Tickytickytango I can't make that design work at that scale. It's way too low on ammo factories and the wings are too thin to fit forward facing shields into far enough out to cover the whole front. Properly wrapping shields around corners takes too much space to do so close to cannons so the side coverage is also lost.
I wound up four tiles longer to accomodate the turning the wing shields forwards and putting some turning thrusters in the tail and two tiles wider to fit a centerline shield. It's unavoidably vulnerable to chain reactions when the ammo factories are full, but the reactors are all separated by either enough space or an armor partition so that they won't chain instantly. They can still cause fires that will spread to other reactors, but it has enough fire extinguishers to deal with that.
Unfortunately, it's about 25% more expensive. I can't keep the size and cost down and improve protection without removing two of the cannons, which doesn't hurt its sustained firepower but does completely wreck its alpha strike. The larger version does decisively beat the original at a 4:3 ratio and fights can go either way depending on which AI decides to be mind bogglingly stupid at 3:2.
s36350 I'm not going to try to upgrade mod ships, including the large build box.
