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Protected Cruiser – Prinz Heinrich

Protected Cruiser – Prinz Heinrich

by | Dec 21, 2021 | Blog, Pinned, Space Engineers

She’s finally presentable in full.

Overview

The Prinz Heinrich is the oldest ship I’m still doing any work on. I can’t even remember when I began poking around with it, but there have been at least a dozen versions and over a year of off and on work, all culminating into this fully functional cruiser.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, the main focus of the Heinrich became trying to make the most extensive use of a particular mod as I could. You’ll see later on just how integral this mod is to the ship.

But I digress.

Take a look at this: The Original D-37 Timberwolf.

Prinz Heinrich and the Timberwolf

I prefer to build ships from scratch, but there’s something oddly compelling about the Timberwolf, something that had me coming back to tweak the ship more and more until I was well into my own project. The Heinrich looks nothing like the Timberwolf anymore, but that just tells you how much time I spent poking, prodding, redesigning, overhauling, and refitting it.

Lore

Heinrich’s story both in our reality and in the Cosmo Kaisermarine’s is one of scope creep incorporated successfully. For the most part. She was the first capital ship designed for the fleet and as such served as a testbed for all kinds of innovations.

Prinz Heinrich was originally a D-37 Timberwolf acquired by the Kaisermarine for research and development. Seeking to build on the design and create a large but nimble cruiser for the fledgling navy, they made countless changes to the ship in time. The changes began with the addition of preferred weapons a redesign of the propulsion systems to a more unified scheme.

The prototype cruiser went on to be modified extensively as the Kaisermarine’s new corvettes, frigates, and destroyers began to come online. Many of them incorporated design cues from Heinrich. Several new cruisers were also built during that period, but the fleet still lacked a mainstay heavy cruiser for the frontline.

As piracy and Iron Core (ICOR) activity increased around the fringes of the Kaisermarine’s territory, even experimental ships like the Heinrich were pulled into active service. There, Prinz Heinrich participated in many skirmishes, both as part of a small squadron, as well as on her own.

With real combat data to reinforce the direction of capital ship development, the Kaisermarine’s engineers set about designing two staple cruiser types for the fleet: the Leipzig class and the Admiral Hipper class.

As for Prinz Heinrich, she remained attached to the Kaisermarine’s Research and Development Bureau, but was frequently sent into battle fitted with experimental weaponry and modules. The fleet’s defensive shield systems were field tested on the Heinrich, as well as the Oculus and Nucleon point defense weapons. All of these and more became permanent fixtures on the ship as the Kaisermarine began a fleet-wide standardization program.

Prinz Heinrich has yet to be retired. Despite her aging hull form, the Heinrich remains one of the most diligently maintained and up to date vessels in the entire fleet.

Weapons

Prinz Heinrich wound up with both more and larger weapons than her hull was designed for. Despite this, her overall firepower is considered, at most, moderate by Kaisermarine standards. The ship’s layout is heavily tilted toward defense.

1x Mark-V Atlas Super Laser

(So he says right before introducing a super laser)

Heinrich’s strongest weapon is the Mark-V variant of the Atlas super laser. This weapon along with the Epstein drive engines are why the Heinrich is significantly longer than the Timberwolf she’s based on. This weapon takes a moment to charge up, but the firing time is sufficient to hit and knock out multiple ships in one use with the right maneuvering. It’s next to impossible to use in a close in fight, but by that point you’ll want to save power for the shields.

While the Heinrich leans sharply toward self defense, given enough distance between herself and an adversary, the helmsman or weapon’s officer reserve the right to press that dislike button.

6x 480mm Hurricane Heavy Cannons

The Heinrich’s primary weapons are six 480mm guns in three turrets. The guns have an 800mps muzzle velocity and a 4km effective range. While these massive guns were intended for larger ships, Heinrich’s hull was just large enough to handle them in small numbers.

Extensive testing showed that these cannons are best suited to <2km engagements, where even small, fast moving Iron Core ships can be quickly destroyed with continuous focused fire.

2x RL6 Hydra Rocket Batteries

Prinz Heinrich‘s secondary weapons include two RL6 Hydra batteries. They have an effective range of 5km and are capable of utterly devastating smaller ships with successive hits.

