falcon500 Ouch, that seemingly was quite the miscalculation on Alpha's side...
He sadly lacks time lately, so you might aswell try beating the 'Plainswalker V2' also known as my I/C-Wall while I take a look at your design.
^ I/C-Wall (complete version; there is a prototype version without Flak, but this is the real deal so feel free to go wild.)
'Plainsbeater', huh? No worries I'll go talk someone into opening a Naming Academy for us after typing this, so there's nothing to worry about.
It's actually gotten quite late around here so I'm tempted to send you over to Oneye's (new) building guide and call it my day but you probably already read it, so it appears I happen to have to do my jop properly. Well, good for you...
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Place ammo factories next to or behind cannons and flak; they don't explode as violently as other factories
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Reactors are costy, try to use as few as possible while still keeping your ship fully functional; placing them close to shields is a good strategy to increase the reload time of the latter, giving a shield a dedicated reactor wastes much of the reactors potential energy output and costs too much to be worth it in almost every case
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Armor is quite heavy and costs 3 times as much as corridors (and 6 times the price of structure), limit its use to sections that really need it instead of filling empty space with it; (corridors work as spacefiller for aesthetic ships, use structure/nothing in any other case)
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PD has become quite weak and has only a small effect against anything other than HE-missiles (and even then); flak is better at shooting stuff down and can take way more hits, but can be hard to fit
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EB is only effective against shields and energy weapons and even then requires several turrets; 4-8 EBs in a price range from 0,75 to 2 million seem to work best, more is usually overkill and uses up space for other weapons, less rarely has any noticeable effect
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Try to only use needed doors, their price of 200 credits each adds quite some extra cost when stacked
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When powering thrusters you only have to account for the maximum amount of thrusters facing in the same direction (+ ~1/2 of the biggest amount not facing the opposite direction)
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Crew are slow, costy and have issues supplying anything over more than 5 tiles (unless you used corrdiors correctly); moving factories and reactors as close to the things they supply without making it too easy for the enemy to take them out really helps reducing the needed amount of crew while simultaneously the resupply time
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LBs are rarely used at designs costing more than 750.000 due to the rather low dps; LCs and HLBs are better alternatives on larger ships, the cannons deal massive amounts of damage, but heavy lasers offer better accuracy and firerate and only need energy to function; (experience says that there is a point somewhere around 4 million credits where a ship can hardly be effective without oversized mainweapons (railguns/ ion arrays) or some large cannons, but there's likely some pro capable proving the opposite)
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Large thrusters have a better ramp-up/thrust/cost ratio than huge thrusters
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There are some ways of increasing the efficiency of your armor (the armor/structure grid you used beeing one of them), normal 1x1 armor blocks aren't on that list tho; (I personal prefer 1x2 armor interlacing mixed with some structure/spacing, makes for some good mix of durability and weight reduction)
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Make sure to spread your FE out to allow crew to fight fires on every spot (including the thrusters)
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The position of thrusters relative to the center of mass influences their behavior, those closer to it are better at moving a ship in the direction they are facing but those further away from it are better at turning a design
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Oh, I almost forgot, but the tip has too much armor (few things will ever get through half as much) and a ship of this size/cost should have more than a single CR
That's it from me for now.
PS: Your design had more trouble fighting my I/C-Wall than the Plainswalker, which is quite odd considering the fact your plainsbeater won against the -walker which is of the same type as my ship and has more firepower.
