How to REALLY design ships | Draconis Expanse | Space Engineers

We take a look at Spudvouchers Javelin Class design process and how good ship designers iterate in a live server environment.
Javelin Class Display Box: steamcommunity...
Discord: / discord
Server IP: space-engineer...

[@komagaming6069]

Spud isn't building ships, he's creating art with drives attached

[@alphamatte4259]

Preach

[@pliniomourao]

This creator/designer is very talented to know how to use the blocks to best come out with a beautiful ship. You should find more of this.

[@alphamatte4259]

I have many many ship showcase videos on my channel

[@Mightydoggo]

TL:DR Context is super important for design in my experience. I played a lot of space games from X and Avorion to Space engineers, my biggest problem in most space building games is, while you can build everything, you rarely have a real purpose doing so. Every ship can do anything. Designs and classes usually come from the necessity of filling a specific role, than changeing that role or the scale. A small miner looks different than a large one, mining in outlawed territory requires different approaches than in safe sectors, etc. Most games don´t really have that and doing the entire lore+world building yourself requires quite some work.

[@sorrowandsufferin924]

So all you're really saying right now is that, in order to build better ships, you have to come up with lore as well.

[@Mightydoggo]

@@sorrowandsufferin924 Context. Lore was just an example. You can build coherent design on pretty much anything if you really want, though people study that for years for good reason.

[@Keyboard_Thoughts]

​@@sorrowandsufferin924 you need to come with in world explanation as to why something is this and that. And so on.

[@williamthehuman6779]

3 minutes in and i just realized it wasn't small grid. the detail on this is insane!!

[@Jeff55369]

One thing that bothers me with a lot of ship designs in scifi settings, is there's often very little thought given to saving space. Extra space costs money, and inefficient use of space is wasted money. Even on luxury boats, they make good use of space, so there's no reason to think it wouldn't be any different in a fictional setting.

[@michalvodicka5123]

I might be wrong here, but extra space certainly cost money on boats, submarines and planet -> space rockets. But I think it is questionable how much money would space cost on space ships that are also constructed in space.

[@Lambda420]

Yes dude, my designs have a few rules to follow for them to be plausible in my brain. First Full life support is a MUST. If it doesn’t have kitchen, bathroom, cryo and beds it’s already a write off. second. It must be made as cheap as possible for completing its role skimping on every possible thing. THEN once I see what weaknesses the prototype has i fix those flaws and produce the mk1 of the series. The we battle and battle and battle until enough different things happen that I can make contingencies for. then I fight outclassed and see how well it punches up. Then it goes on workshop.

[@Jeff55369]

@@michalvodicka5123 every square yard/ meter of floor space is x4 in building materials you have to spend. (floor, walls, ceiling...) So if you're wasting space in your design, that increases the cost needlessly. Terrestrial boats in our current day are a good thing to look at for comparison. Look at how well they use space. Even on luxury yachts, they use space well, so there's no excuse for it in fiction, other than pure laziness. But props to to the op for thinking these things through and testing them.

[@coldwarkiwi_2nd183]

Agreed, owning a boat myself irl (small one, dont own them, their money pits and im broke lol) every bit of space is used when set up for cruising or relaxing, while racing of course stuff is emptied down to save weight but that's boats. Id imagine it to be the same for spaceships like how you said, not only saving money but making them smaller and easier to park/move/pilot by making them more compact and less empty space.

[@Jeff55369]

@@coldwarkiwi_2nd183 Yeah, I'm sure there would be some standard sizes based on docking births / jump gates / ect.

[@yurisaki_raijin]

this just popped in my recommended and i have to say, as a ship designer myself, i love this, i think this is one of the best ways to improve on a ship, mods or not, and these look and seem to perform pretty good, props to the creator i do want to mention though for whoever else is seeing this and maybe you want to improve and you're very into designing, don't be intimidated, there's many ways to do it, you do it the way you want, but take this kind of evolution method as inspiration, test your own stuff out, see what works for the purpose you build it for, go all out for your own likeness and people will like it too just for the love of klang, stop with the bubble angles

[@alphamatte4259]

What are bubble angles

[@yurisaki_raijin]

@@alphamatte4259 lmao okay that one's my weird name for when you try to do a smooth angle but you need to zigzag it to extend it, since the game doesn't have the necessary armor block angles in vanilla [just a little joke, i don't actually mind]

[@borischung01]

Damn y'all put in a lot more effort building these than I do

[@alphamatte4259]

Nah this is just one of the best builders on our server

[@konigbismarck1019]

Much respect coming from an Xbox player you guys and everyone on your server should be proud of what you've built I hope one day I'll be able to join you all on PC

[@alphamatte4259]

Thank you!

