- Edited
I've been through plenty of phases over the course of my ship designing. The first ones of course are always the smallest, assuming you're starting from the campaign. But then they grow and mature, as you earn more credits or begin to branch out into creative mode, and understand more and more what makes a good ship in Cosmoteer. So what phases have you guys gone through in your main competitive designs? Have you changed styles very much from when you began? Here's my story:
This is the first real main ship that I used during the campaign- the idea being that a minimum surface area was best to avoid damage to the internals of the ship:
Next, I upsized, and added "wings" (mostly for extra mobility):
It should be noted that the awesome paintjob was applied later, when I had way too much time on my hands.
Then I decided to make a truly fearsome capital ship, one that would destroy anything the game could possibly throw at me...
The idea behind this station was to constantly rotate, ensuring the shields were maintained and given time to recharge, and that the mixture of cannons and teslas would be given time to reload while those on the other sides of the ship were turned toward the enemy to fire. Plenty of armour and point defence, for a balanced defence, and plenty of missiles (since missiles are A: awesome, B : long-range, and C: able to fire even when facing away from the enemy). I gave it an awesome paintjob, a ridiculously armoured core for the hell of it, and was satisfied.
Untill I discovered the slight problem with chain reactions in the reactor blowing entire corners of the ship to hell.
Much later, I designed the mk. II variant, mostly by copy/pasting the sides of the mk. I multiple times:
I made an effort to prevent reactor chaining, added more fire extinguishers (not that anyone uses them anyway), added more teslas and made the core around twice as big and reinforced with shields. This is the largest I could possibly make this station without making it completely square, which would also limit its ability to fire two sides at once, have greater surface area and not look as cool. When constantly rotating, this ship is nigh indestructible against others in it's credit class.
It also, in my opinion, has the raddest paintjob of all time.