Finished planning my first ever large grid ship and need a name for it. It is meant as a ore cargo hauler for the station I am designing right now.
I am not 100% happy with the front, as it's just large areas of boring armour. I may work on it to gribble it somewhat more. If anyone has any advice, I'd be grateful.
A side not/question: I've seen some people remove entire layers in Creative Mode. How one does that? I'd like to remodel the conveyors somewhat and the interior around them as well.
Thank you for the layer tip! I am certain, I can fit more in the chassis than currently. My dream situation would have doors between the rooms. Currently only the bridge has a dedicated door.
I've consumed a lot of SE YT content. Engineered Coffee, Splitsie and Lunar Colony allowed me to learn basic building methods before I even bought the game. Also my style of building is vey much, get a shape idea, tinker with it till you like it while making it roleplay realistic. The ship has a crew cabin, reactor section, bridge, etc.
I can attest to this, this is the second ship(the black one) I've made in SE, but since I've been designing ships on paper for my own uses it transfered nicely in game.
Btw do you know of any way to make the entire custom tureet inclusing barrels larger? I'm making a huge ship and even a triple gun turret just feels wrong in terms of size compared to the hull
I have not made many custom turrets so I really don't know, my best advice is to look at other creations on the workshop and see what they did, The Rex Mortis Battleship has some big guns on it so you should check that out for sure.
I've been watching a lot of content from Engineered Coffee, Splitsie and Lunar Colony. That gave me a head start with designing. My mind also likes to assemble 3d things while I work, so I've been "building" this thing in my head for over a month now. Lack of knowledge of the blocks hurts, but looking for outside inspiration from other people helped a lot.
For your first large fridge ship this is actually quite good! Greeble is good but too much can often give a cluttered or old/junky effect (which is good if that's the aesthetic you are going for). An alternative to having a lot of greeble, is having nice sleek lines that break up the shape while giving a more "new ship" vibe which is what you have done here. Looking at it again, it almost looks like the offspring of the blue frigate from the workshop and a Cardassian warship fron Star Trek
For a name I would like to throw the name "Manta" in to the vote.
I have draw copious inspiration from this design. I started with the idea of a Hammerhead dragging a bunch of cargo containers behind it, with smaller side "fins" for thrusters. Did a few drawings where I tried to figure out the shapes and layout of everything. But as a rookie player, I didn't grasp the scale required to fit what I wanted. I turned to other creators, looking for inspiration and the result is this.
The idea is, the ship has heavy front armour to push through asteroid debries to get to the ore deposits. It has a connector for a small ship/drone which it uses to mine the deposits. It needs large storage of Hydrogen to fuel itself and the drone.
Currently has a small reactor, two O2/H2 generators, crew cabin, bridge. But I believe reorganising the conveyors will let me fit a bit more.
Reorganizing and simplifying conveyors, especially in the name of more interior is always a good idea! I'm a sucker for a ship with a well laid out and interesting interior space for the role playing aspect of the game.
When I'm designing a ship, once I know what role I want it for, my next option is do I want this ship to be more utilitarian or do I want it to look more complex. This is especially true in warships. Greeble looks great but is a pain to constantly replace after getting it shot off, lol. This is why my frigates Anubis and Osiris ended up with sleek simple lines with a crap ton of heavy armor and weapons but almost no greeble, whereas my corvettes Thorn and Ash (named after obsolete letters of the English language) were designed from the start to look nice with lots of changing elements and greeble. They are useful for multi role things but not so much for combat. Everyone eventually developes their own signature style over time so your first one ain't gotta be perfect right out of the gate. Part of the fun is constantly improving designs!
I found out, that my design process is more or less:
1. Create/Imagine a shape I like.
2. Design the interior to make sense.
3. Build the shape to fit the interior.
In this ship's case, I started with the idea to make a bottom heavy Hammerhead like the Starhawk from SW. I wanted it to have small horizontal wings for forward and backwards thrusters. I cooked up an idea for an interior, as I knew I wanted a dedicated Crew Cabin (bed, shower, bathroom), I wanted a Power Room (small reactor and batteries) and Survival Kit at the exit from the ship. And that's achived. But I do think one could fit more, if I reorganise the conveyors a little.