[@joyhoward6105]

Whenever I want to build something really unique, I’ll load up advanced welding and spawn in a bunch of massive ships and a small but powerful tug and I’ll attach a bunch of mismatched parts together, but never repaint any of the salvaged parts

[@alphamatte4259]

Yeah, I think that's a pretty cool way to get creative!

[@sebass8965]

I live in sadness knowing that most cool modded servers are outside my region and ill never experience them under 250 ping.

[@alphamatte4259]

We have people who play from all over the world. Give it a shot

[@sebass8965]

@@alphamatte4259 I think its too high, the server is always unresponsive after a long attempt at joining. I'll keep appreciating it with these videos.

[@wojtekmedia237]

​@@sebass8965 yo so I play on US 12 official with Xbox series and PC, sometimes Nitrado won't lemme "join world" if someone else is joining or leaving so I have to refresh and try again, hope this helps🎉🎉

[@lua9502]

same problem here :(

[@alphamatte4259]

@@lua9502 try changing your steam region

[@erccdang]

I've never played this game. But even I can tell this man has above average dedication to his craft.

[@alphamatte4259]

He is very good

[@JustABalrog]

I don't use mods in space engineers, but if I were to, it would be this one. Probably for the extended sloping blocks alone, honestly! The rest is just bonus.

[@alphamatte4259]

All of the players on our server started with vanilla and eventually got bored. Our mod pack adds ton of depth and fun stuff

[@antediluvianatheist5262]

Wow. Didn't even realize this was Space Engineers.

[@alphamatte4259]

Yeah we have it pretty modded almost a different game

[@orion9026]

These are REALLY pretty, it's so far femoved from the style I go for and I really appreciate the uses of blocks and especially textures

[@alphamatte4259]

Yeah this is one of our best builders

[@sowiwiody3681]

I'm on a long break from the Draconis server due to personal life, so I have no idea what's going on the server right now. But these designs look so good. I really wanted to fly my own ship when I started, and while I'm happy how it turned out in the end, and even worked on low lvl PVE, it was so much simpler than this. If all goes well, I'll rejoin in a month or two, and this time I'll stick more to other players, rather than be by myself.

[@peaceunique1216]

First and very pretty ships i always loved ship lineages in SE and sci fi

[@JustVentus02]

I really wish I could have someone like that like... mentor me like holy hell... I'm okay-ish (kinda shitty ngl) and have had a lot of trouble finding my style... but yeah, these are amazing and I am speechless at how beautiful these are...

[@lordsherifftakari4127]

I found an intriguing quirk when placing my PDC's. my ships tend to be quite thin and this often results in my not being able to place a PDC on the underside of my hull due to proximity to the PDC above. thus given that many parts of my hull are 3 or occasionally fewer blocks in thickness. I face a conundrum regarding where to put my PDC's in order to keep a balance of fire Top & Bottom. I'm not fond of the look of having to raise a turret even higher up on some sort of pedestal as it really breaks the lines I'm trying to convey in the design. super-firing positions are used, but those steps are placed carefully front to back to maintain the clean lines and form.

[@alphamatte4259]

Great designers can make gorgeous ships that also have great firing arcs. Like spud does in this video.

[@IngeniousNinja]

To be frank, 3 block tall/wide hulls are tiny on SDX and wont find much combat use outside of initial bouts of fighting TTU to get starting tech. Certainly in PvP, a ship that small wont last long (I know, I've tried it). In which case, you may want to just limit your pdc count and alternate top/bottom placements to not find issues with the exclusion zone.

[@mr_crab6181]

DVI yesss my old faction so good memorys

[@andybraid4263]

They look great but you can just slap a pile of pdcs and other weapons on a drive and it will do just as well. One sht or torp getting thru from a ship you never even see is all it takes to turn it into the same scrap.

[@alphamatte4259]

I mean yeah but flying a beautiful ship is half the fun

[@Jay_bit]

So I have almost 5k hours in the game, much on Draconis. Befriended a couple of the mods from the 2019-2022 ish era of the game. They are all gone including myself from Draconis and joined Stone Industry. Hedge is impossible to work with, rejected much of the feedback given, and lets moderators abuse the systems in place by freely copy/pasting blueprints, spawning in materials, and abusing the economy. Secondly, last time they did a wipe around that time they rewarded themselves (TSI and all of their faction members) an incredible ship to each player and a large amount of Tech tier 3 which put themselves way ahead of all the competition that were forced to start from scratch. Being on a PvP/PvE server, that's a huge deal. Since I had moderator friends (from that era), they showed me both in-game and their creative world. We all quit at about the same time. While I cannot speak to the current state of Draconis now (so in 2024 that may no longer be the case), Hedge is still the lead, and Hedge allowed that behavior to exist. That said, I'll never play there again.

