Equipment Efficiency Charts (read if you're designing ships)

[Water_and_Wind]

I've attached a DPS/Mass vs DPS/Energy chart to take into consideration when arming your ships. The closer to the top right, the more efficient the weapon. Drones are not included because there's no way to accurately calculate their DPS and artillery is better than it looks due to splash damage.

Note this does not directly translate into combat efficiency. Autocannons are slow and miss easily, while vulcans are inaccurate and short-ranged.

[Water_and_Wind]

Efficiency of power cores (power supplied/mass): In general, using as small a power core as possible is a good choice, until the efficiency bottoms out starting at the standard cores. CiviTech cores are efficient, however they can only use CiviTech engines which are atrocious as we will see.

[Water_and_Wind]

Engine Comparison:


Speed assist and heavy engine have the (slight) edge here, although all military engines are pretty consistent. Note that the speed assist does not provide enough of a speed advantage to justify its being utter crap at everything else; we will see this pattern played out elsewhere. Civitech is just bad.


Light engine beats accel assist. Sad? Yeah. Also, ultra light as you can see is not that great either, but overall its still a better choice than using two assists.


Again light engine comes out on top, out of the main engines. Agility assist is only marginally better.

In conclusion: light engines are great, ultralights are weak, but still beat assists. Heavy is significantly worse for turning, while Ultralights have poor accel.