what's up ship builders in this video I'm going to share with you the best ship parts in each category and why that's the case as you can see I like to build iconic ships that's why I'm making these videos but what good is a cool looking ship if it isn't overpowered too that's why it's important to know what the best ship parts are and the tradeoffs to each of them because honestly there are tradeoffs everywhere and before you criticize that this video is too little too late I know there are plenty of videos and guides out there claiming to walk you through the various ship components I've reviewed them and while there are some really good ones out there I think frankly they were all made a little too quickly trying to be the first and they leave out critical information because of it or simply Miss key factors that completely change how you look at ship stats so we're going to cover those and more so let's Dive In now the most important place to start when building your ship is choosing your reactor I'm going to assume you already know the basics that your reactor class determines the other ship components that are available to you Class A being the lowest C being the highest I'm also going to assume your piloting skill is leveled up enough that you can fly class c ships if not go start the Vanguard quest line until you reach the piloting simulator level up your skill and then come back the other thing I'm going to assume is that you're going to be at least level 60 a lot of these ship parts don't unlock until you're at least level 60 and so if you're not you might have to uh skip over some of these parts until you reach that level finally because these are some of the best most efficient most powerful ship parts in the game you'll also need to have a maximum Starship design skill in order to use them the quickest way to level that skill is to Simply add various inexpensive structure pieces to your ship uh and you can always delete them immediately afterwards okay back to reactors you should know right off the bat that class A reactors are effectively worthless I mean unless you're purposely trying to restrict yourself uh I'm not going to be discussing them now that's because Class B reactors allow you to use both class B and Class A Parts similarly Class C reactors allow you to use c b and a parts um but as we're going to see Class B and C reactors are simply better uh in every way starting with power points generated from the reactor that let you allocate power to various systems when you're flying your ship weapons engines Shields and your grav Drive the more power points your reactor generates the more power you have to allocate across these systems now the current highest amount of power points that any reactor generates in the game is 40 but we're going to look at a few now the other important factor to consider when choosing a reactor is its whole value now your ship's whole value is essentially its Health points the higher your whole value the more Health your ship has and this health only begins to deplete once your Shield has been depleted so the more hole plus Shield you have the more defense you essentially have now the thing to know about your whole value is that nearly all of your whole value for your ship is provided by your reactor some ship components such as Habs or even some landing gear provide a small amount of whole value three points here Five Points there but if you think those pieces are going to materially impact your overall whole value you're wrong your reactor basically determines your overall health points and everything else is negligible now I don't want to skip over repair rate provided by your reactor which determines how quickly your ship systems can repair themselves in battle but honestly it doesn't matter if your Shield is depleted and you're taking whole damage your time left in this universe is nearly over the repair rate won't save you having a good shield and a high hole value are far more important in practice so those stats out of the way the first reactor we're going to look at is the 104 DS mag this is a Class B reactor Factor but for a class B it actually generates 39 power points which is near the max of 40 what also sets this apart is that with that much power it's also Class B meaning its mass is lower than the other reactors we're going to look at that provide that one extra powerpo keeping your total mass at a minimum is important when we discuss engines and having highest Mobility possible so for that reason this reactor is one of the best you can use as it provides 39 power at a low mass now the next two reactors the sheared flow and the pinch 8z are both Class C reactors and they provide 40 points of power the maximum that you can achieve the difference between the two is actually quite small and it's mostly to be found in their mass and their whole values with the pinch 8z being a bit higher in both areas lastly I want to highlight the pinch 8A reactor so don't confuse this with the 8z version we just looked at the pinch 8A provides a little bit less power to distribute across your ship 36 power points to be exact but that 10% drop in power is made up for by a near 45% increase in whole value so whereas the sheared flow and pinch 8z provide about 1,300 points of whole value the 8 a provides over 1,900 whole points that's a huge jump from every other reactor in the game now once we get to discussing weapons I'll show and tell why I believe trading Four Points of Power for 600 points of whole is a worthwhile trade all right let's move on to engines I'm highlight highlighting four engines as I believe these are quote best in their class for various reasons now the first are the S 6830s these are Class C engines meaning they require a Class C reactor now these engines aren't available at the beginning of the game even if you reach level 60 but they're actually unlocked by a Quest from Walter stra during the constellation quest line so once you've unlocked those you can find them from either