Building a Missile | A Space Engineers Tutorial

[@annkoehler8017]

I didn't realize just how tough your missiles were! Great job!

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Thanks! I was a little surprised myself at how tough it was. And that is before armor plating!

[@lightingstrike1]

For the Thruster Override, you can have them at max at the start with the thrusters off and have your timer repeat to lowering the override

[@CosmicIntroverts]

That would make it more simple. Good idea!

[@dakaodo]

This was a chill walkthrough of your process and learning moments through trial and error. Obvs missiles are just one-way drones, and anyone can make them as simple or complex as they want. --- To help automated server grid clean-up, I try to ensure that my battery is as minimally attached to the rest of the missile as possible (like only attached on one fact, to the side of an armored conveyor or something). Then I include one more timer in addition to the main missile firing/activation sequence. This solo timer is set to detonate the warheads after... 5-10 minutes. If the missile hasn't hit or died by then, it's probably crashed, crippled, and/or coasting off into deep space at max speed and zero fuel. The minimally attached battery improves chances that no other high-PCU blocks randomly survive attached to the battery. Default clean-up will not automatically delete powered grids, even if it's a single small battery. This way, at least none of the high-PCU stuff will remain powered, and thus be cleaned up. It's kind of a pain to go into admin mode, select paaaages of small grid fragments, and delete them. Particularly if someone (ahem, looks in mirror) was a dumb-ass and has multiple other non-missile small grids built with the default naming/numbering. ^^; --- At terminal velocity (100 m/s in vanilla), Luca the Dry-Humored Girlfriend did a video recently, showing differences in no sensor, 10 meter detection, and 15 meter detection. Due to the polling rate or whatever of the sensors, a fast-moving missile/ship/grid needs to be set to about 10-15 m ahead of the missile for the warheads to have maximum effect. That's with the sensor on the nose of the missile, so adjust for the length of the missile itself in your case of a protected sensor mounted aft (one small grid block = .5 m). Less than 10 m CAN work very well in ideal conditions (no server connection lag, full sim speed, simple linear target approach), but the rate of successful (and effective) detonation drops off really fast when things become non-ideal. I've had to adjust my sensor ranges once I tried actually using missiles against live NPC ships. --- During initial design, you can put on a temporary remote control block facing the missile's forward direction. Then when you take control of it, it will show you which thrusters are in which directions. Then delete the block after you're done designing/building. Renaming thrusters using Build Vision works just fine too, as you did. H2 ships require very little power, so 1 small battery would be more than sufficient to run the electronics onboard the missile. 2, for redundancy. Because you sat in a control seat on the launching grid, you didn't need the missile's antenna or action relay, b/c the missile was connected to your main grid via the connector. I haven't used relays, but I thought they were more for cases where you're on a 3rd grid (e.g. a small fighter), and you want to trigger the missile launch from your primary base/mothership grid. And even in that case, the antenna and relay could be mounted on the launching grid, not the missile. If simplicity becomes a priority, the last time I built a missile, the AI Move block yelled at me for not having thrusters in all directions, but it still did its best to fly with only one thruster -- even in 1 g. I assume this is still true a year later, since the AI Move block has to be able to work even on a damaged combat drone that has had 1+ directions of thrust disabled. So the backward thrusters can be removed for sure, since missiles are usually given 1-way non-stop tickets. Unless you want to build more of a loitering munition drone with extra timers and etc. By setting the AI Move block to align to P-grav, you can additionally eliminate the "down" thruster on top, just like any atmo craft. When in 0 g, the missile will do its best to sort its vector out with the remaining lateral thrusters. Going increasingly bare bones, you can drop the left/right thrusters, leaving only the down thruster to help the missile stabilize in p-grav without having to divert part of its forward thrust downward for lift. Again, in 0 g this one down/lateral thruster will help the missile change vector, though I haven't seen the AI blocks be smart enough to spin and reorient these asymmetric lateral thrusters for fastest vector changes. And the rock-bottom cheapest missile only has forward thrust. WIth the block/PCU/mass savings from the other reductions, you could afford twin forward thrusters for much faster acceleration. This also helps offset the lack of lateral/down thrusters since diverting some of the forward thrust to down in p-grav is proportionally less impactful. You can save about 150+ PCU with building these 1-direction missiles -- more, if you can design them with no antenna. And for that cost, spam them like a bunch of 2000s boy bands to boot. A couple gatling turrets on the target can knock out multiple missiles, so I prefer to use saturation tactics. Not too many though, since once a few missiles blow a hole through the center of a complex grid, additional missiles will whiz straight through that hole, b/c they intercept the actual center of the target grid. I've thought about cheesing this with a big ring-shaped ship design, but nothing in PVE uses PMW custom missiles AFAIK, and unless there are some mutually agreed design restrictions, PVP meta doesn't give PMW missiles much of a chance. Missiles are more of a rule of cool or PVE thing. --- One silly artifact of the vanilla 100 m/s universal speed cap is that a PMW missile will NEVER catch a target that's topped out speed and is moving in a straight line away. I've had this happen with damaged NPC Reavers and Orks that lost braking thrust. One option that is a big if and personal preference is to use a mod to set your small grid max speed higher than large grid. Small grid ships will still be able to run away from missiles infinitely, but they usually die quickly to guns anyway. The Aerodynamic Physics mod has the option for separate small/large grid max speeds. I like to set small grid to double the max speed of large grid. e.g. 100 m/s for large, 200 m/s for small. 75 and 150, or 150 and 300. The Relative Top Speed mod may have the same options, but I haven't used it in ages and can't remember. There USED to be a mod that scaled max speed to the mass of the grid on some kind of asymptotic curve, which was a really cool idea. Basically, it puts a floor and cap on speed, where REALLY large large grid ships aren't going to be that much slower than merely large ships. REALLY small small grid ships won't go that much faster than larger small grid ships (but with enough difference for a missile to eventually catch anything other than another missile-sized small grid with comparable thrust). But small small grids will be really fast compared to large large grids. But I think it was too much complexity for most recreational players to appreciate -- honestly, I didn't feel its effect 98% of the time I played. :P At least in atmosphere, the Aerodynamic Physics mod partially addresses this, since a more streamlined skinny missile will travel faster than a wide grid. Though you'll need the add-on Large Grid mod for the physics to apply to large ships, since the AP mod itself does not apply to large grids AFAIK.

