Ship Design Tips
These tips might be easier said than done, but here’s some advice from me:
- Use angled armor to form out your shape from Basic Box to Proper Ship. Just make sure you have the thrusters to compensate for the weight.
- Try to picture the ship as though it were in three dimensions. How would sections be cordoned off? How would everything be positioned on the inside? Let the outside be informed by that.
- Avoid the temptation to make every ship bristle with weapons. Purpose build your ships. Is it a trade vessel, a miner, or a military vessel? If it is armed, is it a little patrol craft meant to protect orbital stations, a destroyer meant to be agile and take down larger ships with heavy weaponry, or a screening vessel designed to be big and bulky and physically shield still bigger ships? Not all military ships require tons of weapons. Sometimes one or two well-placed guns do wonders.
And as for some tips for methodology, here are a few you might try to get yourself in the aesthetic mindset:
- Take real world battleships as inspiration. How many guns did they have? How were they positioned? Use that as inspiration and see how you interpret it in space.
- Try placing down key systems in blueprint mode first, then connect it up. Start with your thruster block(s) and cockpit. Add a weapon or two. Then seek to add duplicates of what you already have very sparingly if at all as you tie everything together with corridors, support systems, and armor.
- Head to this generator, generate some single-deck plans (many will be multiple decks), and try to recreate them in Cosmoteer. Since this doesn’t show the exterior shape all the time, you’ll have to use armor to build a shape around those core designs.
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