Hello and welcome to my defenses guide, in this guide I'll be covering every defensive system in the game that I know of as well as a couple building tips to help make these systems more effective. Before we get into the guide proper however I should lay out the different categories of defensive systems I'll be covering, In total there are 3 categories of defensive systems, Passive Systems, Active Systems, and Composite Systems, the goal of all defensive systems is to either prevent or otherwise mitigate incoming damage, the difference is in how each system achieves that. For a simple definition of each category: Passive Systems are typically blocks on the craft that absorb and/or reduce damage that has already or is immediately about to hit the craft, Active Systems are typically weapons systems with a separate detection component used to either distract or destroy incoming projectiles so that they miss the craft entirely, and Composite systems are a combination of both passive and active methods (for example: a block that distracts a missile). With the simple definitions out of the way let's start talking about the systems themselves.

As defined previously Passive systems are typically stationary blocks on the craft that absorb and/or reduce damage after a projectile has already hit or is about to hit the craft, these systems are usually easy to set up since they're stationary blocks but their location and position on the craft are vitally important, case in point: Armor.

Armor is the textbook definition for passive defense since they're just structural blocks that sit there and absorb hits, reducing damage based on armor value, flame resistance, and EMP reduction. Since armor is made from structural blocks, this means that the very structure of your craft can act as armor and serve as your last line of defense, so thinking carefully about where you put vital components (stuff like ammo boxes, AI, fuel) can help ensure your craft keeps functioning through severe damage. Since these components are vulnerable to different types of damage, material selection also plays a crucial role in what armor goes where and why.

Materials generally used as armor include: Wood, Stone, Metal, Lightweight Alloy, Reinforced Decking (not pictured), and Heavy Armour

Of the Building blocks to choose from there are 6 main material choices, Wood, Stone, Metal, Lightweight Alloy, Reinforced Decking and Heavy Armour, I've compiled their stats into a quick-reference table along with some notes on the pros and cons of each material, oh also a good building tip: build with beams everywhere you can, you'll get a +20% health boost when building with beams which can help greatly with damage absorption, I'll be using the beam health in the table along with other beam values to show you how big of a difference it makes.

On the left we have an example of spaced armor with a spall liner, on the right we have an example of Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) and its intended use case.

I go into more detail in my weapons guide but the basic premise of HEAT and HESH is to use explosive energy to get through solid blocks of armor and generate a bunch of low AP fragments on the other side and shred the unarmored internals. There are 2 ways to mitigate this, if you don't have a lot of space option 1 is Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), this block is placed on the outside of the craft and will detonate the second a shell makes contact, mitigating the HEAT/HESH shell by triggering it's effect early on the outside of the armor. This does come with the downside of destroying the ERA block meaning each block can only defend against 1 attack and you need to repair it before it can defend against another. The other method that's a bit more reusable is spaced armor, this is where an air gap is intentionally left in the armor to trigger the fragmentation effect early before it gets all the way through to the internals, allowing a second belt of armor to catch and tank the damage from the fragments. Of course there's more we can do here, by adding a non-solid low-armor block like applique panels on the frontside of the 2nd armor belt, we can give the 2nd armor belt a little more armor while preserving the air gap, mitigating the damage caused at maximum efficiency, another way we can achieve a similar effect is with beam slopes.

By having a slope at the point where the fragments spawn we can intentionally cause them to bounce and rob some of their damage before impact, longer slopes made from heavy armor are ideal but they will take more space, this does end up being a bit more expensive than the applique panels but in my experience both methods work just fine. The downside of using spaced armor is since it relies on having the space for an air gap it's not suitable for all vehicles, and it does raise the craft's initial cost since you need 2 separate layers of armor. If you'd like to see these principles in action I found this video from TinySloth7 to be a very helpful visual aid, they also boil down everything I've talked about into a nice 5 minute video so consider this the tl:dr version of this part of the guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wJXEaWksi8

Anyways this is all well and good against physical damage but you might be wondering: how do we deal with EMP? Well as we discussed in the material section earlier surrounding vulnerable components like your AI with EMP resistant materials is a good start but stopping the damage entirely would be better, this is where surge protectors come into play.