stoud Eckland on neon or in the naron system now what makes these engines unique are two things they have very high maneuvering thrust per engine and you can place up to six of these engines on your ship you'll see in their stat box that one engine consumes two power points and you're allowed up to 12 power points per system that means you can put a maximum of six of these on your ship so when you multiply six by their already high maneuvering thrust that makes these engines the best for ships where you have a high mass and still want High Mobility next the SAE 560s you'll notice that these are also slate and Aerospace engines meaning you can find them from stoud Sellers and similar to their class C Brothers these Class B engines provide good maneuvering thrust but especially in relationship to their Mass so you can only place up to four of these on your ship as they each consume three power but a key metric to look for When selecting engines is their thrust to mass ratio these are some of the best they even beat out other certain Class C engines next the sa 4330 is and by now you should notice a theme these are also Slaton engines and with these Class A engines we're back to being allowed to place up to six of them on our ship now we'll come back to these in a minute because I want to discuss top speed with each of these but there's one more very unique engine that I want to highlight that are also Class A the white dwarf 35s you've probably heard of these These are also Class A engines but as you'll see in a minute they provide a significant boost to top speed compared to any other engine in the game even other class A engines so watch our overall top speed in the bottom right it currently sits at 130 that's because your ship's top speed is only as fast as its slowest engine and generally speaking class C engines have a top speed of 130 Class B have a top speed of 140 and Class A have a top speed of 150 as I delete complete each of these engines starting with class C you'll see my top speed jump up to the next class from 13 to 140 to 150 finally as I delete the sa 4330 class A's leaving only the white dwarf 315s you'll see my top speed is now 180 the spread between Class C at 130 and Class A at 150 is only 20 points and yet for some reason the white dwarf 305s are an additional 30 points faster than even all other class A engines now when you have Sam Co on your crew who boosts your top speed even further with his piloting skill and you are using these white dwarf 315s you can boost away from enemies so fast and so far that they aren't able to stay engaged with you your Shields can then recharge and you can come back and finish them off especially with the weapons we'll discuss later and the fact that they have some of the highest targeting range in the game all right let's move on to Shields Shields are actually quite simple compared to reactors and engines you always want to fully power your Shields The Shield regeneration rate is negligible and you can ignore it and therefore what you want from your Shield choice is to find the highest Shield health you can have that fits within the overall Mass constraints of the ship You're Building you basically always want to have the most health you can have when you're out there flying your ship so in my experience that leaves three choices the Vanguard bullwark Shield which is a Class B Shield has 1,450 Shield health at a mass of 70 now you can unlock this soon after starting the Vanguard quest line Second is the 28t defender it's also Class B with 1500 Shield health and a mass of 90 so a little bit heavier a little bit higher health and last the Assurance sg800 this requires a class C reactor but it has 1,600 Shield health but a much higher mass of 160 now the trade-off between Shield health and mass is a real one especially because those white dwarf 315s don't have much maneuvering thrust so if you're building a ship with those engines you're actually only allowed up to about 1,020 Mass before your Mobility starts to drop below 100 once you place your reactor grav drive and other components the mass of your Shield becomes a much more difficult choice but in the end one of these three Shields should always be your go-to now let's talk grab drives and this might be a quicker discussion than Shields when choosing a grav drive you really just need to remember one value 28 for 28 light years that is currently the farthest distance between two star systems in the game so as long as the grab drive you choose provides you with at least 28 light years of jump distance you should select the one with the lowest mass as you're building your ship you can literally just scroll through the grab drives and watch that value move around between how many light years it provides you and just find one that gives you 28 light years at the lowest mass now I've placed a few here just to have something to show typically for a lightweight build one of these Class A gra drives has plenty of jump range for a heavier cargo hauler one of these Class C drives either the j52 Gamma or the Apollo may be necessary as those two provide the highest jump thrust of any grab drives in the game on to landing gear the main stat to look at when choosing landing gear is its Landing thrust as a quick rule of thumb One landing thrust is enough for approximately 200 units of mass the two landing gear with the highest Landing thrust in the game are the ng20 which you can find at new Homestead on Saturn's moon Titan or the Hope 55 which you can find in the valow system at Hope Town now technically the Hope 55 has one less unit of mass making it the best landing gear in terms of thrust to mass ratio but I find that they're so bulky to place on your ship that the ng20 are often much easier to use a couple other landing gear to highlight the pinpoint 3G landing gear from Taio astring are unique in that they provide three hole points per landing gear at only one mass and the front-facing version has a weapon Mount again your reactor will provide