[@alphamatte4259]

Hey sorry you had that experience - almost all the old mods are gone and whole new team is in charge. For the record this is NOT the “main cluster” that had TSI on it at all. This is an off shoot Expanse Themed server that is hosted by Sigma but has nothing to do with anything you are talking about whatsoever. Hedge is not involved in decision making processes for this server. Again sorry you had that experience but it’s pretty much completely unrelated to this server.

[@YukariYakumoRanMode]

As a ship designer, we don't actually do this. We usually draw it up on paper and complain about the simulator not working

[@fakshen1973]

No initial design iteration survives server combat. A few months ago, I was playing a lot of Keen official servers. So everything had a max cap of 20,000PCUs, no scripts, etc. Most of the combat was reserved to planetary. You get to see how your build stands up to all kinds of strategies.

[@corajallen9471]

This is awesome please do more, I would watch a more in depth breakdown too! Definitely hitting like and sub!

[@alphamatte4259]

Thanks for the sub!

[@fanjerry8100]

Hey I was wondering, if PDCs are deadly up close, how effective are carriers that launch drones armed with PDCs? Also do you guys use small block ships on the server?

[@alphamatte4259]

Carriers are not effective at all. We have small grid ships but they are all skiffs and fast transports. Small grids get absolutely shredded by our weapons.

[@matthews2715]

Love the server when I'm able to get on and play. Which is kinda my issue with it. I wish I was able to make a light one or 2 drive ship and be able to leverage the maneuvering ability in a fight. But unfortunately the bigger ships have just as much agility as the smaller ships because there are no limits on the amount of drives per ship.

[@GabrielGABFonseca]

Ah yes, the 'Halo/Expanse to Nebulous: Fleet Command' pipeline.

[@Bingchill11000]

I am about too start playing the game and I’d love too make a drake Corsair someday hahaha

[@bodgiechap]

Sorry to sound like a bot but what mods is he using for the shape of the hull?

[@IngeniousNinja]

You're likely referring to the longer slopes - I believe we use AQD slopes extended for 3x1 and 4x1 sloped armor blocks!

[@bodgiechap]

@@IngeniousNinja Just realized that I am already subscribed to it. LOL. You're the best, thanks!

[@TheRealEtaoinShrdlu]

Why did you stop with the penultimate ship and not show the final/ultimate version?! Is that coming in the next video?

[@StoveFortuna]

I was a little surprised at that being the last one too, lol In case OP is unaware, penultimate means second to last

[@64SGH]

Beautiful ❤

[@alphamatte4259]

Spudvoucher is a great designer

[@mrvoltem9379]

How come the engines are all at the back? How does it function without reverse and side thrust?

[@alphamatte4259]

Those are just the main drives. There are RCS thruster all at round the on the other sides

[@StarWarsExpert_]

1:52 I have never seen grinders look like this. From which mod are they? What modpack are you using here and are these all public mods or server exclusive?

[@alphamatte4259]

All of our mods are public they are on our discord

[@johndee2990]

So I'm currently Blueprinting in the sigma Draconis Creative World and I wanted to know something before I actually did it because it might be breaking a rule as there's no AI blocks for a Reason.. Reverse Rotor Custom Turret MIRV Missiles in a Print Bay to Knock Out Chasers. Before I commit a No-No I thought I'd look up and ask.

[@alphamatte4259]

You can make that stuff just needs a script

[@johndee2990]

@@alphamatte4259 A clever use of two Projectors and a Spindle Printer on 90 degree turns, allows for a Custom Turret Controller with two rotor-heads attached first for reaction wheels. Just one Thruster and a camera are all that's needed for the main drive. I've found simple Sensor + Timer Combo for a Decoy surrounded by Warheads. The speeds in Sigma Draconis means a small block, back fired missile would possibly hit any Chasers due to the grid being ignored when locked on. kzbin.info/www/bejne/qXvFm5yCe5dgmLcfeature=shared Zer0's Legion explains it but I found it to be devastating to larger grids.

[@johndee2990]

@@alphamatte4259 I finished my Entry Vessel, I called it an SSRT (Single Stage Reusable Transport) if you're interested in taking a look on the workshop - Hopefully it'll get me through the Ring into PvPvE Space.

[@dustinstanley9134]

Im on xbox so things aren't as great but i feel useless for not releasing any of my ships. I don't want to brag on myself but i think i have a very unique style that departed from traditional scifi and i now feel like i should share them.

