I thought that could be a bug, its really weird. Thanks for sharing your designs!

frankly i do not fully understand the bug yet, but these speeds are flat out not achievable using regular railguns. I have no clue how or why. I haven't done that much experimenting with optimal payload weight or dimensions, but i know it does affect performance. it's a relatively new area for me too, probably a lot of room for improvement.

Wearing it down is for sure the best strategy i've come up with too, since it can only carry so many decoys. If this game allowed "pvp" fights, that's where i imagine the onboard drone would assist, as it can intercept missiles before they intercept the actual ship.
Using a drone that carries a similar railgun also works, but that's probably only something a larger and costlier ship would carry.

This became the new boss of the game for me. After a lot of fun in the designer i can't consistently beat it yet. Throwing a lot of expandable missile/drones to wear it off seems to be a strategy, another could be out ranging but that's a huge design challenge.

I am intrigued by your railgun, can you achieve these velocities only with payloads? Do you know why? I am trying to make a regular projectile one but it won't even get close in a similar footprint.

no, that's a visual error - the armor doesn't actually physically cover the engine.
The bingo avoider is there to prevent the missiles from dying from being out of delta-v.
In aviation, being "bingo" means that you are almost out of fuel.

Are the Bingo avoiders just for adding the armor layer over the missile engines or for somehting else?

This thing looks awesome

I updated the ship's missiles, they should be more survivable now. Also added a version of the ship that has a jitterproof laser in place of the massive one.

thank you so much for the thoughtful input, that's GOLD to me!
I'll see if i can improve on some of the areas mentioned. I hadn't tested this much against drone swarms, or the missiles against PDs. I'm not sure if the railgun drone issue can be remedied though, as they're just generally very strong against manned ships.
The MPDT is always a good idea, but i put it off in this case because i fear the AI would attempt to power it in combat instead of weapons. Not sure if that's actually the case.

Overall, this is probably the single best designed ship I have ever seen for this game, and I'm going to be ripping off your railgun and missile tech as soon as I can get the freetime. I'm curious to see what you'll post in the future.

Edit: read these backwards, steam limits you to 1000 char comments lmao

I'm not sure if you would consider it cheating, but adding an MPD thruster to use your reactor power with your existing fuel could significantly improve your strategic mobility. Here is a paper of someone using a hydrogen powered MPD so hydrocarbon systems are plausible, although I shudder to imagine the engineering challenges associated. You can generally get about 5mg out of such systems, useful for allowing you to return to where you want to be after burning hard for combat. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.23691?journalCode=jpp .

I could not find a way to consistently beat this in a fair similar price ship on ship engagement, and I could not find a way to land significant missile hits on it. The 10 kps of deltaV is excellent, and the attention to crew survivability by preventing lethal G loads is commendable. The armor scheme holds up to lasers for a very long time, especially on the weapon mounts which are typically easy targets.

Second, the ship as a whole has a problem defeating raildrone groups, as the effective firing range is long enough to give the railgun significant travel time, the targets are small enough to give the railgun significant innacuracy, and the large number of targets forces the laser to drill through more armor than it would for a large single target. I believe this problem could be rectified with a few 100kt - 1mt range nukes to knock out drone swarms, or counterdrones to shoot them down. Obviously the AI sucks, but I was forced to use out about 4kps to defend against 500t/3mc of raildrones (10 raildrones with 50kps/100MW railguns) while manually driving your ship.

In my limited testing, I found two major weaknesses. Based on what you've written they are both intentional design tradeoffs. First, I found the missiles were weak to kinetic PD, especially railguns in the 100MW/50kps range chewing through them rapidly. I imagine this would be less true against a full 700 shot volley, as I was only able to test around 50 at once. On the other hand, they are the only missiles I've ever seen in this game that do well against lasers.

This thing is wonderful, probably the single most effective craft in the hands of the AI I have ever seen. The DeltaV on the missiles is incredible, and the railgun is a work of art. I found the drone to be delightfully effective in its intended role as a picket, and it tore up similar mass squadrons of my lighter drones.

I can already tell this is thoughtfully done, I'm gonna download it and play around with it.