nearly all of your hole points so I don't put much importance on this but I know someone will call it out if I don't lastly the acul Lander landing gear is is worth mentioning just as a comparison it's Stroud landing gear and what's unique about this is its base version has attachment points on all sides and the top something these other landing gear do not which makes it easier to attach to different ship builds and it has a respectable two Landing thrust next we do need to talk about cargo but honestly only briefly nearly all cargo pieces are created equal in this game and by that I mean the main stat to attempt to maximize is Cargo per mass now the best cargo per mass is 4.77 the worst 4.69 that means the difference between the best and worst cargo containers is 8 hundredths of a point so use whatever cargo you want whatever fits your ship now the key distinction is for shielded cargo shielded cargo reduces your chances of Contraband scans finding Contraband in your cargo hold the percent chance of those scans getting caught essentially works by dividing the total mass of the Contraband you have on board by your total shielded cargo space now for shielded cargo the best cargo per Mass ratio is actually 3.39 and the worst is 3.27 again not a huge spread to worry about but there is one significant outlier this 10st huler shielded cargo that I'm showing you right now is much much worse at 2.58 shielded cargo per Mass so rather than recommending a specific cargo container to you I'm doing the opposite here avoid this one if you can it's just the most inefficient on to fuel fuel seems to be a mechanic that frankly was cut during the development and I think both Bethesda even said as much that the original plan was for the player to have to refuel at various points but they cut that from the game cuz it just wasn't that much fun the result is that we still are required to have fuel on our ship but it works a bit deceptively so while the gra Drive governs the distance you can travel between Star systems your fuel seems to govern how many of these jumps you can string together before you have to stop to refuel which in terms of gameplay basically means requiring you to sit through more loading screens so regardless to determine which fuel containers are the best is a simple equation like cargo except there's actually greater variation between fuel containers so so out of all fuel containers the 90t helium 3 tank has the best fuel per mass of any fuel container in the game being just above 10.0 the next best container the M50 ulses is the second best with a fuel per Mass right at 10.0 now while these are both great for that total fuel per Mass you actually might not need to incur as much mass as these tanks have especially the 90t helium tank at a mass of 60 units depending on the ship you're building for example I have a lightweight fighter ship with a mass of around 1,000 mass units it only needs 220 units of fuel to jump from one end of the galaxy to the other I can achieve that amount of fuel for far less than 60 mass that the 90t fuel tank provides now my character has a maximum astrodynamics skill which reduces my fuel cost significantly if I had Sarah Morgan as a crew member that fuel cost would be reduced even further so while these two are technically the best fuel tanks test out how much fuel you need for your ship and its current Mass to jump from one end of the galaxy to the other start from one end try to jump to the other see how much fuel it costs you might be able to save on some Mass okay on to weapons now let's get something out of the way right up front particle beams are the best weapon type they do equal damage to Shields and hole and a lot of it meaning you don't have to waste reactor power juggling between lasers which primarily damage Shields and ballistics which then damage the hole you can simply put Power to particle beams hit the trigger button and you're on your way so which particle beams are the best we're going to start looking at the non- turret versions and then we'll discuss turrets after that because turrets versus non- turrets is where the debate really begins so for non- turrets you the player actually control when they fire that means you direct where the damage goes and when uh and when the power allocated to your weapons actually gets consumed now there are three particle beam weapons that far outclass the rest in terms of damage per second the Vanguard obliterator Auto projectors the Exterminator 95 me auto helion beams and the PBO 175 Auto helon beams if I can I'll link in the description a great spreadsheet that provides the DPS on these if you're curious now you'll notice that there are two versions of both the exterminators and the PB 175s specifically I mentioned using the auto versions but there is a standard I'll call non Auto version to be clear the auto does not mean the same as turrets turrets are self- firing and self- aiming Auto however means the weapon has a magazine it's a magazine that's full of ammo that it can fire before it needs to reload non Auto or standard means single shot and then the weapon has to reload after each shot I'm going to illustrate the difference so I've equipped both the auto and non-auto version of the exterminators and I'm going to fire both as quickly as I possibly can first I'll put one PowerPoint into each weapon you'll notice in the auto version on the right as I fire the magazine depletes in the non-auto version on the left the full magazine depletes with each shot and has to wait to reload now let's see how they compare when fully powered the auto version still fires faster twice as fast actually which is true for all Auto versus non-auto versions until its magazine is depleted and then we have to wait for it to reload whereas the non-auto version continues to fire but just as fast as it can be reloaded what this means is that the reactor power you allocate to your weapons impacts how quickly they reload not their overall damage now obviously this would have an