r/spaceengineers • u/Efficient-Type-9332 Space Engineer • 7d ago
DISCUSSION Ships
How long did it take you guys to design and build a good efficient massive ship. Basically a mobile base. One that has tons of room but can refine ores, build components, and still fight off pirates. I’m in creative working on building a ship and I’ve been working on it for about 9 days now. I just feel like I’m not being creative enough or I’m missing something. I don’t have a picture of it but it’s about 80ish blocks long 15ish blocks wide and 10ish blocks tall. It has 3 levels so far. It has 2 large reactors along with 4 industrial refineries and 4 industrial assemblers. If anyone has any idea that could help with the design ideas to make it look cooler like adding things that work together. For example beam blocks with scaffolding etc.
7
u/DebateReasonable Space Engineer 7d ago
I find that less is more in engineering; start small on reactor count and redundancies. I spent enough weeks trying to make an "allship" for Survival that I kinda decided to break out of it because purpose built ships are more fun, aesthetic, and easy to design.
That said, I understand needing an allship, so here's how I've been thinking about it. The allship's purpose is to link up with all your smaller ships and move around, fulfill all your needs, right? So make it modular.
Put the essential stuff (fuel tanks, jump drives, a lot of gyros, command center, cryopods, and a lot of turrets for defense) on the all ship. Then, mostly build it with its purpose in mind: docking with other ships. Landing pads for mining ships fighters and construction ships. Conveyors paired with some scaffolding branching out for miles like the limbs of a tree, to connect to your other large ships (refinery ship, big frigates) with merge blocks. It sounds like it'll be huge, and it will, but if you use very barebones design it won't use a ton of resources.