A Beginner's Guide to Engineering Your Ship

When I started looking at engineering, I was a little confused and a little angry. I was angry at how inaccessible it was and the lack of explanation of engineers as a game mechanic. Modifications such as grade 1 overcharged increase jitter to a monumental level, making the weapon nigh on impossible to use. Mods such as overcharged and rapid fire force the CMDR to rank up the engineer to grade 5 access and and gather the necessary rare materials. After some time, I bit the bullet and invested in unlocking the engineers, and was able to have my Anaconda 99% fully engineered within about a week. This laid the groundwork for future modifications, allowing the easier engineering of other ships. Whilst engineers remains unexplained in-game, the accessibility of engineers is a point of contention. That's what I'm going to try and tackle with this guide.

Back to my confusion. Upon first look, the mods that can be gotten for weapons that have a focus on DPS heavily punish people going for anything less than grade 5. The grade 1 overcharged mod for multicannons can increase the jitter of the weapon by as much as 1 degree, which may not sound like much, but can make you miss a lot of shots at range. Not only this, but distributor draw is heavily increased with these lower mods. What's important is to not gain tunnel vision and focus solely on DPS, like I did. This is where you can be smart about how you engineer, rather than slap G5 overcharged on everything, because that's not always the smart solution. The purpose of this guide is to be a quick reference that can be bookmarked and looked upon whenever you need help with a module. I will describe a typical build for a PvE FDL, explain my weapon choice and then show the same build but modified. I will then go through each of the important modules and explain what mod they are using, but more importantly WHY they are using it. Due to this guide aiming to make engineers more accessible and not focusing on maximum time to kill, I will not be applying grade 5 mods on everything. This is incredibly time consuming and needs a lot of planning. Instead, I will be using modifications that can be attained from the first few sets of engineers.

NOTE: This guide is strictly for pilots who want to increase the effectiveness of their ship in PvE engagements. The current landscape of PvP is heavily dictated by maxed out engineered ships, whereby every mod on each important module are grade 5 (within reason). This guide does not apply to anyone wishing to be competitive in PvP, unless it prompts you to build your ship in a smart way, rather than slapping G5 on everything you can.

To start off with, you'll (obviously) need Horizons. If you don't, then this guide does not apply to you as engineers are only found on certain planetary settlements. Secondly, don't take just my word for it, ask around and see what people say. There are many communities who would be happy to help you out with a build. I would also suggest downloading EDEngineer, you can thank me later. I only recently downloaded it and it makes material management SO much easier.

Let's start off with the build. Here we have a typical FDL using a mix of gimballed thermal and kinetic weaponry: https://eddp.co/u/2eB2nFqe

The core internals should be fairly self-explanatory. Should the shields go down, the military grade composites are there to give you those precious extra seconds to escape, complimented by 2x hull reinforcement packages. Largest thrusters, power plant and power distributor. Lowest life support and sensors as these aren't of great importance.

Next up, the optionals and utility mounts. I went for a 4A shield generator, 3x 0A shield boosters and a 5A+4A bank combo. The 4A shield gen is there because shield cell banks scale better with size than shield generators do. This logic may not be useful in PvP due to the presence of the feedback cascade effect, but for PvE, it's generally a good idea to oversize your banks and undersize the shield generator, with a few exceptions (such as the Cutter). It may be questioned why I went for 3 shield boosters instead of 4, this is for a couple of reasons: I wanted all of the shield charges be covered by a heat sink, hence the need for 2 of them, but I also wanted a chaff launcher as there is a large use of gimballed weaponry by NPCs. The 2 heat sink launchers can be replaced with 1 if the ammo capacity mod from Ram Tah is used, but that engineer is not as easily available, and so will not be part of the discussion. Another option for shields is to go bi-weaves. Whilst not as strong, their high recharge rate makes them very useful in PvE. I use one on my Cutter for PvE, to many people's begrudgement, and it's incredibly effective, especially when engineered.

Finally, the weapons. These may be a point of contention, and by all means swap them around if necessary, but this is just an example. The laser + multicannon mix stays relevant even today for good reason. The thermal weapons are most effective against shields, whilst the multicannons are effective against hull. If you wish for an arguably more effective build, the gimballed pulses could be made fixed instead, leading to greater overall DPS. For the time being, we'll stick to all gimballed as it's easiest. Now that the base build has been explained, let's whip together some engineering for this ship. I'm basing this build on the premise that you only have access to the following 4 engineers, but modify it more if you have access to more engineers: -Felicity Farseer -Tod 'The Blaster' McQuinn -The Dweller -Lei Cheung (You might be wondering why lei Cheung is here as he's not one of the first engineers you meet. However, shields are one of the msot important things you can mod on your ship, leading to massively increased survivability. G5 shields are much easier to attain than G5 boosters from Didi Vattermann. Lei Cheung is also discovered through The Dweller.)

And with these engineers, this is what we come up with: https://eddp.co/u/fhpaepXe

This is by no means a great or even optimal build, however it'll improve effectiveness, give better defences and improve staying power. We'll explain the build by going through each component and discussing what other modifications might have been appropriate.

Let's start with the core internals. The mods we're using are a grade 1 overcharged power plant, grade 3 dirty drive thrusters and grade 3 charge enhanced power distributor. The FDL's typical shield configuration, along with the power hungry boosters means that the power plant could benefit from a little bit of extra power. One thing that's important to know about engineers are secondary rolls. These are additional increases or decreases of slider values to the benefit or detriment of any given mod. Grade 1 overcharged power plant, for example, can produce as much as 20% over the standard with secondary rolls, whilst limiting the impact on efficiency. The overcharged mod also decreases integrity and decreases efficiency, meaning that going above grade 2/3 can be detrimental to the build. In general, only mod the power plant for as much power as you need. If you find you absolutely need more than the 20% that G1 can provide, then get a G2.