These rocket batteries were intended to replace the Heinrich’s torpedo system, which was removed in the process of streamlining the ship, as well as giving her a clearer mission profile.

12x Oculus Orb-Point Defense Lasers

The Heinrich’s first line of defense are her long range Oculus lasers. She sports twelve of them and they can reach out to 1.5km to intercept missiles or chip away at the shields of approaching fighters. When all focusing on a target, they can quickly stack up a fair amount of damage.

5x Nucleon Energy Shotguns

The Heinrich’s final and shortest range weapon set consists of five Nucleon shotguns. While their range may only extend to two hundred meters, the intense scattering fire they unleash can utterly trap and destroy incoming ordnance, sparing the Heinrich’s shields or hull additional hits. They were implemented to compliment and support the Oculus lasers during intense firefights.

Once a smaller craft’s shields have been stripped away, these shotguns are capable of tearing through them with contemptuous ease if they draw too close to the ship, leaving behind a searing, unrecognizable mess.

Systems & Modules

The Kaisermarine tested most of their medium sized module concepts on Prinz Heinrich. This led to a lengthening and widening of her hangar, the installation of a powerful energy shield, a backup power system to support it, and external spaced armor.

Hangar

Prinz Heinrich features a large internal hangar bay designed to carry a single large reconnaissance or utility craft. Multiple smaller ships can be carried if they have their own magnetic landing gears, but for normal operations, the Heinrich carries one AR type Cosmo Messer.

Defensive Shields

The shielding system employed by Prinz Heinrich is extremely powerful thanks to its plentiful reserves of power. It could even be considered the ship’s main feature despite being present on virtually all Kaisermarine ships.

(This was tested quite recently, and under less than ideal circumstances)

Power Plant

Prinz Heinrich has a primary and backup power system located in the engineering section. The primary system consists of three large reactors while the backup system constitutes six hydrogen engines and an extensive network of batteries located throughout the ship.

While working at full capacity, all of the Heinrich’s weapons, thrusters, and even shields can work in tandem, with the sole exception of the super laser. As the jump drives prepare their own charges ahead of time, the Heinrich can execute a warp jump to disengage at any time while not letting up the fight.

External Spaced Armor

Not all Kaisermarine ships use spaced armor, much less external spaced armor, but those that do follow after Prinz Heinrich.

Spaced armor in real life helps to defeat normal armor penetration rounds by causing them to deflect, tumble, or otherwise lose their penetrative and destructive power between the first plate they strike, and the next. In Space Engineers, the idea is similar, but meant to lessen the damage of area of effect damage caused by damaged blocks spreading their damage to adjacent blocks during heavy hits.

Heinrich’s externally mounted spaced armor frees up a massive amount of space within the ship for internal facilities while still offering good protection in the event of direct hits.

This type of armor scheme has a couple of weaknesses, those being area of effect damage to the mounting points, and deep penetrator weapons like UNSC MAC guns or specially designed ‘block thrower’ guns. The former is compensated for by a long connection between the plate and the hull, but remains a weakpoint, particularly on the hangar armor. The latter can only be countered by evasive maneuvers and a strong energy shield.

Search Unit

Prinz Heinrich has an older variant of the Kaisermarine’s search unit, a special module attached to the top of the ship. It features an independent sensor, a camera, and a spot light. As a subgrid, it operates using a single rotor and hinge. The search unit can be controlled from the tactial seat on the bridge, or from the weapons station (also on the bridge).

Inside Prinz Heinrich

The ship has a peculiar hull shape, and that owes largely to the internal layout. The interior overhaul freed up some space while helping me better link the sections of the ship behind the large hangar to those in front of it. The internal passageways take up roughly a third of the internal space while the rest is made up of the systems, conveyor tubes, and the occasional ‘cork’ acting as filler.

Mods & Scripts

Prinz Heinrich has a fair number of mods and just as many scripts running her, but I cut down on the use of the former as much as possible. Over time I’ll be phasing out even more required mods with the exception of four and any dependencies they have: The Aryx Weapon and Epstein drive mods by AryxErin, Defense Shields mod, and of course the Passages mod by AViegarien.

