo box (or ammo box if you plan on having a few sentry guns or other defenses) for extra fuel, oxygen, and other ship supplies is also a good idea. Keep in mind, most of these devices are hazardous to be near, so you'll want to try and keep safe areas in the engineering room to stand. The bridge is where you're actually going to be flying from, so it needs to be placed so you can see forward (usually the bow). I usually assume a one-to-three person crew consisting of a pilot, copilot, and captain will need seating. For a civilian ship, visibility is king. You want to be able to see as much as possible from the pilot seat. An LCD for navigational notes such as the locations of autominers is also helpful. Things get more complicated on combat ships, which need to worry about protection more than visibility, but that's another build. The only thing I'd add is to strongly consider armored windows instead of basic ones. They take some extra titanium plates and glass, but they're much tougher. With the interior rooms all laid out, it's finally time to work on the exterior. Your job now is to wrap the entire ship in cool-looking steel blocks. Sleek, chunky, boxy, it doesn't matter. If it looks good and covers up the carbon composite blocks beneath, it works. Any gaps or void spaces between are no problem. In fact, such gaps are great places to store extra fuel and oxygen tanks. Now that you have a beautiful armored box, it's time to add some thrusters and make it a ship. Vanilla CV thrusters are all rather powerful, so this part is pretty easy. The biggest concerns are how the thrusters contribute turning torque and their power drain. It can be a little complicated, but once you understand the basic concept, the possible thruster layouts you could design are practically infinite. The trick is to turn on the center of mass view with the N key. Imagine that CoM dot as a fixed axis of rotation. Now imagine a thruster firing in a given placement, and how that would spin ship. How strongly and in what direction that thruster position spins the ship tells you how much it helps the ship turn on those axes. Play around with thruster placement along the hull and see how the ship moves. Then, try placing thrusters out on wings or other structures away from the hull. Your most important vectors are forward and lifting thrust. Braking and especially lateral and downwards thrust don't need to be nearly as powerful on a non-combat ship. As little as one small thruster can be enough for a skilled pilot. Make sure you know you can move with full thrust forwards, upwards, and to one side all simultaneously without overloading your generators. Once you've got the thrusters laid out in such a way that you like how the ship maneuvers, you're on the home stretch. Time for some fixturing and texturing. You'll want to make sure each compartment has doors and a ventilator. Individual rooms might also need some non-airtight doors. This is also the time to add lighting. It's generally enough to place a few and set their radius to twenty meters, but you can get more complicated if you wish (hey, lights are cheap). Final internal devices are probably a detector and wireless devices. The CV detector has the longest range of all three vessel types, making CVs almost better scouts then SVs. Wireless devices have a range of one hundred meters. Add more than one to opposite ends of very long ships if a single device proves inadequate. Once the interior is properly oxygenated and lit, it's time to head outside. Landing gear, spotlights, and a boarding ramp are your goals now. Every ship needs at least some spotlights, either for seeing the ground or objects ahead. Landing gear can be tricky. It helps a lot to view the center of mass when placing them, so you can keep your ship from tipping over parked at non-flat angles. A boarding ramp can take up more room than you'd think. But, since you've already got a low hangar for loading HVs, you've got plenty to spare. Right along the inner wall next to the interior door is a perfect spot. Other good spots are open crew areas next to O2 stations and armor lockers, and dedicated docking/boarding rooms. This is also the the time to place any sentry guns or other defensive turrets. A few well-placed sentries really help when you need to park in a rough neighborhood. Now begins the final phase; texturing. This does not include only the color & texture tool. Any carbon composite shapes you wish to use as decorative greebles, flare blocks (both blinking and non-blinking), and LCD signage are added in this last step. You don't have to go totally crazy. A simple floor and wall texture combo, a base color with black and white accents, some carbon composite piping in the engine room, some console decos around the bridge, picnic bench seating around the fridge, little touches like these add a lot of aesthetic value for not a lot of effort. You can always come back later add more if you want. One last thing on the topic of signals. If you can do them, go for it. A few automatic door and constructor toggles on the control panel can be very useful. But if you don't want to bother with them, nobody's gonna blame you. Logic circuits can be something of an arcane art. I doubt very much that anyone would be able to read this post and suddenly be able to produce masterpieces that set the workshop on fire. Hopefully, though, this methodology can get you through designing a couple decent ships in a reasonable amount of time, and then you'll have enough experience to find your own best practices and ways of doing things.
