Not sure where to put this, but this seems appropriate. I made this as the result of me stating that I wish the devs would design more Skirmish ships rather than wacky Alliance ones with repair layouts that make me want to ruin my match completion rate, and would draft up a concept today.
May have to open it in a new tab to see it clearly. Hopefully my writing isn't too awful.
I wanted a ship that relied primarily on broadsides like the Junker and Galleon, but actually be fast enough to use those broadsides aggressively (by motoring up next to its target). I also wanted to experiment with having two guns very close to eachother on the right side (very powerful setup for gunners but super easily disabled), and a gun placement with the captain using it in mind. Due to the shape of the ship, the ship can approach with the side guns fairly well protected by the cockpit's hitbox.
For the ship's maneuverability, I had in mind poor turning but very good forward thrust, coupled with a good top speed by virtue of very low weight (this is a very compact ship).
For toughness, due to the firepower potential so close to the hull, and the small size of the gondola, it should have around the armor of the Goldfish (cause panic, force common repairs). For hull health, while small it is still a bulky target due to its two-floor design, so around the Pyramidion's should be reasonable. This is a ship capable of trifectas that is also fast, even if only going straight, so it needs to be a bit squishy to compensate.
The gondola being rather close to the larger balloon overhead reduces its vulnerability to high arc weapons at range (literally only the Hades), but it is not significant, especially since long-range guns shoot almost straight (esp. with lesmok).
Here is the component placement:
On the right side, there are two light guns that are very close to eachother. A single artemis could disable both easily, but it's still some serious firepower that only really needs one guy to do it.
At the front, the helm is in a roofed cockpit, with a ladder leading to a gun pedestal on the roof. The captain could theoretically climb the ladder to that gun to fire it, then quickly jump down to the helm. Save for the helm, that particular gun is very isolated and intentionally to the left of the center of the ship to reduce the effectiveness of close-range trifectas. This gun is ideal for approaching, so a potent disabling gun (artemis) or gun that puts a lot of pressure without being at point blank (lesmok gat) might be the best options.
As a way to inhibit the lower engineer from getting to the helm gun, the door is rusted shut. The upper engineer can still get to it easily though.
The left gun can be used for a left-side bifecta (if you are one of those people who likes using the port guns of a pyra), but is primarily a utility/defensive slot, which is always nice to have (flare op). It is comparable to a Goldfish's left gun that doesn't make you feel bad for using as utility.
The hull component is nearby so that the gunner feels pressured to help repair it rather than shooting if the ship is critical.
The engines are purposely separated to allow one engineer to get both turners, but not let one engineer maintain constant burn by the captain without assistance. Constant burn is the Pyra's thing, and is one of the reasons why high-level pilots can use them to such great effect despite their natural sluggishness.
The balloon is in a sensible spot to give the roof engie more stuff to do near the engines.
And now for the shape.
The gondola is shaped such that if you tried to jump off the edge onto the lower deck, that's not gonna happen. A safety railing on the inside prevents you from getting inside the lower deck from outside, and a safety railing on the upper deck hopefully prevents you from doing something so absurd. The only major shortcut is from the helm gun to the lower deck via jumping off the cabin to where the stairs begin. Honestly, this ship is really compact, so unless you're going from the turners to the main (which two split engineers easily covers), you don't need a shortcut. If that's a problem, I'll try to address it when I re-draft it so that there's more crazy parkour tricks on your ship that is coincidentally similar in size and shape to a short bus.
The lower rear of the ship is surrounded by low walls (think pyra rear) that don't block visibility much. The pilot can't see behind at all due to the location of the helm, so that is more important than you'd think.
The has a frontal wedge (like the pyra) specifically designed to cause it to veer off course when ramming (like the pre-galleon-weight pyra) because this game does not have deformable collision meshes (not even sure that is doable in real-time). Combined with its low weight to make it easily tossed around, this makes it a ship that you can intentionally "mess up" a ram with to get your side guns in arc (Galleon is too heavy for that to ever happen, Junker is slow and doesn't like ramming for that reason).
It's also a shape intended to make a pyramidion trying to ram you frontally be deflected by the nose (you turn left and thrust towards him), having your gun on his weak side, or cause it to spin you about while it keeps going forward (results in your right guns against his left hull guns, which should favor you against most pyra loadouts). This makes it capable of punishing a pyra's aggression by being too easily tossed away from the ram and hard to pin, which would hopefully give the pyra another counter.
In hindsight, the ship is too small (would be half the length of a Squid, which is a lot bigger than it looks), even for being designed to be small. Probably because I designed it around a zeppelin gondola shape, which is very, very small, and GoI ships being the size of houses (even the Squid). The two very close guns combined with the front gun are also still potentially overpowered, as an engineer could just take that gun and boom, two person trifecta. The major downside preventing this is that an engineer all the way on that gun has a long trip back to repair anything but the hull, and can't get back there easily, but if you're on someone's flank the second engineer can easily pick up the slack.
The resulting repair layout is also too similar to a Goldfish's and too similar to a Junker's at the same time for me to be comfortable with. It's hard to come up with a repair layout that's both unique (Mobula, Pyramidion, Squid) while not being completely insane (Crusader, Magnate rear half).
After I'm done messing with this one, I'm going to mess with the concepts of physically shielded components and driver visability more. Then I might try one that plays with verticality and exotic gun placement.
