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. A platform row reads as the weapon you
chose, down to its level and its card. Ammo is 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. EMP is the exception:
a duration, not a rate, so EMP LOCK shows the seconds one shot buys. The damage percentages raise it like any
other damage of the projectile; the cycle does not divide it.
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. An ordinary weapon on part
of its power fires slower; on zero, it does not fire. A deficit is shown, not forbidden.
AUTO-PICK spends generation + margin minus what the other rooms use to maximize the sum of independent first-minute totals, and
never touches your crew points or combos. PER POWER divides the table metric by assigned power. For ordinary
weapons it stays constant as power changes. The 60s column shows the selected TARGET total over the
first minute, including reload, flight, which depends on both ship levels, drone deployment and your configured bonuses. AUTO-PICK uses this
same value; enemy shields, armor and interception are excluded from both. Equal results prefer less power.
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 marks the first hit that brings accumulated shield damage to its HP, including
reload, flight, drone launches and enabled drone losses. If hits cannot exhaust its HP, the shield holds.
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. Armor piercing goes through twice as easily: the AP part of a hit is cut by
100 / (AR / 2 + 100).
What a hit does to the hull depends on the room you aim at. A room absorbs a hit up to what it has left,
and the rest goes on into the hull, the armor piercing part of it at a tenth. TARGET ROOM sets that state.
STANDING counts only the projectile's own hull damage, as if the room still had plenty left; DESTROYED
counts the whole hit as overflow. Armor next to the room still cuts it either way. The switch changes hull
figures only, and unlike armor it changes them everywhere: in the table, the 60s column and AUTO-PICK too.
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 and the length of both hulls. 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 Hangars and drones
Hangar DPS is the combined damage per second of all drones launched during a battle, assuming all have reached the
enemy and remain alive. It uses each drone's projectile damage and Reload (in ticks), with the hangar's WPN
and damage-combo bonuses. Drones are offered at the highest level your ship can build; BatchCount sets how
many launch together. Launches per battle use a manually maintained table, independent of Capacity:
levels 4–5 launch four batches and 6–8 five, matching in-game observations. Levels 1–3 retain estimates
of 2, 3 and 3 launches; levels 9–10 retain estimates of 6 and 7 pending measurements.
The compact label shows drones per launch × launches = total drones.
Table DPS excludes launch and drone travel time. PLT, Rush Command, reload combos and
power affect how quickly the hangar releases batches, not how fast released drones shoot.
DAMAGE OVER TIME includes deployment delays: each batch completes the hangar's reload, travels to the enemy,
then fires on its own cycle. Travel is the same distance as in (11) divided by FlightSpeed. Drones circle
the enemy hull and fire from there, so their projectiles cover a distance close to the length of that hull
rather than the gap between ships. The first shot comes one full drone cycle after arrival; that timing is
an assumption. The hangar's ~FLIGHT adds both legs, excluding launch reload and the first firing cycle.
Enemy Anti Craft Laser is off by default. Enabling it adds drone losses to the timeline, using the enemy's
maximum available number and level of lasers, fully powered, without crew or combo bonuses. Range is ignored:
drones become targets on arrival. Ready lasers fire immediately, then follow their reload, finishing the
oldest surviving drone first. Each hit damages one drone using its HP; excess damage is lost. At equal times,
interception resolves before drone fire; already-fired projectiles still land. Lasers stay operational
throughout battle; their ammunition, target evasion and other ways of destroying drones are not modelled.
Enemy armor and interception affect DAMAGE OVER TIME, not table DPS or the 60s column.
SHIELD BREAK accounts for drone losses. AUTO-PICK accounts for deployment within the first minute,
but does not optimize survival against enemy defenses.
08 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.
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.
Fire: a hit sets the room alight, and the fire burns the room and its crew every second
until the crew or a sprinkler puts it out. How soon that happens depends on the enemy crew and modules, so
fire is in no figure here; incendiary ammo shows only the physical damage it carries. Modules in the target room are not counted
either: an intact barrier or turret takes a hit's room damage on itself, so none of it reaches the room or
spills into the hull, while fire, EMP and the projectile's own hull damage still land.
09 Twelve interpretations
Twelve things the data does not say and we had to decide.
(1) ReloadTime and VolleyDelay are ticks, 40 ticks per second.
(2) A standing target room takes every hit whole, so HULL DPS counts only the projectile's hull
damage. A hit bigger than what the room has left spills the difference into the hull, and on a room already
destroyed all of it spills: DESTROYED counts that case. How much a room has left changes with every hit and
is in no data the planner sees.
(3) The turret and valve combo is worth the Hydraulics Valve's Capacity in percent.
(4) EMPDamage is seconds of lock per hit, never divided by the reload: two hits on one room overlap
rather than queue up.
(5) Shield break ignores Restore.
(6) A room on part of its Max Power reloads proportionally slower.
(7) The first shot leaves at the end of the first cycle, not at second zero.
(8) 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.
(9) 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.
(10) 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.
(11) No field of the data gives the distance between ships. Flight time is that distance divided
by Speed, and a beam arrives at once. The distance grows with the length of both hulls:
2.5 × (columns of your hull + columns of the enemy's). If your faction has no hull line of
its own, and always for the enemy, whose faction is unknown, a hull's length is the average of that
level's hulls. Across the levels on offer the dividend runs
from 67 to 175. Where the firing room and its target sit on the two hulls moves the real figure by
up to an eighth either way, so read the column as an estimate.
(12) 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.