For most cases there isn’t much point in cutting down on the number of scripts, since they don’t require other users to download them from the workshop. They load in right along with the programmable blocks. With scripts, it’s more about quality control than anything.

Below are the complete lists of both the mods and scripts used for Prinz Heinrich. The Required Mods list is the one you should be chiefly concerned with when the ship hits the workshop. Loading the ship without these won’t be pretty. The Additional Mods list includes mods I recommend or at least use while working on the ship, but shouldn’t cause headaches or any other major problems if the ship is loaded without them.

Required Mods List:

Additional Mods List:
(Recommended or just used on a temporary basis)

Script List:

Survival Mode

I don’t do much testing in Survival Mode, so I can’t say the ship is survival ready. With the mod set used, her handling is fine, and she’s lethal in a fight, though. With a few small changes or additions, I think the ship could be made survival ready pretty easily, assuming she isn’t already.

There’s a difference between being survival ready and being efficient, though it’s ideal to be both when you can.

The Workshop

I’ll be uploading Prinz Heinrich to the workshop proper in a few weeks. A good portion of the information in this article will be covered there as well, but I’d like to do some test uploads to make sure I get this one right on the first try.

An Ongoing Project

While the ship has come a long way, she’s still an ongoing project. There are a few more things I want to do before I’ll consider her complete.

What still needs doing:

  • Repair projector (initially left out due to subgrid incompatibility)
  • Optimize the internals
  • Rigorous power system testing
  • Rigorous endurance testing
  • Storage limit testing
  • Complete conveyor system testing
  • Install a fully vanilla auxiliary thruster system (for convenience and to remove the DHI mod requirement)
  • Group each lighted passage section separately for per deck internal lighting control (pure hell, this one)

Closing

This concludes our look at the Prinz Heinrich, my oldest ongoing project and still my favorite to date.

Thanks for reading.

One More Day (Prinz Heinrich)

by | Dec 20, 2021 | Journal, Space Engineers

Progress is great all things considered. That said, I’ve been pulling things together all day and I still don’t have the time or energy left to finish it up today.

I actually could post the article here shortly, but it would be without the tour video. I’m going to need at least a few hours to edit that and my energy levels just aren’t where they need to be in order for me to put together something good in time. So we’re going to try again tomorrow. It’ll be a day later than I hoped, and this does push my work on the Chronicles of Proxima back an extra day, but it will be well worth it if I can give this article the thought and care it deserves.

So here’s to tomorrow.

EDIT:

I forgot to mention, on top of waking up later than I would have liked, I got ambushed by npcs in-game while gathering screenshots and footage. So naturally I took the opportunity to get some combat screenshots and footage while I was at it.

Overall, the article will be better for it. It did cost me an hour, though. It was a long fight with about a dozen ships gunning for the Heinrich and I had to take some time to capture, convert, and upload the extra stuff. I didn’t wind up using all of it, but it was one of those nasty surprises that actually worked to my advantage.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to add. I was expecting random problems but nothing that would actually help in the end.

Clan Battles and Other Ships

by | Dec 19, 2021 | Journal, Space Engineers, WoWs

Clan Battles

As of this writing I still owe 90 sit ups–more on that in a moment.

Bourgogne’s still working pretty well for me. I get far, far better damage numbers than in Yamato, though my survival rate is down. Part of the problem is that we haven’t quite figured out where the ship excels, yet.

North in particular is a map I despise in the ship because Bourgogne’s shot arcs can barely make it over most islands–North is nothing but islands and most of them are three to five times taller than normal. Yamato has the range to compensate by sitting farther back or sitting around mid near the spawn area. In Bourgogne I have to focus solely on other backline battle ships sitting around where a Yamato might be–assuming there’s anyone sitting that far back … oooor push in recklessly and hope for the best.

Thankfully, I got more contested cap assignments as the problem became more apparent, but this is definitely an area where Bourgogne’s less effective than Yamato.

As for those sit ups I’ll be tending to after this, myself and at least one other clan mate decided to do certain exercises depending on wins and losses.

For mine, it’s 20 push ups on wins and 60 sit ups on losses. I only got in half my loss quota before the last match, and since we lost that match, I owe another 60.

