Avorion – General Ship-Building Newbie Tips

Here you can find some general ship-building newbie tips.

Beginners Tips to Ship-Building

All credit goes to umop-apisdn!

• Turn on the “show all ship stats” so you can see what each block is doing when you add it.
• Match your acceleration and deceleration, leaning toward having more deceleration.
• For control, iron “Inertial Dampeners” are great, and so are gyros (make sure to rotate your gyros to cover all 3 axes). Throw thruster blocks as far from the middle of the ship as you can, and put engines absolutely wherever.
• Integrity field generators are an absolute must; they quadruple the strength of any block they cover.
• Shield generators (once you find the glowing green goodies) are an excellent way to prevent getting shot to pieces, although they don’t do anything at all for running into rocks (or other ships, or stations…) so make sure you have at least as much shield HP as you do hull HP. Double or triple the health is even better, for most combat situations.
• Don’t forget power! Adding subsystems costs power, so make sure you have plenty to spare. A good rule of thumb is to have double the “required” power (after accounting for the additional costs of installed subsystems), and ten times that in storage capacity. I’ve found that having quadruple the “required” power means I can boost almost continuously, so aiming for that mark may make things easier.
• Don’t discount Solar Panels. Make them thin, and stack them together; they don’t actually need to be able to “see” the light to produce power, and they’re actually much more resource-efficient than generators, for the power produced. They’re a bit larger, and slightly more expensive in credits, but you can build them when you’re not in a sector with a shipyard… at some point, that fact will save you from being stranded and watching your crew suffocate.
• For armor, you can often “get away with” scaling down to a 0.1×0.1×0.1 block, then holding shift and clicking all over your ugly blocky ship to give it an ugly (but thin) armor coating that does the job nicely without adding a billion tons of weight (and thus skewing all your flight control stats).
• And finally, keep in mind that weapons made of higher-tier materials are generally more effective than those made of lower-tier materials; those “turret base” blocks exist for a reason.

Don’t feel like you need to make your ships “pretty”; function is much more important than form. Look at the original Model T; Ugly, noisy, and just downright disgusting in comparison to the vehicles on the road today… but it was still a car.