Greetings Engineers! Some of you know me, though many do not. I am Kilroy, one of the moderators for the popular monthly construction contest. As moderator for the contests I am asked by many players how to make decent looking ships and structures. In this guide I will cover...

• General topics of design.
  
• How to add variation and texture to surfaces.
  
• How to break up the shape of a platonic solid.
  
• How to master Klang the Mighty (or at least how to avoid his wrath).
  
• Some ship building strategists.
  
• Tips and tricks i have learned over the years.

I hope you find this guide helpful. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave a comment or contact me in person.

I cannot over emphasize this enough. If you want to have a great ship or space station you need to sit down and do a little planning and research. A little bit of planning goes a very long way.

Spend some time looking through google images or deviant art[www.deviantart.com] for concept renders of what you want to build. Get some Isograph Paper[teachers.sduhsd.net] and sketch out your ideas.

More advanced users may even want to draft there ship in a 3d drafting and rendering software. AutoCAD or SketchUP can be used for this. You can get an idea of the general dimensions your creation will be, what shapes and forms go well together you can even import your model into the game through Space Engineers Toolbox if your are happy enough with it.

Lastly it is important to remember; even if you plan it perfectly, you still have to go into SE and your ideas may not translate well when you start placing blocks. Planning your ship before hand may sound like a waste of time, I believe it is worth it.

Ender Wiggin said in Orson Scot Card’s Enders Game “The enemy’s gate is down” He said this to convey something that was intrinsically important in 0 gravity combat. In space, up is whatever direction you perceive it to be.

It is important to keep this in mind when moving from your sketch or concept art you have researched. You must design your ship to function and look good in this 0 gravity enviroment. (Planet’s will be a topic addressed a little later).

I have seen so many mediocre and terrible creations on the Workshop and Build Contests where they have forgotten, or ignored, this fact. Your ship/station needs to look good from all angles. This goes right along with spatial awareness disussed in the previous section.

This is something that I had learned how to do over the course of my education and job. If you haven’t had design or drafting background the video below teaches you to think of your complex three dimensional solid as a collection of views (Top/Front/Right side). If your creation looks great in all three of these views, then it will defiantly look great as a three-dimensional object.

As you can see by adding subtracting a few bricks and adding paint and light you can make any wall look much more interesting.

One of the rules I have always instituted in the construction contests that I run is “No Borg cubes of death” This is a rule for oh so many reasons.

• Cubes are just 6 blank uninspiring walls.
  
• Why make a cube when Keen has graciously given us many triangles.
  
• Anyone and everyone can make a cube, after all it's just 6 blank uninspiring walls.

While cubes are one of the simplest plutonic solid you can make, really any simple plutonic solid[www.ma.utexas.edu]] is just as bad. The way to make your simple solid look much more interesting is to blur the edges to break up the transitions between its faces and to merge other shapes to it.


In just a few simple steps we have gone from an uninspiring cube in empty space, to a communications repeater satellite!

The same rules apply to interior spaces I had a lot of trouble with interior spaces until I found this guide by Brenner

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=321774466

Read the whole thing then favorite it; I could not write a better guide to interior design if I tried. The only things I would add would be that I find it helpful to sketch out floor plans for my ships interiors before I start building them, and I always, ALWAYS, start your interiors with the internal staircase first. This way there is a coherent internal flow on each deck and its easy for the end user to navigate between floors.

The age old dilemma.

Does form flow from a ships function, or should a ships functions be derived by its general form.
After mastering the above aspects in this guide, it is your job, as a space engineer to determine the answer to this very problem.

Let me break this down to a more basic question that you can ask yourself. Do you build your creation from the inside out (placing equipment conveyor lines and thrusters as you go then encasing it in a hull) or do you build an outer shell first then cram whatever equipment you can on the inside and place thrusters where you can?

I have used both approaches, and I can tell you that not a single ship that I built from the inside out has made it to the front page of the workshop.

Below are two ships that I designed for the same competition:

I wound up hating the first ship so much that i never even bothered painting it.

Bad Humor likes designing his ships from front to back. It works pretty decently for him. Building from back to front or front to back is good for maximizing the form of your creation while giving you control of when and where the functional blocks get. Imagine you have sliced a bell pepper vertically then splayed out the sections. You get to see the peppers outer wall and the interior framework at the same time. Building from front to back you would approach your creation from one plane extrude sections backwards as you go.

