The idea of vertical ship is pretty much that the drive of the ship thrust the ship with all its 'broadside' forward. Always exposing its mass if it is how it move forward.
Vertical ships
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The idea of vertical ship is pretty much that the drive of the ship thrust the ship with all its 'broadside' forward. Always exposing its mass if it is how it move forward.
How is that different from a wedge-shaped ship viewed from its side?
It would render your vertical ship useless in battle, as there are no place to put batteries of laser and cannons on the thin line of a wedgeshaped ship's side!
My point is that if you face me in the battle, driving forward towards my battleships then your mass is exposed af!
Thats why most of the "harder" scifi series rely on broadsides for the heavy combat. When facing mounting damage in combat, its a simply maneuver to roll the ship and present the other fresh broadside, with most of the more powerful reaction drives being relatively immune to most forms of weapons fire when pointed at it, it makes it easier to run away if things go bad aswell. (Tends to be rather hard to punch say a laser through a 100 mile long plasma plume.)
A "vertical" ship like the ones presented are impractical on basically every level that is relevant there.
As for ships portrayed like star destroyers, they kind of get the worst of every world, except the ability to project firepower forwards, there they exceed all other designs.
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Wedge vs tower on a spaceship is different in regards to the relation between the hull and the engines. Wedges have all their engines at one end. Destroy every engine but one and it still moves the same way, just with slower acceleration. Towers have their engines along one edge. Destroy one engine and you've got parts of the ship accelerating at different rates. Maybe you'll end up in a humiliating spin or maybe the same designer who insisted on the tower wasn't as incompetent as they seemed and chunks break off next time you try to move.
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I made this thread just to ask a question and defend the coolness of vertical ships. The practicality of such designs is irrelevant. Please, let's not make this a 15 page discussion like the 2Dx3D map thread.
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If every ship design was built only to be as effective as possible, everybody would fly in the same ship types, with varying sizes. They would be controlled by machines instead of organic lifeforms, if that's less expensive than organic crew. And they would have a black color to make them less easy to find with your eyes. Mostly, the empires would use swarms of tiny drones which are easy to build and difficult to hit. That doesn't seem to be the case in Stellaris though, so you guys can stop using effectiveness-arguments against vertical ships 
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If every ship design was built only to be as effective as possible, everybody would fly in the same ship types, with varying sizes. They would be controlled by machines instead of organic lifeforms, if that's less expensive than organic crew. And they would have a black color to make them less easy to find with your eyes. Mostly, the empires would use swarms of tiny drones which are easy to build and difficult to hit. That doesn't seem to be the case in Stellaris though, so you guys can stop using effectiveness-arguments against vertical ships
Because painting it black totally is effective because we eyeball ships in space
There's actually quite a bit of variance in efficient design schemes that would result in some pretty different designs especially with different tech and aesthetics. Just look at all the various designs for ships and aircraft with our homogeneous tech base and sense of aesthetics. (At least in the Galactic scheme)
Also from an engineering standpoint tiny ships are very difficult to build effectively, and not any harder to hit, which is why bigger is usually better in scifi. (Miniaturization is alot harder than macro sometimes, heat insulation for instance on a reactor or engine there's really no choice but to use mass for the job)
As for ai controlled, yeah you would if you've got sufficiently advanced enough Ai and you trust it (Humanity for one never will were distrustful control freaks by nature)
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Horizontal and vertical are irrelevant without a horizon as a frame of reference. The only two clearly defined axis are thrust and normal. Either the ship is long and narrow along its vector of thrust, or it is broad and short in its vector of thrust. If you rotate a "vertical" ship 90* along normal, it would look as a "horizontal" ship but behave identical. The only consistent frame of reference is the vector of thrust.
The main arguments for coaxial ships are that you expose as little front towards the enemy as possible and that you have the greatest possible length of weaponry such as mass drivers.
The main argument for conormal ships is that you have the maximum surface towards the enemy for mounting equipment, and a larger surface for mounting engines.
Conormal ships are more common in softer science fiction, as they in most depicted space battles are inferior to coaxial. But there are techs and tactics that could use conormal ships to great effect. They turn faster, and several smaller guns might be more useful than a few bigger. Depending on what phelbotinum you are using for shields it also reasons that conormal can have more shields, offsetting the increased chance to be hit.
Perfectly round ships expose the minimal surface/size if the enemy is equally likely to engage from any direction, but we can assume you can orient your front quickly as well as choose engagements where it already is oriented towards the enemy, and thus spherical ships expose more surface/size than coaxial on the whole.
So you can either have shape of ships be fully aesthetic or you can have it as an option for chassis, with accompanying bonuses and penalties.
The main arguments for coaxial ships are that you expose as little front towards the enemy as possible and that you have the greatest possible length of weaponry such as mass drivers.
The main argument for conormal ships is that you have the maximum surface towards the enemy for mounting equipment, and a larger surface for mounting engines.
Conormal ships are more common in softer science fiction, as they in most depicted space battles are inferior to coaxial. But there are techs and tactics that could use conormal ships to great effect. They turn faster, and several smaller guns might be more useful than a few bigger. Depending on what phelbotinum you are using for shields it also reasons that conormal can have more shields, offsetting the increased chance to be hit.
Perfectly round ships expose the minimal surface/size if the enemy is equally likely to engage from any direction, but we can assume you can orient your front quickly as well as choose engagements where it already is oriented towards the enemy, and thus spherical ships expose more surface/size than coaxial on the whole.
So you can either have shape of ships be fully aesthetic or you can have it as an option for chassis, with accompanying bonuses and penalties.
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Was wondering about this topic as well. I did notice that the fallen empire has the 'vertical' ships, but whether the player has the ability to field those...is yet to be answered (to be honest, I just wanne create a Minbari look alike race and would need 'vertical' ship design for that )
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Was wondering about this topic as well. I did notice that the fallen empire has the 'vertical' ships, but whether the player has the ability to field those...is yet to be answered (to be honest, I just wanne create a Minbari look alike race and would need 'vertical' ship design for that
I don't believe they are a part of the initial choices from what I have seen.
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This is correct - there is one ship style per 'phenotype', plus one (the vertical design) for Fallen Empires. There was a thread where someone posted an image of the ship designs that were available to the player fairly recently but I can't seem to find it at the moment. I don't remember any of them being vertical.
That said, some people on the forums have expressed an interest in seeing alternative ship styles being added to the game in future, so I think there's hope that there could be some eventually.
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I'd call it a near-certainty, given the number of unit packs in the other PDX games. We love our sprites (even if they haven't actually been sprites in over a decade)
After you mentioned there being a thread I looked a bit and found this https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...these-ships-in-the-game.923419/#post-21049849
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Ah - yeah - that's the one! Thank you for finding it. I was just looking through the Blorg Stream videos on Youtube to see if they were shown there too (apparently they are - at 17:00 in the first video).
EDIT: In fact I think that may be where the screenshot was originally taken from as they both show the possible 'PLANT' phenotype.
I'd actually like extra dimensional ships that exist partly in other dimensions. You'll never know what hit you!
Smiles
I would love to see more ship designs as DLC's, and a vertical, or wide ship would be a lovely change. From what I've seen of the game, all ships are currently symmetrical, so an asymmetric ship would also be nice to ad variety.
Echoing @Efa_Aurora's hope for asymmetry. I'd also like to see a ship design which has the decks perpendicular to the axis of thrust, because ever since I read Revelation Space that's how I see spacecraft.