Surge protectors are unique in the sense that they are completely susceptible to EMP damage but only take 5%, turning a 5000 damage strike into only a measly 250 damage which is taken by the surge protector, so by packing surge protectors around your electronics and dotting a couple around the rest of your craft you can make EMP virtually a non-issue, just keep in mind that these blocks are double the cost of heavy armor so be as economical as you can with them!


Now that we've done everything we can on the armor front it's time to take a look at some more high-tech solutions, Both shielding systems in the game require engine power to run and provide their own unique effects, however both cannot be present on the same vehicle so you'll have to make a decision as to which one you want on your craft.

Pictured here is a fully powered Planar Shield Projector

Planar Shield Projectors will generate a square/rectangular shield at a range of 1 to 15 meters in front of the projector, the shield can be set in the Q menu to any square/rectangular dimensions up to a limit of 25m in both directions. Power costs do scale as shield size & range increases so keep that in mind, angles for the shield can also be set here to help improve ricochet chances, the strength slider will change how strong the shield is at the cost of engine power, set this as high as you can spare power for to get the best results. The upside to planar shields is that these things will protect against everything except missiles & flamethrowers, lasers will have their intensity reduced, plasma's damage will be partially mitigated, and any shells attempting to pass through will have a good chance of being reflected. That being said there are several downsides, after the much needed nerfs to shield stacking now only the strongest shield counts against the energy weapons and the deflection chance for projectiles is only rolled once, this combined with the shield's dimension limits means having to dot these projectors around the ship for good coverage, and on top of that each projector generates a lot of heat at higher power settings so you craft ends up lit like a christmas tree for any Infrared cameras. That all being said they do defend against energy weapons whereas the other shield system does not, so that's something to consider when trying to decide what system to use, speaking of which...

Pictured here we have the 9x6x1 Ring Shield example prefab the game gives you

Ring Shields work off a very different principle from Planar Shields, instead of generating a flat plane to deflect projectiles before they hit, Ring Shields will buff the armor value of all of the blocks on the craft in a similar manner to how armor stacking works, think of it like projected armor stacking, any blocks parallel to the Ring Shield will receive a buff to their armor value in the direction facing away from the Ring Shield.

In this example, the blue blocks are the ones mainly buffed by the ring shield, while the red ones do not get the same buff

In the example above we can see the blue blocks are the ones buffed by the ring shield while the red blocks do not get a buff in their respective direction, they do still get a buff in the blue block's direction, but not any others. This can be solved by placing another ring shield perpendicular to the first one to buff the red block's direction, and another ring shield laying horizontally will cover the top and bottom sides. The amount the armor is buffed by is dependent on the size of the area inside the ring, bigger rings will have a bigger effect and multiple rings in parallel will stack their effects in the same direction, theoretically allowing armor values to skyrocket to insane levels. However there are 2 notable downsides, 1. Ring Shields only buff armor values, meaning things like lasers and other incendiary weapons can still do unmitigated damage, along with plasma unless you can buff armor values above 100, and 2. if only 1 piece of the ring shield breaks it'll spew high energy particles out of the end of the broken tube and cause a lot more internal damage, it'll be localized to anything more or less inline with the tube but my point still stands, with Ring Shields you are betting on being able to push your armor value high enough to make the risk of accidentally poking holes in yourself worth it.

That all being said the ring generator only costs 30 materials with each tube piece costing 10, while each planar projector costs 100, so like I said earlier, you're going to have to make a decision on which shielding system will be best for your craft. In my experience & research I've found that planar projectors tend to win out for surface ships and very small crafts like planes since ships have the waterline to help protect them and planes don't have enough internal area to make ring shields even remotely feasible. Where ring shields are very viable is on frontsiders, frontsiders are typically airships or thrustercraft with the vast majority of their armor concentrated at the front, since these ships tend to have a relatively low amount of frontal surface area and a lot of length, this allows you to stack ring shields along the whole length of the craft and boost that frontal armor value to those insane theoretical values I mentioned earlier.

