My first proper Warship

[Maharava (OP)]

This is my first actual Warship, designed to go out and patrol rather than sit at Earth.  Any and all advice is appreciated

Swiftsure class Destroyer    19,950 tons     1412 Crew     2147. 4 BP      TCS 399  TH 378  EM 0
947 km/s     Armour 1-65     Shields 0-0     Sensors 12/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 5     PPV 236. 28
Maint Life 3. 03 Years     MSP 5336    AFR 636%    IFR 8. 8%    1YR 871    5YR 13071    Max Repair 231 MSP

Military Ion Engine MK II (6)    Power 63    Fuel Use 88%    Signature 63    Armour 0    Exp 7%    Hyper Capable
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres    Range 10. 2 billion km   (125 days at full power)

Single N-UltraV 120k Laser-4 Turret (4x1)    Range 64,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 4-2     RM 3    ROF 10        4 4 4 3 2 2 0 0 0 0
Heavy Quad Meson Cannon r30k ts10k Turret (4x4)    Range 30,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 24-12     RM 3    ROF 10        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S04 32-4000 ( 8 )    Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 4000 km/s     84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Gas-cooled PO 9 (11)     Total Power Output 99    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Pinpoint Detection ASS 32 Res 1 (1)     GPS 32     Range 1. 9m km    Resolution 1
Broad Sweep ASS 32 Res100 (1)     GPS 3200     Range 19. 2m km    Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH2 (1)     Sensitivity 12     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  12m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

[TheDeadlyShoe]

*Lifts Eyebrow* You appear to be using an old version of the game.

But aside from that

You have no passive defenses (Armor and Shields).  Any beam warship will need those.   Your turrets also use the default tracking speed of 10,000 km/s while your fire control is only capable of tracking at 4,000 km/s.  The weapons will use the worse one, so you will likely to be unable to hit incoming missiles. 

The ship is also too slow, but that's in part because of the Hyper-capable engines.  Hyperdrive is useful only in very specialized designs, unless you have extremely high tech levels.

The power generator appears twice as strong as actually needed by your systems.

You have 5 engineering spaces, and what looks to be 5 maintenance storage closets; this is very inefficient.  Maintenance storage components are for support vessels pretty much. It's always better to use engineering spaces on combat ships. 

Proposed action list:

Research a new Military Engine without Hyperdrive
Research new Laser and Meson turrets with 16,000 km/s tracking speed
Research a new Beam Fire Control that uses a 4x tracking speed multiplier. 
Remove  the Maintenance Storage Spaces
Remove existing engines
Add at least 1 new engine per 1,000 tons of ship
Add more engineering spaces
Add more armor using the 'armor thickness' control on the left.
Replace the turrets with the new turrets.  I would suggest reducing the number of meson turrets from 4 to 2.
Remove existing fire controls; add 1 new fire control per meson turret, and 1 for the 4 laser turrets.
Remove plants until the power output is close to (yet above) the total power consumption of your beam weapons. For reference, your laser turrets use 2 power each and your meson turrets use 12 power each. So your current power consumption is 56.  If you removed 2 meson turrets, you would have 32, requiring 3 of your current power generators. 
Adjust number of engines to be about 1 per kiloton.

If you do all these things you will probably end up with a decent Point-Defence Escort. 

[Nightstar]

Looks like version 5.6?

The obvious problems:
No EM sensor. Even a fairly small EM sensor will spot anything with active sensors on.
Poor speed AND poor range. Practically anything will be able to sit outside its range and kill it.
No defense. One layer of armor and no shields. A very few hits will cripple your ship.
I'm not entirely confident in this, but it looks like you have more reactor power than you need.
Your fire control isn't fast enough to control those turrets. You should also have a longer range fire control for your lasers. You can't use their range with this one. You don't need a separate fire control per turret by the way. At least in most cases.
Relatively short range. Hyper may help some depending on your system layouts, but this is limited to a couple jumps.

Someone else can probably give better suggestions for improvement.    Actually, just use Shoe's. ^^^

[Maharava (OP)]

I KNEW I'd mixed up my tracking speeds lol.  And apparently I was looking at the wrong numbers for how much power I'd need, thanks for pointing that out And I do believe it's 5. 6, don't ask me how or where I picked it up.
Thank you both for your tips: as you can clearly see, I'm new lol.
Do I need Fire Controls for each weapon? Or only each type of weapon?
Thank you both again.  Thank the dice gods I haven't met any aliens XD

[TheDeadlyShoe]

You only need one beam fire control for basic function. It can handle any number and any type of beam weapon in any combination. However, for various reasons, you should use a minimum of one per quad turret. 

Basically, one fire control can target one thing per 5s tick, whether thats an enemy ship or an enemy missile salvo.  It's possible to face a great number of salvos of relatively few missiles each, in which case have too few fire controls results in overkill versus some salvos and no fire at all against others.    Of course, you need a minimum of one weapon per fire control, and a quad-mount turret acts like one weapon.

P.S. I made an error, your powerplants are rated at 9 rather than 11, so you would need 4 power plants for for 2x4 meson + 4x1 laser.

[metalax]

The number of fire-controls you need is dependant on how much fire-power you want to direct at each target. As a rule of thumb I tend to use around one fire-control per four beam weapon barrels.

Design 2 types of fire-control, one with 4x speed the other with 4x range. Use the first for PD guns and the later for anti-ship weapons.

Redesign your turrets to match the tracking speed of the appropriate fire-control.

Increase the size of your resolution 1 active sensor by at least x5 if not x10. You only pick up size 6 or smaller missiles at roughly 10% of the listed range, and with such a short range it is entirely possible for a missile with decent speed to cross your entire detection range in a single 5 second increment.

I'd put an additional resolution 16 active sensor for picking up FAC's, small ships and star swarm.

Increase the armour to at least 3-5 layers. This should be pretty much the minimal levels you put on any combat ship. Some shields would be a good idea as well to provide defence against leaking missiles that you don't have to return to a shipyard for repair. I'd typically place about 5% of the tonnage into shield generators and around 10% into armour.

As you are running an older version you are limited to fixed size 5 military engines, put one for every thousand tons of the ship.

Use engineering spaces rather than maintenance storage for combat ships. Not only do they provide some maintenance supply capacity, they also reduce the failure rate which results in less need to actually use those supplies. When designing a ship I typically put one space per thousand tons then reduce the number at the end if it results in a maintenance life too much over three years.