impact on overall damage per second in practice this the damage dealt by the auto versions is much higher for two reasons first they fire twice as fast as the non-auto versions however their damage per shot is lower but it isn't quite half in fact it's quite a bit more than half so overall it's dealing more damage per second now the key Point here is that because they have a full magazine of ammo to start with and their DPS is so high they actually destroy enemy ships even groups of enemy ships before needing to reload making them all around better than the non-auto versions this is also why you should always equip as many of them as you can because even with one reactor Point allocated to them you get a full magazine to burn through so you may as well maximize your DPS output by having as much ammo to fire as possible all right over to turrets similar to the auto particle beams there are three turrets that deal more damage per second than the others I've got them listed here in descending order of DPS first the obliterator 250 me Alpha turrets second the pb300 auto Alpha turrets and third the PBO 100 Auto Neutron turrets now one way you'll know you've selected a turret in the ship Builder is they will always initially be pointed sideways just like they are here you can flip them to different cardinal directions which is important because they don't quite rotate a full even 90° but rather closer to 80 but they can also rotate upwards or if they're oriented down when mounted on your ship underneath then they can rotate down now the big question is how do particle beam turrets compare to Auto particle beams which one is better now this is an inexact science I'm going to attempt to show you two different builds one with turrets and one with auto particle beams both taking on the Crimson Fleet at cricks on very hard now these ships do have the same crew the same sheep field which is the assurance and the same reactor the pinch 8A that has the highest hole value but they do have different engines and Mobility as honestly I would typically use turrets on a slow immobile ship and auto particle beams on a light highly mobile fighter so that's what we're going to compare now what you're going to see other than my poor flying is that the turrets fire on their own will I don't control them so long as they're powered up they will fire when they acquire a Target that even means that if that Target is boosting away and all of their shots are missing because they can't get a Target lock they're wasting ammo and reactor power overall in spite of my poor flying I was Victorious with the turrets which is a good sign now to look at a lightweight ship which ALS o has maximum top speed with the white dwarf 315s and auto particle beams what I've called frankly the most overpowered ship in the game I think my piloting is much better here and because of the high mobility and top speed my hole never even sustains a hit but what you'll notice is how quickly these weapons just obliterate the enemy Shields and hole it really isn't and that's even with the particle beams not fully powered by the reactor you can see they're really only at about half power or a little bit more but because they start with full magazines uh I'm really not missing that and I destroy them so quickly that I have plenty of time to reload as I'm flying circles around them with these white dwarfs 305s now the other thing you'll notice with this build is just how fast these white dwarf engines are with Samco on board especially their ability to break the enemy's Target lock to get around behind them to re-engage from Far distances uh it really is just an overpowered uh build when you can have this High Mobility be this fast with these particle beams so what does this comparison prove honestly I don't think it proves a whole lot I think it means you should use turrets if you like turrets or use the auto particle beams if you prefer those I think the only real conclusion we can draw is that if you have a heavy slow ship with low Mobility you should use turrets do not put manually firing weapons on a ship like that you'll just get destroyed however if your ship is mobile and fast use either and you'll destroy anyone foolish enough to test you so particle beams as we already discussed are the most overpowered weapons and it honestly isn't close but I do understand sometimes you simply want to role playay differently so let's talk missiles quickly now in general missiles initially appear incredibly powerful if you look at their stats uh in the stat box and for a single shot they are but that's where the problem is they take so long to reload that higher level enemies can honestly destroy you before you you can fire another volley now it can still be fun to play with at least one set of missiles if you choose to so here's three that I think are the best in terms of damage output but they're very different in how they accomplish it and that's due to a hidden stat that the game doesn't really show you and that is their magazine so the infiltrators here can actually fire 14 missiles before they have to reload and these are actually Class A so you can get them right out of the gate now the C 59s they can only fire four before they have to reload and these two adcs they can only fire two before reloading now you can kind of infer how many they can fire just by looking at them but there isn't a stat that I can see that shows you just how many you have available to you before you have to reload and again the reload times are painfully slow so just to prove this to you I'm going to show how big of a difference this makes so on this ship I've placed infiltrators on the leftmost side the c59 in the middle and the 280c is on the right now you'll see the 280 CS fire their payload of two missiles and they stop firing almost immediately followed quickly by the c59 but the infiltrators continue to fire for quite a while what we can conclude if you do the math is that if you want a quick burst of high damage the 28 CS are