[@najlitarvan921]

is the walkable connector part of the core mod or is it from another mod

[@alphamatte4259]

“Zardos connectors”

[@najlitarvan921]

@@alphamatte4259 thank you, ngl it would be nice if the supermod had a description with the mods used, but i guess comments on youtube generate favour with the algorithm god

[@Trexor_]

the only very big problem i see with this ship, you can see the main thrusters too well. he could have hid them a bit more in order to protect them more, because right now it's a couple of shots in the back and many of the thrusters should be down.

[@alphamatte4259]

Armor doesn’t do much on our server. Railgun fo right through all armor just like on the lore

[@Trexor_]

@@alphamatte4259 ah, that's quite silly. so i would imagine my drone tech would be useless on this server, because it works by exploding the rounds fired at you, something like a forcefield but a little more expensive. but in my opinion armor should do a lot, i would say designing the armor is the most fun part about making the ship.

[@HwhatDaHyell]

Yeah but how do you Get to the part where you have a decent enough ship to iterate on

[@alphamatte4259]

1000s of hours. Literally.

[@sniper6823]

whats this server like anyway? ive always wanted to try these kinds of servers out but im horrible at ship build and have zero pvp experience

[@alphamatte4259]

Come join and find out. We have a PvE sector for people to learn the ropes

[@over-ingaming6490]

Where can I find the modlist for this?

[@alphamatte4259]

on our discord link is in description

[@MrStaffelkapitan]

Please specify your computer configuration

[@alphamatte4259]

Not potato lol

[@MrStaffelkapitan]

@@alphamatte4259 ok... bought 3080 TI…

[@mysteriumxarxes3990]

I mean, it can be a good exercise to improve your ship building skills, but I dont like this "forced" way of building a class evolution. I prefer a more orgabic way, where you actually improve things from your first design in a real, non rp way. Although its not a ship, this has been happening with my asteroid base. Ive been constantly upgrading and modifying it, to the point it is now significantly different from the original design. But I didnt do it on purpose, like I tried to make different versions to simulate a design evolution. I had an actual design evolution, that happened organically, and I think this brings much more realism and verossimility to the evolution and the different designs. This happened because of feature creep (in this case a positive one), and I am still improving and upgrading my base, both aesthetically and functionally. But refuse to create useless design features just because of decoration. I try to make it so it looks good while I put the necessary blocks, but the resources are limited and I dont want to spend them on useless things. This design philosophy has a beauty to it on its own, its utilitarian but if done properly it can have a good look. All the tubes and railings and catwalks and passages and production blocks, although completelly necessary, create a visually pleasing ambient that looks like a real thing, as a side effect. And this is the design philosophy that I defend. To have aesthetics being created as a side effect from an utilitarian design, which is perfectly possible if you design it in a smart way.

[@SA80TAGE]

which mods he use?

[@alphamatte4259]

Here ya go steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3113386643

[@bruckenpfeiler6550]

is this really space engineers?

[@alphamatte4259]

barely haha

[@Gxaps]

Damn guess I'm not a real builder

[@alphamatte4259]

clickbait title go brrr

[@robertwoodford1180]

Those are fake unless you have 90+ mods cuz in space engineers its damn near impossible without a shit tons of mods

[@alphamatte4259]

Yeah these are built for a huge server with hundreds of active players. We have about 40 mods on the server and tons of custom plugins.

[@natalyaredwolf7062]

I just started on the server last night, it's a BEAST of a learning curve 😂😂😂 but the server(s) setup is truly a work of art in and of itself, and the community is just as awesome, I haven't played in an online community in years because of.... lol 💩 people :x the community is unbelievably awesome. Very helpful

[@Akumeitakai]

Oh yeah! That's my @#$%ing flavor! Spoon me up! I cannot do any of this. This is not a skill you can learn or teach. You have to have been born with the genes in your epigenetics ready to be turned on. Worse, when it's done correctly, it's indistinguishable from people living and working in that world who grapple with it's rules. These craft are not only beautiful, but also clearly functional.

[@DoremiFasolatido1979]

Oh...mods. Never mind.

[@alphamatte4259]

Playing this game without mods is insane haha

[@danielkirpichnikov2007]

-Exposed engines -not enough guns on each side - a lot of space wasted in space Good looking ship? Yes. Functional ship? Not really.

[@alphamatte4259]

These ships are built for a very specific meta on our server- exposed engines don’t matter and there is a pcu limit that limits weapon spam.

[@jozopako]

All these ships have same design. Nothing original.

[@alphamatte4259]

This is one class of ship iterated over and over again they are supposed to be the same