Section one(front)
Section 2 (middle)
Section 3 (rear).














You still need to be mindful of transitions between larger/smaller sections but the end effect is a creation that has a aesthetically pleasing exterior shape and an interior that is not random or maze like. Bad Humor cautions that if not planned thoroughly the resulting ship can quickly become dysfunctional.

This may sound like a weird question to consider but it is important.
An odd grid has the mirroring plane set in the center of a brick while the even grid has the mirroring plane set in-between two bricks.

Odd grid constructions are most common as it allows your ship to have a main conveyor line and have the main cockpit centered visually.

Even grids are almost always for asymmetrical builds with offset cockpits (Millennium Falcon would be built on an even grid).

Klang the Mighty (regional dialects may pronounce him Clang) is the omnipotent physics god that inhabits all Space Engineer worlds. He/She/It's name is derived from the sound complex creations make when they explode for no reason other than "Klang didn't like it" The blocks that most frequently attract the ire of Klang are pistons, rotors, wheels, landing gear, merge blocks and connectors. KSH is still working on ways of reducing His influence on these bricks in game but for now we have to deal with it.

Tips for avoiding piston explosions

• Make sure the piston head does not displace when it moves along side of an object because when you start moving(or do anything which puts pressure on the cpu) it will start shaking against whatever is displacing the piston and explode.
  
  
• Use blast door edges or better put them on their side so that the completely square face is facing where the piston extends and contracts. This will make sure that the piston will have enough room to move and do its own thing.
  
  
• When connecting a ship or anything that has gyros/thrusters onto a stationary piston; force lock it in place first. When moving the piston with the ship connected to it, make sure the gyros and thrusters of the ship are turned off and that your base/ship is completely stationary.
  When you want to move again lock it in place.
  
  
• When travelling at speed check how much the piston vibrates and check at what speed the things begin to vibrate. Set the piston to lock on the speed a which it begins to vibrate.
  
  
• When a piston is moving extremely heavy loads without help; make sure that when the piston is done with its action that you wait for it to stop moving around. (You can use gyros for this just don't turn them on when the piston is moving only when it is done moving)
  
  
• Keep piston speeds low so when it does collide it will most likely just stop instead of explode. Only use High piston speeds when you know there is at least 1 small block clearance on all sides of the piston and don't use high piston speeds with heavy objects (the result is quite spectacular.).
  
  
• Force lock pistons when merging landing objects with pistons on them especially when the piston has a landing gear on the end which is attached to something. merging and connecting things with landing gears don't mix with pistons.

Tips for avoiding rotor explosion

many of the same tips from pistons apply directly to rotors, don't use high speeds, check your clearance's, apply rotor lock below are some unique things that you should be aware of.

• do not have two rotors attached to the same thing rotate in opposing directions.
  
• set offset of rotors independently on thinks like large hangar doors. Detach one rotor, set the others offset the reattach the far rotor.
  
• heavy objects requires high torque
  
• If you want the rotor to stop on a dime use a high break force and a low speed.

Tips for avoiding merge block explosions

I don't use merge blocks as much as I use to since the update that allowed us to paste objects onto another grid but there are times when you have to slowly and carefully pilot a section of a large ship and merge it with another .

• Use more than one merge block to allow for faster connection.
  
• have a few bricks space between your merge pairs for better connection accuracy
  
• Ge sure ownership is identical for both sides of the merge block
  
• For tough merges use spectator mode to get a better view of the merge
  
• It is usually easier to merge head on then approaching a merge from a side.
  
• Don't use a merge block on a piston to reach out and grab another ship section. the piston head may detach resulting in sadness and explosions

Tips for avoiding connector explosions

Again KSH has done a pretty decent job patching connectors in the past months but here are a few tips

• don;'t have connector strength higher than 50%
  
• don't have a connector strength lower than 5%
  
• surround areas around connector that may be hit by thruster wash whit blast door bricks or heavy armor
  
• Don't ever lock a grids landing gear to the same surface that is also attached through a locked landing gear. this may result in Klang making both grids spin rapidly in space.

the only tip I have for landing gear is to turn off the auto lock

I don't build space cars so i am no expert on wheels but there is a decent guide for making them work for you

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=663651148

These are techniques never intended by the game developers but they allow for great engineering opportunities and ways to maximize space. These are techniques every space engineer pro should know about.

