It's time for our April ship building competition (The Fifth Element)! See the details below. Some things have changed, so be sure to read all the way through.

Goal & Prize
Create the most effective combat fleet and see how it holds up against the competition! All submitted ships will compete in a bracket competition if we receive enough entries. Ships must come stocked with ammo, crew, and life supporting resources. See details below. The winner receives the Competition Winner flair and/or associated roles in the Discord server.

Submissions & Rules
All ships must be submitted by April 19th, 2025 at 11:00 PM EST. Totengeist and Johnny_Struggles will not submit any ships to participate in the tournament, as they'll be running the battles.

You may submit your ships in the following ways:

* Submit to the Ship Showcase on Discord
* Send a Steam Workshop or Shipyard link to Johnny_Struggles
* Send a `.ship` file to Johnny_Struggles

We will allow up to 2 submissions from each contestant, and each submission may be composed of 1 or more ships, so long as the combination of them meets the requirements below.

The tournament bracket is randomized (3 times using RANDOM.ORG), so we may end up having 2 submissions from the same person fighting each other.

Build Requirements:

You must use your own ship design(s).

* Build 1 or more ships with a combined price cap of 8m space bucks.
* The capital ship must have at least 1 docking ports.
* Ships must have at least 1 engine.
* Ships must not have any ammo and the ammo production line must be empty of supplies.
* Ships may only use Metreon Gas and Metallic Minerals to produce ammo.
* Each docking port can have 12 squares where supplies are loaded. The final design must have all Metreon Gas and Metallic Minerals in those 12 squares.
* You can have as many docking ports as you like so you can have more raw materials.
* External objects should not be placed as shields. Anything designs that appear to have objects placed as shields will be rejected.
* Ships must not travel at speeds higher than 130.

Only for ships that have crew:

* Crew must have food and water.
* Ships crew capacity must be equal to or greater than the number of crew.
* Ships must have breathable atmosphere where spacesuits are not required by the crew.
* The atmosphere must be maintained with oxygen supplied from a bottle or from reprocessing.
* C02 must be captured and either bottled or reprocessed to oxygen.
* Sewage must be captured and either bottled or reprocessed to oxygen.
* **You may use** weapons officers and consoles.

Combat rules:

* Ships will start combat facing each other outside of Railgun Range.
* The games AI will control all the combat.
* The default orders will be on so hull repair will be enabled during combat. (Be aware, drones may be distracted by salvage during combat.)
* Ships will fight each other twice and the ship with two kills wins. If both ships get a kill then the ship that killed it's opponent the fastest wins the tie.
* Combat has a 8 minute time limit. If the limit is reached, the ship with the highest percentage of health left wins.

AI options:

To add even more excitement we can alter the basic strategy your ship uses by default for combat. They are defined below, so you now have the opportunity to choose one that you think best fits your ship. Now, two things to be aware of. It's possible the AI will change the strategy it's using based on the situation it's in so it may not stick to what you have picked.

Strategies to choose from:

StrategyVeryCloseOrbit: Broadside orbits within Gatling gun range.
CloseRangeAggressive: Broadside orbits in cannon range just outside of gatling gun range.
MediumRangeOrbit: Broadside orbits at far end of cannon range.
LongRangeSniper: Broadside orbits at railgun range well outside of cannon range.
FastMovingJet: Forward facing strafing Runs, fly's straight at opponent then circles around to do it again.

Let us know if you have questions and any feedback is appreciated.