Wow thank you for this post, I have book marked it and guess I will give it another go at making my own.
my daughter and I started out using this ship. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=974961108 I do not know if it can be easily modified to work in 1.1 we had great fun and learned much about what we wanted from a ship using it. we made several modifications to it through a9 and possibly a10 but by a11 were using ships of our own designs
Kudos to @The Big Brzezinski for an excellent write-up. Between the prefabs and the workshop, there are a LOT of designs out there. I've probably loaded up 10 in creative mode for each one that I actually built in survival mode. I've modified every ship I've used based on changing capabilities and needs, including my own designs. I went through at least a half dozen different CVs in survival before I built one from scratch. Even a "small" CV is big and messy and complicated. I also share your frustration with things like bedrooms. The role play aspects often look great, and definitely belong in NPC bases and craft, but I don't want anything in my personal CV that isn't actually functional and useful. On the flip side, those spaces usually end up filled up with more useful gear in the long run. I don't think anybody else mentioned it, but repairing a CV is easy now. Just fly to any friendly trading station and pay them some credits. Fast and easy. It's usually very cheap if no blocks are actually destroyed. It can get pretty expensive if you took major damage. You'll get a Station Services tab on the control panel when you're close to the base.
Rather than write a novella, tell you to download something, or any of that, I'll point you in the direction I go when facing these kinds of issues: Creative Mode You can build freely, with no cost for resources and experiment all you like. If you come up with a design that suits your needs, blue print it and produce it via the factory in the "real" game. The best players are not just good players, but also good builders, as building in a large part of what Empyrion is all about, and it does you no favors going "Here, download this.". Oh, and for repairing a CV: Build a small base in orbit with a repair bay and console. Makes them both easy and cheap to repair, as stations often charge a premium for repairs.
@IndigoWyrd : You're right from a long run perspective but if you'd joined the game during spring 2020 (like me) or summer 2020 (like @Treeost), you'd just need exposition to what a good build is. So, not to ruin the survival side, you need something usable immediately. Then, you can learn functionalities and eventually deconstruct things to see how they were made. I initially tried to make wy own CV as you suggested, without having used or deconstructed any other one, and (maybe it's me) it was an unusable poor thing lacking of everything. And I do not agree as for the Creative Mode being the absolute testing ground. Many things do lack in Creative to properly assess if a build is functional. The only test to me is Survival so, provided you do not allow yourself a (third) test environment (as for development/testing/production), you'll have to pay in Survival mode for what you made wrong in Creative.
In my first days of Empyrion I used both, survival and creative. There's no real way to do it, players discover a new game with lots of options and the Creative mode is as much fun for newbies as survival. It allows to see and "feel" all devices, the size of big CV thrusters and how fiddly it is to place them correctly, and it's easy to see if one is going to like building or not by trying it in creative. I made a few CVs in survival, but that's an adventure in itself, and to be honest after doing it once I didn't see how I could have as much fun (which was not much) doing it a second time. I still tried but after making half of it I would simply go to creative and complete it, or go to space and use godmode/ itemmenu/ spawnblueprints to build and test is the same savegame.
Hey you don't build anything in Survival, merely adding stairs to a base... building is in Creative. But apart of seing whether it flies, testing is in Survival (actual speed, fuel consumption, ah no information about solar energy, 4G wtf ?, oxygen wtf I have a leak, hull ? what is combat steel worth when I do not face enemies...) . So when reverse engineering things, I take something good from Survival (downloaded !), then analyze it in Creative. Just that. You guys are all Rear Admirals and respectable for this but how you learned the game is not the way new guys can learn the game today. No offence, we the new guys can just use shortcuts, that was my only point and I will stop spamming this thread now. Cheers and long live the Admirals !
You're not "spamming the thread" at all. By the way I did write that there is not one way to do things. I used the workshop maybe twice just to see huge builds, and that was enough for me. I don't mind others using it for all their needs and I can't criticize suggestions regarding the workshop, it's just not interesting me and surely many others. I build all my ships in survival now, in space, using codes. I don't make "crew quarters" because that is dead mass to grind fuel for.
I can do a "live" survival build, and I do make use of "crew quarters", though they tend to be far more functional than fashionable. Great place to hide a toilet and shower. But when experimenting with new ways of doing things, making use of shapes I don't normally use, I find the cost-free environment of Creative to be a boon. As for determining a vessel's combat capabilities - let's face fact here - combat against the AI is combat versus the AI. It's very "A" with little "I" involved. AI combat is incredibly predictable and severely lacking in tactics.
I like this one and it still seems to work fine in 1.1: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1929624106 There is a cheaper "starter" version which you can upgrade to this. Then I usually go further with my own tweaks.
I do a quick and dirty hack in creative mode, tweak it in game to iron out the wrinkles (or rebuild the thing entirely), then later back into creative to finish it.
I started the game and knew nothing about the workshop and creative mode. I wanted to play. My first CV in the game was the Pelican Hauler from the game's own Prefabs. It has a large hanger with 3 entrances. Perfect for 4 small to medium-sized SV / HVs. Everything else is minimized. The infirmary kicked out and a captains quarters built in. Then I used the good piece until the end of the game. I upgraded and rebuilt it in the course of my game and learned how things work. Everything in survival. It was the perfect apprenticeship. Only in the 2nd round under hardcore survival conditions did I build my own SV instead of a base, based on the same basic idea of Big Brzeinski from a shoe box that grew with the child. It was also a lot of fun.