What is the rotor hack: The rotor hack is an exploit that allows a player to attach a small grid subgrid to a large main grid through rotors. This can be done using both the advanced and the normal rotor.
It is very easy to accomplish:
1. Place a large grid rotor on your large grid ship
2. Then select the small grid rotor head in the g menu and place it partially in the rotor body so that rotor pin is partially submerged in the rotor. The flat side of the rotor head should be facing away from the rotor body.
3. Then go into the control panel of the rotor and hit attach. There is nothing else to it.


OR

Just use these handy blueprints

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=454684619

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639999775


examples of what you can accomplish with rotor hacks






Rotor Wheel Hack

This you would rarely use if ever but it allows for you to build very interesting things: Like the hailfire droid below:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=611933705

1. This exploit can be done by removing the wheel off of the suspension first
2. Then you build a long rod from either small or large grid it doesn't matter as it works on the same principles as of the rotor hack. Make sure the rod is to the length you want it to be as that will be the radius for your player made wheel, rotating mass, etc
3. Add a rotor head to the end of the rod and copy it into your clipboard.
4. Then paste the rod with rotor attached over the suspension in a way that you are easily able to push the rotor head into the wheel suspension.
5. Push the rotor head into the wheel suspension to connect them. This might take a couple of tries. What should happen is that the rotor head connects and flips the entire rod so that the rotor is on the farthest end of the wheel. The rotor head is where it is connected tho so you can remove everything between the rotor head and the suspension and it will remain connected. However the rotor head cannot be controlled by the wheel settings. The hailfire droid in the example overrides gyroscopes on the wheels to create forward rolling motion.

Mods are great.

Mods are powerful.

Mods can add a lot of things to your game that stock space engineers is missing in terms of functionality and role playing.



Keep in mind that not all mods are created equal.
Some do not have mirroring or build states so keep that in mind when placing in larger ships.
Other mods are beautifully crafted, but that beauty comes at a price of increased polygon count. While your computer may be able to handle it, others may not.

Always list your creations mods in your workshop.

Most dangerous of all the mods in my opinion are the ramp mods. The ramp mods add 3x1x1 and a whole assortment of other larger ramps. What’s so bad about that I hear you ask? It’s very easy to become so reliant on the ramp mods that you cannot build something without using it any more.
Even worse it opens novice players back up to the trap of just building plain plutonic solids again, albeit with more faces than simple ones. Lastly if the end user tries to convert a ship using ramps mod back to vanilla the ship may lose structural integrity.

• Add however many gyroscopes you think your ship needs then add about 10 more.
  
• You can always turn extra gyros off.
  
• Don’t add so many gyros that if you sneeze your ship spins about 6 times.
  
• Ships should have as much or a little more negitave thrust as positive thrust.
  
• Don’t over use interior blocks as they have the most polygons and will cause lag.
  
• Use a 3 axis roll maneuver to figure out if you have enough reactors to power your ship. (hold 'W' 'E' 'D' 'Space' keys simulations if your power meter overloads then add more reactors)
  
• Learn where the thruster damage cones are so you can build thruster cowls.
  
• Keep gattling guns away from pilot’s chair to avoid blinding user.
  
• Same rule goes for beacons.
  
• Placing rockets in recessed alcoves is a very quick way to explode parts of your ship. (place them forward to avoid turning into your own rockets)
  
• Conveyor lines are vulnerable to weapons fire, hide or otherwise burry them inside of armor.
  
• Name doors and air vents as you go to keep track of what rooms you have.
  
• Understand how ownership of blocks works.
  
• Ground down bricks are a great way of adding extra texture.
  
• Learn how to use some basic scripts to easily add interesting aspects to your ships.

Use this guide to simplify your creations polygon count for better sim speeds. https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=365584802

use this guide for paint tips and tricks
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=631502196

To Bad Humor for his front to back build method, rotor hack section and much of the klang and you section

to w0lf3y for editing support