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[DraQ]

i.e. could you recapitulate your designs and show that they have improved greatly over the years, to when you started the game?

I'm more of a "explore ideas" and "build cool shit" kind of guy than "iterate through a design until perfection" and I've only had this game since little before the latest patch. Still, you'll find a lot of examples of the latter by other players. There's been design tournaments on the official forums and stuff like that.

The main issue with honing your designs to absolute perfection is that stock stuff is very suboptimal so it kind of feels hollow unless you get someone else's custom stuff to play against - preferably with both sides refining their designs as they go - this game really needs MP it doesn't have.

The game is definitely complex enough to allow some non-obvious choices - even seemingly no-brainers like running your reactors very hot to minimize radiator area or maximizing thrust at given exhaust velocity (assuming you have made sure the crew won't get jellied) to maximize manoeuvrability can turn out to be less than obvious when it turns out that very hot radiators that are already close to their melting point flash off very easily when hit by nukes or that your ship has effectively no endurance in combat and immediately runs out of propellant after which its superior manoeuvrability no longer matters.

And again I want to stress the amount of customization you get in CoADE - that game in your sig allowing you to fit different engine models? What if you could actually *make* your engines including engine type, amount of cylinders, their dimensions, materials and fuel used as well as fuel mixture proportions? And same for all the other components?

The combat scenarios aren't just "drop ships, see what happens" either - this may be not that far from truth for battles around asteroids, but in serious gravity wells delta-v and acceleration both suddenly matter and you have many different options that may or may not suit your designs and fleet composition.

Plus, again, it's fucking space battles with technology that has actually been built IRL, even if just as prototypes and proofs of concepts. There are no things in this game - neither technologies, nor materials - for which the author couldn't find the formulae and numbers to punch in - no phazors, neutronium, FTL, deflectors or even fusion drives.

 

[DraQ]

Burning Bridges
Although, you know what?
My "Dragon" class (available on whoreshop) can be considered the kind of iterative design you're after:

• Started out as modified Laser Frigate with a whole slew (15) of redundant 60MW coilgun turrets (small, stupidly high rate of fire) on the nose and some titanium nitride hardening - capable of beating single gunship, but not without taking severe beating.
• Quickly got extra NTRs (up to 12) and partial armour to reduce sluggishness.
• Got extra reactor
• Some 60MW coilguns replaced with 100MW (lower exit velocity, but more accurate and heavier round), number of nose mounted ones reduced to 3 - still allowing to fire as many as reactor power allowed the moment shooting started, with the rest being allowed to track and join in the meantime, as the nose ones got destroyed or needed to cool down.
  
• Added chemical Meth-LOx verniers, reduced NTRs count to 6, added a large bunch of Meth-LOx afterburners in the middle - not as much endurance, but superb manoeuvrability.
  
• New version! Switched to new pentagonal, form fitting armour, restored full armor coverage at the price of thickness, extended titanium nitride plating, added graphite aerogel whipple stuffing and some CVD diamond plating on the nose. Added another cluster of 60.4MW reactors in the front (brinigng the count up to 5), increased number of nose mounted 60MW coilguns correspondingly.
• Experimented with new blast missile launchers.
• Switched vernier setup to assist rolling.
  
• Experimented with shorter range heavy hitting variant, scrapped, but yielded some good insight. Also experimented with several frigate models (finally scrapped as well, but they were good).
  
• Decided nose mounted coilguns weaken the armour too much, moved them backwards - nice sloping at the cost of short delay at the beginning of battle
• Switch to octagonal in attempt to get more delta-v and less cross section, altered verniers to match.
• Beat Vesta (poorly) using selection of stock ships and one of my frigates with dead man's remotes - custom modules!
• Customization spree - essentially the same ship, but much better propulsion and armament including nuclear and later nuclear/frag/continuous rod autocannons - can breeze through Vesta; added MPDs for interplanetary cruise mode
  
• switched from Meth-LOx to mini-NTR verniers (slight hit to agility but superior endurance), reworked armaments due to much smaller fire control crew (needed to accommodate fuckton of nuclear engineers and technicians).
• Massive reworking changing ship's arrangement convention (purely notional dorsal-ventral axis rotated 90 degrees), armour shape (to hexagonal), armaments and pretty much everything, started working on V2.0 variant.
  
• Readjusted crew position, decided to restore stock variant (along with Meth-LOx) for export purposes using new design - was super effective, with even stock variant soloing Vesta or beating 5 gunships (game's equivalent of battleship - heaviest stock direct combatant available) simultaneously with superior performance, similar mass and less cost than a single one
  
• Added 240MW variants of both stock and custom version with only 4 reactors, but better delta-v, started experimenting with external tanks.
• Further armor tweaks, added auxiliary power generation in the form of RTGs (ship can now manoeuvre and fire conventional CIWS without any reactors working), added flare launcher (scramming the reactors and retracting radiators allows dropping of heat signature to levels manageable by sanely sized decoys).
• Decided to abandon V2.0 and repurpose work in progress as frigate
• Some further armour and tankage adjustments, re-added missiles
• Switched to hybrid launcher setup.
• Ongoing further small tweaks to armour.

tl;dr
Went from barely tackling a single gunship with this:

Through easily beating one with this:

Through breezing through Vesta with this, leveraging superior armaments:

To breezing through Vesta or punching 5x above its weight without even *needing* superior modules with this:

 

[Burning Bridges]

Sounds like exactly my kind of game, I was just not motivated and lazy to try it out. Also as it's a one man project it can never have enough development time.

And again I want to stress the amount of customization you get in CoADE - that game in your sig allowing you to fit different engine models? What if you could actually *make* your engines including engine type, amount of cylinders, their dimensions, materials and fuel used as well as fuel mixture proportions? And same for all the other components?

It does all that and I think it's very similar. It's totally hilarious when I show people how I played this game for a large part with Excel where I calculated and perfected my tech over 6 years, and compiled a huge database like a car manufacturer

I take great pride now that I have the fastest laptimes on Steam now. I don't think they are the absolute best worldwide but I do get better results with small cars and Excel calculated optimums, when many other guys build unfeasible monsters and probably have nothing but headache.

 

[DraQ]

Sounds like exactly my kind of game, I was just not motivated and lazy to try it out. Also as it's a one man project it can never have enough development time.

And again I want to stress the amount of customization you get in CoADE - that game in your sig allowing you to fit different engine models? What if you could actually *make* your engines including engine type, amount of cylinders, their dimensions, materials and fuel used as well as fuel mixture proportions? And same for all the other components?

It does all that and I think it's very similar. It's totally hilarious when I show people how I played this game for a large part with Excel where I calculated and perfected my tech over 6 years, and compiled a huge database like a car manufacturer

I take great pride now that I have the fastest laptimes on Steam now. I don't think they are the absolute best worldwide but I do get better results with small cars and Excel calculated optimums, when many other guys build unfeasible monsters and probably have nothing but headache.

With CoADE you can always head to the official forum and bang heads with people there, possibly even take part in tourneys and challenges, or wave dicks at each other in whoreshop.

Plus, in CoADE building an engine looks more or less like this:

Space autism is the best autism.

 

[Burning Bridges]

 

[J1M]

Space For{ce/um}!

 

[DraQ]

I want to force space forum for games that are obviously about space. I mean, why else was it formed?

 

[DraQ]

Ok, CoADE thread finally got moved where it belongs.

Many thanks, attaching spaces of aproval: