01 A ship at the end of its level
Pick a ship level and a faction, and the planner builds the ship as it stands when that level is done: every
room the game sells by then, as many of each as it allows, at the highest level the ship can build, with every
research the laboratory can reach. Ship levels go up to 10; the data lists more, and those stay
hidden here as they do in the rooms database. Generic is the set every ship shares: a faction gets all of it
plus its own weapons, so pick your own to plan the ship you fly. Defaults are stable starting points, not
advice; a room's name and code open its card.
02 Damage lives on the projectile
Rooms carry no damage of their own: fixed weapons fire their own projectile, a turret platform the weapon you
mount in it, launchers the ammo you pick, hangars the drone you pick. A platform row reads as the weapon you
chose, down to its level and its card. Ammo and drones are listed one entry per family, at the highest level
your ship can build, and a family that does nothing to a ship is not offered at all. Where a launcher has a
single family, the row names its round instead of offering a choice you never make.
Room, shield, hull and EMP are four different resources of the target, so there is no single DPS here and no
weights of ours: you choose which one leads.
Per shot: Volley × min(1, Accuracy/100) × damage. Per cycle:
ReloadTime + (Volley − 1) × VolleyDelay ticks, the Reload Time on the room's card. A rate is shot
over cycle, times the bonuses; hangars use the drone's Reload and multiply by BatchCount. EMP is the exception:
a duration, not a rate, so EMP LOCK shows seconds per shot.
03 Crew, combos and Rush Command
A room has two bonuses in the game's own words: WPN points of the crew manning it are its Damage Bonus, and
the room's Support Stat, when that is not WPN, is its Efficiency Bonus and shortens the cycle. A plain weapon
room has WPN for its Support Stat, so its crew adds damage and nothing else, and only a combo shortens its
cycle: missile launchers standing next to each other, for instance. Rush Command works differently: it doubles
the room's reload speed for the opening seconds of the battle, 2 × PLT seconds of the
crew that has it, so you type that crew's PLT and the field prints the window it buys.
DAMAGE is the room's own figure from the game: the percentage its WPN crew and its damage combos add up to,
zero until you fill something in. Reload percentages are a separate sum and are not in it, so a room whose
only bonus is a reload combo shows 0% while its rates still rise.
Combos come from the game's own table of neighbours. Where a neighbour can sit on either side, the chip has
two halves and each ticks its own. Percentages add up rather than compound: damage into one sum, reload into
another, exactly as the game adds them on the room you tap.
04 Power, balance and auto-pick
Generation is what the reactors make; every room takes from zero up to its Max Power, set by the stepper on
its row as you would reroute power in a battle. Weapons start silent, shield rooms at their maximum, Life
Support at one point, so the page opens with a budget to spend rather than a deficit to fix. A room on part
of its power fires slower; on zero it is silent and free. A deficit is shown, not forbidden.
AUTO-PICK spends generation + margin minus what the other rooms use, down to the last point, and
never touches your crew points or combos. PER POWER compares weapons by hand and does not move with the
stepper: half the power is half the speed.
05 The enemy ship, its shield and its armor
ENEMY SHIP LEVEL shows what the other side's data allows at that level: the best Shield Generator and Shield
Battery with their Shield and Restore, the best Armor with its Capacity and the number of blocks the level lets
a ship carry, and the hull points of every ship sharing the level. SHIELD BREAK divides that shield by your
shield DPS.
The shield is a phase, not a discount: while it holds, direct fire goes into it and reaches no room at all,
while missiles and bombs pass through from the first second. That is where the line below breaks.
Armor is not shared by the ship. Each block protects only the rooms touching it edge to edge, so what you
enter is how many blocks sit next to the room you aim at; it cuts room and hull damage by
100 / (AR + 100), the same figure the game prints as Defence. A room's own Defence adds to that
AR.