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Wow! There's a lot here to process. You make some very solid points on going as cheap as possible. The use of an additional timer to detonate the missile after a few minutes is a smart idea and your insight on the sensors is very helpful. I will definitely have to implement a lot of these ideas in my future builds. Thanks!

[@dakaodo]

​@@CosmicIntroverts Sure! A lot of that was just my own design choices, so do what you like creatively of course. :D

[@AegirBuildsAndBeats]

Thank you for this video. I've been looking to build a missile like this and this is easy to follow and shows how we could customize it/build upon your main idea.

[@CosmicIntroverts]

I'm glad you found it helpful. Good luck with the build!

[@Rendazz]

one of the things i really like, is that you left the " mistakes " on it , i was " dude the battery , duuude bats " and then you click on send and it went black , i was yeaaaaa batteries maaan , you make me enjoy it !

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Yeah. Real life engineering there. Glad you liked it!

[@kikflipguy101]

Use another timer block and event controller to detect when the base connector is ready to connect, then it activates the timer block on a 2 second timer to connect the base connector. Full auto and reliable

[@CosmicIntroverts]

I like it! That will work! Thanks for the tip. I will definitely use it!

[@5kellDarkes]

So that is the setup for the AI block part of a missile, good to know. I would suggest swapping the 8 second delay timer to an event controller to detect passing a certain altitude depending on your surroundings, at least that is what I'm going to try.

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Good idea! I'd like to know how it goes!

[@JunohProductions]

Set up the connector to connect when the merge block is merged with an event controller and it'll automatically connect.

[@CosmicIntroverts]

I tried this before but I had the event controller locking the connector when connector ready for lock. The merge block may be the way to go here, thanks!

[@lagoman78]

​@@CosmicIntrovertsI use the event controller with a timer that turns off the event controller and unlocks the merge block pre launch

[@Dagonius.]

Thrust override: You can create multiple groups of the same thrusters. I tag them with "G1, G2, G3,..." This way you can repeat commands of single blocks in one action bar.

[@CosmicIntroverts]

That's a smart way of doing that! Good idea!

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Nice idea! I'll have to use that. Thanks!

[@Darkduckization]

For your connector you could have on your base an event controllerwhen merge block on Connector switch lock

[@CosmicIntroverts]

I just had another comment with the same suggestion. I think you guys are on to something here. I'll give it a go. Thanks for the suggestion!

[@Darkduckization]

@CosmicIntroverts Np mate, thanks for your video, I might make a few changes but I dunno if mine will work. At all lol

[@comcastjohn]

The way you have explained it is awesome! The other two were so fast and some explanations but few. Was confusing at times. YOU were perfect! Thank you so much! 😇🫡🫡🫡🫡

[@CosmicIntroverts]

Glad you found it helpful. Good luck in making your own!

[@soysauce73]

How does it do against a couple of gatling guns?

[@CosmicIntroverts]

If you use heavy armor on the tip of the missile it does surprisingly well. At least with the tests I have done with it

[@zacharythomas8617]

Newbie to the game here would it do more damage if you mounted a reactor to it?

[@CosmicIntroverts]

I dont think so. Haven't tried it though.

[@MrBuyerman]

No, it won't. Reactors, in my experience, are very stable in SE and are used for power generation only. You can shoot the crap out of them, and all that happens is a wisp of green smoke, and it stops working. I've never gotten a reactor to initiate or even participate in an explosion short of loading it with explosives and blowing it up.