the best cuz they deliver their damage in just two missiles almost immediately but if you want sustained damage they're fairly equal with the other two sets of missiles the infiltrators can actually be a bit better than the others in this case also like I said before the infiltrators are only class a while the others are both Class C so that's a key difference there now I do want to highlight one ballistic weapon because if you do choose to roleplay with Ballistics these are actually quite fun to use and their damage output to both Shields and hole is quite decent these are the Vanguard Hellfire autoc cannons now similar to the other Vanguard ship parts you'll need to complete the beginning of the Vanguard quest line before you can use these um but because they only require two power per weapon you can up to six of these on your ship just like the Vanguard obliterator Auto projector particle beams which is a mouthful to say with that many equipped these do significant whole damage once an enemy Shields are down and the other reason I'm talking about them is they actually do a decent amount of damage to Shields as well simply due to their very high rate of fire and the fact that you can have up to six of them on your ship so if you want to put these on again they're a lot of fun now you'll notice that I'm not discussing lasers at all and again that's because particle beams are simply so much better given you can max out your ship with three particle beam weapons just hold down the trigger and you'll collectively do more damage to hole and shields quickly than separate laser and Ballistic builds now like I said the Vanguard Auto cannons that we just talked about actually do a respectable amount of damage to shields uh but sadly there isn't an equivalent laser weapon that does the same sort of damage to Hole uh so you're better off just going with particle beams now I will discuss em weapons quickly um just to highlight one more time when choosing a weapon you need to look not only at its damage value but its fire rate uh as well as how many of them you can equip so these nullifier 1750s at class A actually provide more em damage output than these Class C Tatsu 501s because you can only equip two of the tatsus and they shoot almost half as quickly as the nullifiers so that means you're getting not only two additional nullifiers on your ship but they're all shooting almost twice as fast okay now to round out our discussion let's talk about some ship components you may not have seen if you haven't played much of the game yet these can be found in the equipment section when purchasing ship parts and they're primarily found at the key unlocked as part of the Crimson Fleet quest line or you can find the scan Jammer from the ship vendor at the Red Mile now these provide a few quirky bonuses to your ship making you a little bit stronger from making Contraband a little more difficult to scan to even giving a boost to Shield regeneration or targeting mode now for the C Spike and conduction grid once you unlock them during the Crimson Fleet quest line if you ultimately choose to side with the UC against the Crimson Fleet you will lose access to these parts so just make sure to put them on all of the ships you might want them on before you complete that Quest okay I do want to say a few things about cockpits and Habs though honestly with these pieces along with structural pieces they're primarily cosmetic so pick the ones that you want but regarding cockpits the Viking CP 100 is the lowest Mass cockpit in the game which is useful to know if you want a very high Mobility ship build second most ship technicians have different versions of kind of what appears to be the same cockpit with the primary differences being cargo space and cruise stations at the cost of additional mass now you typically have to visit each specific Shipyard or ship builder in order to see their unique unque cockpits and even the bigger versions of the bridges and one last thing to note these Bridges from stoutland the contiki bridges they can be nice for larger capital ship builds because the entrance to them is from the underneath which I know means a ladder but it also means you don't need a horizontally connected Hab On The Backs side of it however one kind of quality of life note that I found is the passenger seats inside these contiki bridges are all extremely close to the Pilot's chair which means your crew will talk to you nonstop while you're flying and you can't tell them to leave you alone so I'm still waiting for a mod that lets you eject your crew members into space I know some modders kind of gave up on this game but I honestly think they had it backwards instead of trying to improve the mechanics they should have given us tools to destroy it but I digress now for Habs there are a few unique C pieces that we should talk about specifically these cross bracers which you can get from Hope Tech or Nova this Nova crossbreaker bracer from the ship technician on new Homestead in Titan the piece that's I think particularly interesting is this htech Hab spine more of a front to back kind of tunnel layout I've used these on my Millennium Falcon build as it creates kind of that stereotypical tunnel passageway through the ship but it also allows you to have a complete kind of circle pathway through the Habs in your ship which is nice and as you probably already know just the different sizes and shapes of Hab pieces um there's actually in addition to this uh a couple 3x3 you can get from Taio or hope Tech as well but if you want any of these 2x two 2x3 3x two you'll need to actually visit the specific uh Shipyard vendors you can't get these from your Outpost uh Landing Pad otherwise you can find the other pieces from most General ship vendors and that's it all the best ship parts thank you I really do enjoy the debate around which combination of these parts makes the best ship so please leave a comment ask questions let me know what I might have missed and until next time keep flying