06 Damage over time, and why the line has steps
A rate per second is an average that only comes true after enough cycles, so two builds with the same DPS can
differ badly in a short fight. DAMAGE OVER TIME counts actual hits instead; fifteen, thirty and sixty seconds
are readable marks of ours, not game values.
There are three tabs. TOTAL runs from second zero, so its columns include the empty opening of a fight: the
shield has to fall, the first cycle has to finish, and the round has to fly. PER 5 SECONDS and PER 15 SECONDS
show the pace instead, the damage that landed in a window divided by the length of that window. The line's
window slides with every moment, a column's window sits between two marks, so the column is the average of
that stretch, and each tab's stretches are as long as its window.
A window is needed because damage arrives in single hits: without one the line would be a comb of spikes.
Five seconds keeps the shape of the fight, with the dips between rocket salvos, the end of a Rush Command
window and the step where the shield falls; fifteen smooths those away and shows the settled pace. Either
line ramps up from zero at the start, because the window is not full yet. Each tab carries its own vertical
scale, topped by the peak of the line you are looking at: the same fight by a different measure would be
pressed flat against the axis of a shared one.
A hit is not a shot: the round leaves at the end of its cycle and lands one flight later, and the ~FLIGHT
column shows that delay per weapon, worked out from the projectile's speed. A beam has no speed in the data
and hits at once, so its cell prints a dash. With the shield phase on top, the first seconds of a fight belong
to whatever ignores shields, not to whatever has the highest DPS.
07 What is not modelled
The hull layout (you tick a combo yourself when a room sits next to a reactor), the battle AI's own rules for
moving power mid fight, crew and equipment beyond the stat points you type, the fifteen crew abilities other
than Rush Command, accuracy against the target's dodge, what partial power does to a shield or an engine,
shield Restore, build cost, and anything above ship level 10. The Rush Command window is
counted from second zero, while the battle AI can hold the ability back and fire it later.
Two whole sides of a battle stay outside the four metrics. Damage to the crew is a fifth resource nothing here
counts, which is why ammo built only for it is left out of the lists. Anti Craft Laser and Anti Craft Missiles
shoot at drones rather than at the ship, and they are the only rooms in the data with a Range: they stand among
the other rooms, taking power and showing no damage of their own, and drones of yours being shot down are not
counted either.
08 Thirteen interpretations
Thirteen things the data does not say and we had to decide.
(1) ReloadTime, VolleyDelay and a drone's Reload are ticks, 40 ticks per second.
(2) Room DPS adds Physical, AP (armor piercing) and Fire one to one. Fire is the weak spot of that sum:
in the game it sets the room alight and damages modules while it burns, and how long it burns is in no field
of the data. Purely incendiary ammo rests entirely on this reading.
(3) The turret and valve combo is worth the Hydraulics Valve's Capacity in percent.
(4) A hangar's own ReloadTime is launch pacing and is not in the rate.
(5) EMPDamage is seconds of lock per hit, never divided by the reload: two hits on one room overlap
rather than queue up.
(6) Shield break ignores Restore.
(7) A room on part of its Max Power reloads proportionally slower.
(8) The first shot leaves at the end of the first cycle, not at second zero.
(9) The Rush Command window is counted from the start of the battle and comes once per fight. The
volley tail keeps its own pace, and a second crew with the ability adds nothing.
(10) A combo whose neighbour can sit on either side counts twice when both halves are ticked, and the
two percentages add up. The data holds one number and one direction per combo.
(11) A room seats one crew per cell along its width, so a CREW field accepts the stat's cap times
that many: 30 points in a two cell Small Phaser is 60.
(12) Flight time is 132 divided by Speed, and a beam arrives at once. The distance
between two ships is in no field of the data, so that dividend is the figure the community settled on. Read
the column as an estimate of the right size, not an exact delay.
(13) While a shield holds, direct fire reaches no room at all: no damage and no EMP lock either,
and only missiles and bombs pass through it. A shield nothing on board can hurt holds for the whole battle,
and direct fire stays outside it to the last second.