Space Engineers

Space Engineers

Revelation Assault Carrier (new)
bIrD_oF_pReY  [developer] 10 Sep, 2020 @ 10:17am
Defenses Information
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General Information
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-Armor/Hull
-Shields
-Turrets
-Decoys
-Windows

Thank god, the Revelation is more durable now.

Since most of the criticism from the old ship was absolutley valid, I took a lot of your
comments to heart and tried to make the whole ship more "tanky".
Luckily I was able to integrate a lot of new systems into the ship, thanks to increased
thrust from the new engine layout.

That means that the Revelation is no longer a giant juicy target(it still is giant),
but a serious contender in a defensive situation. It has better armor, more turrets, shields
and more. For detailed informations about the different defensive systems, see the corresponding
paragraph below.

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Light Armor/Hull
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The armor of the old Revelation was useless. There is no way I can deny that. Whilst the large white
armor panels were made from light armor on the outside they weren't even built with an inside plate,
to save weight.
In fact, saving weight was a much bigger issue on the old ship, than on the new one. This was also
the reason why I decided to make the old hull from interior wall blocks. Two of those blocks are still
only 60% of the weight of a light armor block and with two of them I was able to hide the side
of the block that has all the little glowy things on it.

For me personally the interior wall "armor" wasn't a big issue, because in my head the ship would never
engage in a serious fight, but stay far away from the battle and send its craft forward.
This is also why I wanted to have the large hangar openings at the front. Yes they are vulnerable, but
this is the direction where the enemy is supposed to be, so the corvettes could undock and go straight
into the fight.
In hindsight, docking them facing backwards, might not have helped that cause in any way.

But enough of the old ship.
This is supposed to be about the new Revelation, so what has improved?

To say everything has improved would not be far from the truth. The entire outer hull is now made
from light armor blocks. Only the floors that are inside the ship are made from interior wall blocks
to break up the boring light armor only pattern.

The large armor panels are now completely built and only placed on the hull. At first I wanted to hold
them in place with rotors to make them easily changeable to fix damage, but in the end I decided
against that to help game and ship performance.
But this means that the panels are basically large pieces of hollow armor with a light block on each
side. Add to that the layer of armor the hull is made of and you end up with up to three layers of light
armor where the white panels are.
That's not too shabby for a carrier I guess.

The main hangar still has the large openings at the front. This is for the same reasons as on the old
ship. But this time the corvettes are facing in the correct direction and the fighters can also launch
towards the front, for rapid deployment into combat. The large "hole" in the center of the ship is
mostly for returning craft so they don't block the front exits. The corvettes also fit through the
central hangar access.

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8g Shields
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Shields are cool. I like shields and from the comments I got on the old ship, I think you like
shields too. Sadly shields are quite heavy so they just wouldn't fit into the mass budget that the
old ship had.

But this time things are different.
Firstly I want to say, that I barely look at other ships from the workshop. So I have no idea,
how other people build their gravity shields, but I think there are two principles.
Either you use spherical gravity generators for more range, or the regular gravity generators if
you don't want to use sphericals.

In my case, I didn't want to use the spherical gravity generators. I always disliked them, because
you can't really walk around in your ship as long as they are active and you can't really compensate
for that with other gravity fields. Also, while the range is great, when the ship gets larger, you get
vastly different field depths around the edges of the ship. All in all horrible, I think.

Therefor I decided to use the regular gravity generators, to create a shield around the ship, while
having normal gravity inside to walk around.
But since the range of the regular gravity generators is much smaller, the field is only about
60-70m deep around the ship.
Now, this doesn't sound like very much at first, but with the regular gravity generators it is
relatively simple to make this field stronger, to get more stopping power.

That is why this ship has at least 8g gravity shields in all directions.

8g is enough to stop an object travelling at 100m/s in just over 60m, which is perfect.
Maybe some objects won't get stopped completely before impacting the armor, but they will be
significantly slowed and hopefully cause minimal damage.

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Turrets
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Let's talk active defenses. Things that try to eliminate threats to the ship instead of
tanking incoming damage.

To stay true to the old Revelation I kept the 10 gatling turrets per side, for a total of
20 gatling turrets. These turrets can be repaired by welders and even rebuilt by the same
welders via a projection.

While that is all nice and fine, I still wanted to defend the ship a little better.
That's when I started adding interior turrets.
There are now 240+ interior turrets in and around this ship. About 40 of them are on the
outside hull, to act as a missile defense. The rest of them is on the inside to defend
the ship against hostile boarding actions. This was also mentioned in the comments of
the old ship as a major weakness.

So yeah, most rooms and hallways are now defended by 2-4 interior turrets. Good luck boarding
this mess. You might want to bring an entire army of dudes.

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Reloading Decoy Launchers
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Now this is something that I can't remember if it was brought up in the comments of the old ships,
but is something I gathered more and more ships have these days.

Decoy launchers!
I never used decoys much, since they were quite hit and miss in the past,
if they actually worked or not.

Now it seems that they are working properly again so I needed to include them in the build.
There are two decoy launchers in every direction except for the back, where there is just one.
The decoy launchers automatically reload and can be reused after a short while (about 10-15sec.)

The reloading decoys help the ship to stay in the fight for longer since you can defend as long as
you have got enough material to rebuild the decoys.

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Windows
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Okay, but what about the parts of the ship that are not hull or armor? The bits where you can
see the stars from? The windows.

Windows in combat ships always feel like a weakness so I tried to make the windows that are
present as safe as I could.

Most of the smaller outside windows feature a shutter mechanism, which allows to shut the
hole in the hull, when the glass is destroyed. This also helps in keeping the valuable air
inside the ship, where it belongs.

Sadly this setup can't be used on the larger windows.
That's why those windows are all made from double glass panels. Again the second layer of
glass, if the first one gets damaged.

This feels like an acceptable compromise between safety and having no windows at all.


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I think thats it for the defenses.
Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments.

Thank you for reading!