So my small faction (me and the kids) has pretty much got to grips with survival around the universe. We’re now looking to move into some high risk areas and engage in some pvp - yarrrr
I’m looking for some pointers on pvp cv ship design. Got attacked the the other day - totally unprepared - and ran for cover into a pve planet. Made it ok but noticed some serious flaws with the CV i’m flying. A couple more volleys and he would have taken out my thrusters and then i’d be a sitting duck.
I don’t have a lot of time to play this game so can’t spend hours designing a ship - and most of what I can find on the workshop for PVP are either too big for our server or really outdated. So my thinking is to maybe modify an existing design a bit. Something like the Halifax maybe? I don’t know…
So any tips would be appreciated. We’re in this game for the pew pew and need to get up to speed asap!
you will not find many people willing to give you their PVP designs. You will get tips like don’t use windows to surround the core with loads of combat steel. To be honest at the moment its hard to destroy a CV. They will run out guns before losing warp.
Here is an old build of a PvP ship, that was used on HWS long time before I played here:
As you can read in the description it is not up to date, so don’t expect it to be very good compared to new builds. But I’m sure it will still perform better than most of the “beautiful” workshop ships you can find. A Halifax Rebuild for PvP? I would not waste time on that. Personally, I would still prefer an ugly ship I made on my own, if I had not the time to make it look nice.
If you want your ship to look good and be great at pvp you need to start from the outside in, and by that I mean build your frame what it looks like on the outside then thicken the walls 2-3 times on the sides bottom top and about 5x in front, then hold n connect to that ship and enable centre of gravity sometimes it doesn’t show straight away, it might be a bug but when you finally see it you will notice 2 speres on the line, one will be center of ship other will be center of mass according to weight distribution.
Best thing to do is build a 3x3x3 cube of RCS 2’s right on that center of mass the blue sphere as this will give your ship very nice turning speed. From there I would mark out where you want your cockpit close it off with blocks so you don’t accidently use that space for other modules, make an entrance to it and leave enough space for what ever you need, then with the rest of the space place 4-8 Large 3x1x1 Reactors in different parts of your ship making sure no 2 parts touch, then do the same with your thruster’s split the same direction thruster around so they aren’t too close to each other same with fuel and o2, try get your ship to 22-40m’s in all directions, if you don’t have enough space for that you can get away with about 30 forward thrust 15 upward thrust to get off the ground on heavy gravity 20 side to side 8 down and 10 backwards as breaks.
From there I would place about 10 Large 2x1x1 Ammo crates and fill the rest inbetween all those modules with solid cubes to protect them one your hull is breached, redundancy is king in pvp the more backups of each you have the longer you will hold.
I wouldn’t build a Hanger door on a PvP ship even as a carrier as someone with their sv can fly into it and bug out your ship it’s a massive weak point’s. If you want docking points I suggest at the bottom of your ship leave a flat area with a elevator shaft and door under it and have docking pads on the top of your cockpit so when you dock and exit your vehicle you can move upwards through the door with blue barrier into the elevator shaft and be safe from temperature and radiation.
With Outside guns It’s best to stack them cascading like steps so that no turret is facing the back of another and unable to fire, so usually a thin front and thicker back of a ship will provide you with the most firepower. Also most people use the max cap of every single gun available but this could be their down fall as its very ammo inefficient, It’s usually better to choose a few gun types that you like using Eg for me its Arty + Pulse + Rocket + Cannon and have only those ammo type’s, you will run out of ammo long after your enemy that uses everything will.
Another thing is to sink your turrets slightly into the hull so that they don’t recieve a lot of fire, but you need to leave enough space for them to still have a decent angle of fire available else your nerfing your dps Also make sure to go into p menu and setup what you want each gun to focus on firing at, having too many options per gun will split your dps too much over the surface of the enemy ship, and focus fire is always a lot stronger in pvp encounters.
Fuel tank explodes, ammo boxes explodes, damaging all around, if you have another right next to first one, it will explode too, always separate these, and dont put them all in one place. Fuel rooms and ammo rooms as you see them on Workshop PvE ships are cancer.
Good way how to armor something is to have air gaps between layers.
And its good to have warp drive and warp tank somewhere at hand so you can replace them even under fire. No warp, good bye.
Very good tips, Kogami! Maybe we should create a PvP ship building guide here on HWS. It would be very useful for newcomers and maybe encourage them to join PvP
One very important aspect of a PvP design you forgot to mention are chain reactions:
Ammo boxes and fuel tanks will explode one after another if they are put directly beside each other and if one of them is destroyed. So always have space between them. I prefer to seperate them with combat steel. If you don’t want to waste much of your space, at least build compartiments.
This way you make sure that you never lose all of your ammo boxes / fuel tanks at once.
Im pretty sure you can put them wherever you want, no need for thruster’s flame to have free space also it wont damage anything, only warm you a bit up when you ar enear. Put them inside, protect by blocks, at least some to be sure you can move no matter what part of ship will be missing.
Also you might download PvE ship from workshop and make it PvP, ugly and deadly some of us loves this tuning. And last thing, so far it seems 7.0 is behind doors and there will be new building tools, so if you dont have whole day to play might be good to wait, it will be much less timeconsuming in 7.0 (copy&paste sections of structures)
Ahh yea you can put them inside your ship I have extras on the outside becuase it looks awsum xD but beware of the blue flames coming through the steel as enemies will know where to shoot your ship lol
