I have been given feedback on my designs by another forum member, and apparently storage is considered as a liability and have been advised to cut any storage and go for straight factories and reactors and in fact this increased my ship's output greatly. So I am wondering, what is the actual purpose of storage?
So is storage pretty much pointless?
storages,especially battery storages allow faster transfer of batteries in a short time,but the by-product is to have some crew to refill the storage when it is empty
Power storage can be useful because unlike a reactor it does not explode. So if you need power in a part of the ship that is vulnerable to being damaged a power storage can be better than a reactor.
Currently missile and ammo storage do not appear to be useful for a normal ship since they are still explosive and are emptied very fast.
Bullet Storage is useless. Power Storage is complete opposite.
Missile storage is always completely useless. The missile bottleneck is crew, not ammo.
Ammo storage is usually useless. It's only good in specific situations for bursts of attacking.
Power storage is situational. It can be useful sometimes since it's cheap and doesn't explode.
Well, some people set up multiplayer matches with the "start with full power and ammo" settings enabled. I haven't tried it yet but it's probably viable to have at least one uber alpha strike ship that doesn't have any factories or plasma cores, and just spends the money saved on more firepower.
I've found bullet storage useful to split a longer hauling task into two short hauling tasks for better crew response when space constraints prevent the ammo factories being next to the weapons.
For example alternating this module
with this module
There is no way to get the ammo factories any farther forward and able to feed both cannons due to door constraints. Without the ammo storage there will be breaks in firing due to the guns not generating hauling jobs soon enough.
I've never run into the same issue with missiles even though missile factories are larger. Missile batteries tend not to be as width constrained and benefit little from very dense shielding because of their extremely wide firing arcs. If one were trying to maximize launcher and shield density one might use missile storages similarly.
Energy storages can help with drain spikes on shields. A reactor cannot optimally serve two shields, but a reactor and a storage can if no other nontrivial components are leaching or if there's access to the power supplies for other shield sections that aren't being shot at. This is the only case where storage should be used as storage rather than as a way to split a hauling job in two.
Interesting read, thank you
Radix The benifit of storage is that it is less explosive, and can provide an “alpha strike” by adding a quicker to access store for ammo, during the early stages of a battle. These can also prove valuable in situations such as sheilds, where the storage allows a sheild to still be maintained during the stage of alpha strike.
energy and ammo storages are most of the time usefull for bigger or very big ship,where you have space to deal with hiding reactor into save place instead putting them into vulnerable spots, or,when you need to somehow make better crew pathing. But in general, source of suply is better as close s possible to its delivery place.