The grade 3 dirty drives give the much craved speed and increased agility that most ships need. It'll help with keeping up with opponents, chasing them down as well as keeping your opponent in your sights at all times. This is the maximum grade available without unlocking Professor Palin, who does grade 5 thrusters, however getting access to Palin is a bit of a pain. Grade 3 drives are adequate for the time being. Grade 3 clean drives are also an option if you want your ship to run cooler, but this build shouldn't run very hot anyway, so running dirty drives will be fine.

The charge enhanced power distributor is a really important mod for increasing the time that weapons can be fired for. It also means you can boost more often. The reason for going for grade 3 was due to the higher mods use of cracked industrial firmware which can be a pain to get. However, there are guides for gathering a large amount of it. By all means get a higher mod if you can, but grade 3 should suffice for our relatively low power weapons.

Whilst not included here, one mod to be considered is grade 5 increased range FSD. This doesn't benefit you for combat, but it does make your life easier by increasing your jump range and decreasing journey times.

Let's move onto optionals and utilities. The only grade 5 mod on this build, the grade 5 thermal resistant shields, massively increases the effectiveness of the shields against thermal weapons. NPCs use a lot of thermal weapons, so having adequate protection against it is important. The materials for it are also relatively easy to obtain. The refined focus crystals can be found whilst out bounty hunting from fallen enemies, the untypical shield scans are built up over time, and the Ruthenium can be found from the wreckage of an Anaconda found on Orrere 2B. If the Anaconda is gone by the time you come to modify your components, use eddb.io to find a planet with large amounts of Ruthenium.

The 3 0A shield boosters are all using grade 3 resistance augmented. The resistance mod is very important for lasting shields. Once grade 5 booster access is available, a common booster configuration is 3x resistance augmented boosters and 1x heavy duty booster.

Now for the weapons. The 2 pulse lasers are using grade 1 long range. This may seem strange, but it's quite simple. Lasers suffer from damage falloff very early at only 0.5/0.6km, making them woefully ineffective at range. The long range mod does 2 things: it increases range and it removes damage falloff. When we mod for long range, we aren't concerned with the extra range, we only care about removing the damage falloff. This will make the weapons effective right up to their maximum range. To demonstrate this, I tested how long it would take for a quickly modded G1 long range pulse to take a vanilla Vulture's shields down to 75% (thanks to Demonedge112 for helping me out) compared to a G5 rapid fire pulse laser that I had lying about from when I used it on my Corvette previously. The figures are as follows:

Weapon	500m	1500m	2500m
G1 Long Range Pulse	24s	26s	42s
G5 Rapid Fire Pulse	17s	31s	148s

At 500m, the RF pulse laser does much more damage to the Vulture than the long range pulse does, and so brings its shields down quicker. This is to be expected. At 1500m, the values for both weapons went up, this is due to the natural jitter that a gimballed weapon has, giving it sway and causing it to miss some shots. This issue is further exacerbated in the case of the RF pulse which has additional jitter. The long range pulse gets the Vulture's shields down in 26s, only 2s more than at 500m, which is due to the gimballed sway. The RF pulse, on the other hand, has a value of 31s, almost half the damage output than at 500m. This is in part due to weapon sway, however, a large factor is due to the damage falloff expreienced by the RF pulse, but not by the long range pulse. At 2500m, the long range pulse hands in a respectable 42s, whilst the RF pulse performs poorly, coming in at 2m 28s.

Sticking those two modifications onto pulse lasers and showing it in coriolis, the profiles tab shows that they will output the same DPS at approximately 1250m, after which the long range pulse will start to output more damage. This might not matter in a smaller ship that can stick close to their opponents, but when chasing an opponent who's faster than you, the extra damage provided at range can really help. On top of this, long range pulse lasers are SIGNIFICANTLY easier to mod. At 2500m, the RF pulse laser outputs 20% of its normal damage.

I couldn't decide what mod to put on the multi cannons, so I just stuck grade 1 high capacity on there. It doesn't improve DPS, and actually increases reload time, but it does allow you to stay in combat for longer. If you would like an alternative mod, grade 5 overcharged is the way to go. An important material, Zirconium, can also be found at the Anaconda wreckage at Orrere 2B. Modified Embedded Firmware can also be gotten from the Cracked Industrial Firmware guide found above. You might be wondering why I didn't put long range on the multicannons, this is because they don't start experiencing damage falloff until 1.8km, which is much easier to stay within than 500m. In this case, increasing ammo/DPS yields more benefit than eliminating damage dropoff.

One thing not discussed here are weapon experimental effects. If you are not aware, experimental effects are special modifications that can be applied to weapons by chance. After the main stats for the weapon are decided, a small wheel will spin, which may or may not land on an experimental effect. For lasers, a good mod is emissive and concordant. Beams get a good effect in the form of regeneration sequence, which heal a wing mates shields. For multi cannons, the good effects are auto loader, incendiary and corrosive. Incendiary is a good mod for quickly taking out an opponents shields, but their effectiveness is slightly reduced on hull. Corrosive is good for wearing a target's hull and killing them quicker, but does reduce the ammo capacity of the weapon.

This build was supposed to just be quick and dirty, and give a general idea of how to modify your components as well as the rationale behind some of the modifications. However, you will see a very real benefit, even with these rather basic modifications. Not only that, but you will have made a start on unlocking engineers.