Overview
A few quick tips I have accumulated after wasting to much time on the game (:
Orbits
1: On the more asteroid type levels, shoot streight at your targets ot streight away/around them , don’t try to use “orbital machanics” or “planning”
2: If you want a fast intercept, use the flyby, not the intercept option
3: Under your intercept info in the corner, you have several peices of information
3.1 Intercept velocity is simple, If you are a short range ship try to maxamize it and vice versa.
3.2 The Paralel/Perpindicular numbers are useful, if you want a intercept that goes streight at the enemy try to maximize paralel and vice versa
3.3 The final important peice of info is the closest aproach, if you have a long range ship, make this just inside the range of your longest range weapon to maxamize your time without being fired on while firing.
4 (Skip this one if you played KSP) move along your orbit to bring it out and vice versa. Also higher orbits go slower and lower orbits go faster
5 Capital ships can acclerate away from missles and drones to run the out of fuel one or two kilometers a second will do it.
Combat
1 Many ships don’t have enough power to fire all thier weapons at once, pick ones to turn off (by clicking thier symbol) until the no power signs go way. If their are none of these signs, nice, you are in an actually well designed ship.
2 Use the ignore range button down to 50% ammo, most weapons have WAY more ammo than you need, and it is worth it to try to get hits
3 Next learn how the orders work and what they do, generally you should use the broadside order.
4 Accelerating your missles in orbit up to a few hundred M/S before combat allows you to get to your target faster giving it less time to shoot you down.
5 Always enable the ingore range button on drones, until they are at half ammo.
6 In capital ship on capital ship battles only target a few enemy modules, if you target 20 you wont actually destroy any.
7 Nukes can be launched against enemy missle and drone fleets, use the detonate button to explode them when you get close, becuase they will not detonate manually, this tends to mostly kill missle fleets and decimate drone fleets
8 Presenting sloped armor to the enemy is best when you can a 45 degree angle decreases damage by 20% with even better results for higher slopes
Ship Design
1 Generally use the decane or methane fuel tanks and engines for capital ships.
2 It is common to have more weapons than reactor power, this prevents you from firing all you weapons at the cost of reactor and radiator cost and mass. There is no warning for when this happens though, so dont install 20 17MW railguns and 2 17MW reactors and be confused as to why only 2 of your guns are firing.
3 Mass and cost are equally improtant and limiting factors, aim for a few MC for KT (~0.5-5)
4 Armor is expensive, use wipple sheilds (google it) and dont be afraid of not having much (5-10 CM of bulk armor is a very heavy armored ship). Angling the armor and attacking front on can increase your armors effectivness as much as 20X
5 Include at least some cheap missle launchers on your gunboats and some cheap direct fire weapons on your carriers, it will help you in the long run.
6 Flares are very good, but only if your ship runs light on reactors, if they can not burn hotter than your ship it might be an issue.
7 Flares, cannons, and missle launchers can explode, place them over fuel tanks
8 As far as deltaV, do not run below a few KMS and dont waste your cost and mass requirements with anything much over 10KMS
9 Accelerations should not go below 100mg, on the other side, go crazy make ships with 10g accelerations if you want (though this burns through deltaV quite fast)
Module design
1 Try things, I can not stress this enough, do stupid stuff, you will be suprised by how much it works
2 Railguns should fire projectiles between ~1-25g coilguns should run between ~25g and 5kg and cannons should handle anything bigger
3 Weapons that fire heavy projectiles tend to fire them slower or use much more power
4 Vanadium chromium steel is the strongest material in the game, though expensive and not super heat resistant
5 Ampophorus cabon has good all around stats, use it lots until you figure out how to optemize better
6 For nuclear reactors, uranium 233 dioxide is good. For both the type in generators and NTR engines. Use U 233 in bombs. Also use 97% enrichment for everything. (what nuclear non-proliforation treaty)
7 Speaking of engines Decane and Methane are the way to go for NTRs
8 Lasers are really complicated, start by modifing stock desighns
9 Upddate your modules constantly, use the compare changes feature to make sure you are making improvemnets
10 Build some thick radiation shields that can handle hundreds of MW of radiation, it will save you so much time its silly (I recomend lithium-6 or polyehtelene)
misc.
1 making different versions of things is far faster than starting from scratch
2 Cost and mass are equaly important, dont forget this
3 Try stupid stuff, make that nuclear coilgun you know you want
4 Post things on the workship, it is the fastest way to learn, and the advice is actually pretty unoffensive generally (knocks on wood)
Enjoy playing children of a dead earth, and watch out for those OP laserstars. Feel free to suggest in the commetns, in fact please do.
(Sorry for making this way to long)