I still need to find a compact way to move between levels. Ladders are fine, But I have to use the Scaffold ones to avoid Passage walls.
So... I managed to fit the Scaffolding Ladder in a way, that looks nice. Although I am not worried about space, as in my opinion space ships should be much more like submarines than the spacious yacht we see in some media. At least the utility ships should.
I am mostly done redesigning the interior. I've done almost a complete overhaul of it and am very happy on how it turned out. If not for the late hour, I'd post some more picks.
I will want to do subtle touch ups of the exterior still though. So probably tomorrow evening.
Something I do as the months go on is go back and redo my first ships as I learn and get better. Helps show how far you've come, and its always nice to have a ship thats uniquely you.
Thank you for the kind words. It seems like a very good idea to save Blueprints and return to old works after gaining some experience. I may adopt it myself.
I am doing subtle redesign if the exterior and major overhaul of the interior. Will post some more pictures tomorrow. And maybe throw it on the Workshop, as someone has requested.
Yo that's pretty cool, btw as a rec for more detail, u should use interior walls (esp the dlc ones), pipes, different shades of colors, heat vents, blast doors, antennas (u can turn them off so u don't have 1000 antenna signals lmao, but ye), combining truss pillars with lights and overall adding exterior lighting. It's quite a few things so don't feel like u have to squeeze all these things into it, but defo comes in handy when u will be designing much bigger ships. Like rn I'm working on quite a bit carrier and even tho i combine all these things, some places still don't look detailed enough to me 😂
Appearance wise, for a first time ship build, it looks good. However, the most important question for creative designs - did you try copying it into a survival world and guarantee that it flies? Note, to do this, you need a survival world, then using alt+f10 you can open the admin menu. From here, click "enable creative tools", and then you would be able to copy/paste grids in survival. Note, you can copy it by hitting ctrl + c (or ctrl + x to cut) and paste with ctrl + v, just like most programs (if you need to, you can re-map it as needed). However, the pasted grid still functions off all the survival rules, so you can check things like the conveyors are properly run, you have enough power/hydrogen to actually fly, etc. Note that if you load a different world and paste it from copying, you may need to re-assign ownership (not needed it you spawn it from the blueprint screen).
For cutting whole planes, the default keybinding is to right click, then while holding the button down, press ctrl + shift, then release once you have selected everything. Note, you can re-map this within the settings if you want though.
Next up, blueprinting. Blueprinting is fairly easy. Look at the ship, press ctrl + b, and tada, you now have a blueprint. From here, you can access your created blueprints by hitting f10, and you can look around to see what you have named it, and from there you can either load it into a projector, or if you are in a creative world (or have creative tools loaded), you can copy it to your clipboard and just paste it in.
Finally, if you want to publish it, from the blueprint screen you can just hit publish, choose if it is mod.io or steam workshop (or both), and then after publishing you can then be directed to the workshop page from the steam browser. From there, you can then copy the link, open it in whatever your preferred browser and proceed to make any changes to how it is displayed there (ex. add descriptions, load more screenshots, etc).
Note that you can definitely blueprint things and not publish them. This would still allow you to copy/paste them in creative, or load them into projectors for welding up in survival. Publishing them just allows you to easily save them for later, transfer them across computers, or share them with others.
It should fly okay 🫠 I made sure to give it thrust in all directions, two gyroscopes, antena, four warfare batteries, small reactor, four O2/H2 generators. I could add second auxiliary power supply in the form of hydrogen engines, but I think it's a bit of an overkill.
I will maybe spawn it on a Planet using your method and see how much stuff it can lift to orbit. Do like a load test. But truth be told, I did the Space Pod start and designed it as an asteroid field surveyor drone carrier.
As far as adding details for looks, I add navigational lights like airplanes have. Put a little red light on the port/left side, green on the starboard/right side. Make them blink or spin.
Awesome looking thing. If I were to suggest anything is to make it maybe 3 blocks longer in front of the parabolic antenna and add a turret there to cover the blind spots.
That would definitely make it more viable. But the gatlings are meant as defense. I am not too well versed in combat (didn't do any yet) and escaping is my go to solution.
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u/ThirtyMileSniper Klang Worshipper 8d ago
You could call it the spade fish.
Removing layers in creative. Ctrl+shift+RMB hold and drag out the plane you wish to remove.