I don’t like sitting down all the time, so working in some mandatory exercises between matches felt like a good idea. It’s just tricky to fit them in when you’re in a hurry to get to the next match.

Space Engineers

I made some progress on the final tweaks to the Prinz Heinrich before Clan Battles started. Not all the consoles are programmed yet, and I’m still having trouble finding a solution to manually controlling the turrets. More on that in a minute. There’s also the issue of the paint job. It’s not bad but it’s not great, either. That’s not likely to change before the tour video though, so it just is what it is for now.

As for the consoles, only the bridge controls and the hangar controls are fully programmed. Random button panels and the like around the ship were mostly left as is. They’re not going to be needed for any demonstrations and I’m contemplating a few long term ideas for them so they’re staying as is for now.

Now about the turrets. Manual control with Weaponcore has one little problem that’s hard to get around if the seat controlling them has a wall or a window in front of it. The turrets try to aim where the controlling character’s camera is pointing, which is always going to be at the wall/window in front of it. The only smart thing it does is target ships that are highlighted by the target reticle. That’s when they start aiming properly again. Just aiming them into space is a bad idea, though. They’ll swing around to try and target the grid blocks between them and the controller.

It’s dumb but I couldn’t come up with a work around in the time I had.

I’m still on track for having that video out tomorrow, but I fully expect more problems, especially when it’s time to start slapping together footage and getting the tour video up on youtube. Monday’s going to be interesting. Worse case scenario I’ll have plenty of screenshots for the blog post. I just think something like this warrants a video, too.

That’s all for tonight.

Final Preview (Prinz Heinrich)

by | Dec 18, 2021 | Journal, Space Engineers

I probably won’t have enough time on Sunday due to Clan Battles, but Monday’s a clean slate … or rather I’ll make sure it is. The plan is to do a final sweep of the ship, make sure the outside looks the way I want it to look, take care of any odds and ends on the inside, and then start recording.

I’ll need to do a few takes to see if I can go through the whole ship on a good route in just a few minutes. If not then I’ll at least have multiple takes to pull footage from. From there it’s just taking a few more screenshots, writing up some text, and editing together a video. Frankly, the blog portion of this should be the easiest part, but we’ll see.

I’m still gun shy about uploading videos here directly so I’ll probably use youtube.

For now, here are some previews of the ship in its current form.

Prinz Heinrich‘s redesigned bow

The ship had one large engine and a few tiny ion thrusters for appearance, but now has three large thrusters

Head on view of the ship, Star Blazers style~

Also some bonus pictures, since I did mention I had already started work on a new ship.

Prinz Heinrich beside the Admiral Hipper (under construction)

The Heinrich wound up with much bigger guns than I intended

So there you have it. Admiral Hipper might be significantly larger, but I the Heinrich is a lot more impressive on the inside right now. The Hipper will eventually catch up, but for now Prinz Heinrich is much more functional and put together. I went through enough design overhauls to be sure of that.

The article on the Heinrich should be done late Monday or sooner. It just depends on how the recording and editing go, really.

That’s all for now.

Almost No News (Almost)

by | Dec 17, 2021 | Journal, Space Engineers

My head is too full today. Even after a good nap I couldn’t come up with anything to write about, nothing there’s any real news on at least.

I suppose there is this:

Space Engineers Warfare 2: Broadside

It’s nice that they’re finally adding some more ship weapons to the game, but after all these years and all these mods–stable ones I might add–even I have to wonder if this next paid dlc is going to be worth it.

As always, the worth in the dlcs for Space Engineers is that they’ll always be compatible and up to date with the latest version of the game. Mods on the other hand can just fall off at random if the author disappears without letting people know they can update them if they want. Some of the most interesting mods have gone the way of the dodo because of that little problem.

While I’m on the topic of Space Engineers, I did manage to poke around with both the Heinrich and that new ship I started on. The former is almost ready to present, but first I want to see if I can’t streamline the outside of it, first. Compared to the new ship, the Heinrich is looking kind of short and chubby. She needs a bit more work but then I’ll get a presentation up. In fact, if I can do this right, maybe that update will be good enough to count as the first blog article for this month.

Yeah, sure. Why not? It won’t lack for quality or length, and I’ll even squeeze in a short video if I can get a tour done in one take.

That’s all for now.