With shielding out of the way there's still more we can do to block damage but to do that, we're going to have to start being a little more proactive with our defenses.

From left to right we have a Munition Warner, a LAMS Node, a CIWS Controller and an Automated Control Block (ACB)

As we have defined previously Active Defenses are typically weapons systems repurposed with a separate detection component to either distract or destroy incoming projectiles, protecting the craft by making sure the projectile never makes contact to begin with. There are 2 ways to detect incoming projectiles each with an intended role, Munition Warners will actively look for incoming projectiles in a hemisphere and send out a warning signal to any available active defenses to shoot down the object, Munition Warners only work above the waterline though so they aren't good at looking for torpedoes and their detection range reduces if the craft is moving fast, erratically, or both. To counteract these downsides the AI detection system has 4 components, Active/Passive Radar and Active/Passive Sonar, the active components will actively send out pings and listen for the return ping, while the passive components will listen for any radar or sonar pings, both will send a warning signal to the Active Defenses if it's a missile or torpedo ping, but only the active ones are capable of seeing other projectile types, and they do need a connection to the AI in order to work, along with being in their respective mediums (Radar=Air, Sonar=Water). Once the munition detectors are set up the only thing left to do is set up the weapons to take care of said munitions.


In this picture we have an example LAMS node setup with a generation array

LAMS nodes tend to be the easiest to set up in my experience since after the generation array is all built all you have to do is slap a couple nodes down with connections to the array and it'll just work, assuming you remembered to put down munition warners of course. If you want to tune your LAMS for optimal performance there's a couple things you can do, since munitions don't typically have a lot armor, throwing down some Q switches will give you higher damage per laser shot and may be more efficient in terms of energy expended per shot, however if you're trying to take down CRAM shells or huge missiles, those can have enough armor to warrant the higher intensity of a 0Q laser I have been informed by the community that projectile armor is capped at 20 with no numbers for fire resistance, 0Q lasers still have the advantage of more hits/sec though. Laser Destabilizers may also be a worthwhile choice to help increase damage output but can lead to the laser array running out of energy in protracted fights. To fine-tune even further, we've also got a Q menu on the node itself where we can adjust various settings.

Up at the top in the drop down menus you can select whether the node will shoot at things above/below the waterline (lasers will lose a lot of damage underwater though) and what types of projectiles it will shoot at, very handy if you have 2 different LAMS systems and want them to target different things, there's also a button to allow the node to fire within smoke, tick this if you plan on using smoke dispensers on your craft otherwise a single enemy laser can completely nullify your LAMS. Minimum and maximum diameter to engage is fairly self-explanatory, they'll set the range of shell/missile diameters the node will shoot at, the diameter priority multiplier will decide whether the bigger/smaller stuff gets shot first, very helpful for tuning the LAMS for dealing with either volume of fire or large high health projectiles. Range and angle I tend not to mess with too much since the default settings work perfectly fine, LAMS nodes lose more than half their damage if they try to shoot at anything past 500m and limiting the angles which a LAMS node can shoot at seem unnecessary to me so I don't usually mess with them, but if you're trying to hit railgun shots then pushing the max range out to 1000m will give you the most amount of time to snipe the projectile.

If you've set everything up correctly then your LAMS should have no issues taking down projectiles, LAMS tend to be a crowd favorite since they're easy to set up and use but the range limitations can cause some issues, issues we can solve with the next active defense system.


Shown above is an example of a CIWS Advanced Cannon along with the old model for Munition Warners

CIWS weapons are usually turrets or stationary in-hull mounts being controlled by a CIWS controller and as such the controllers are able to accept pretty much any turreted weapon as a CIWS weapon, however some systems are much better suited for the role than others, fan favorites include: APS, Laser Combiners and Missile Interceptors, the last one doesn't need a CIWS controller to work but we'll get into that in a later section. In the screenshot above I used one of my old cruiser Died with my old hard drive RIP AA/CIWS cannons with all the armor stripped off as an example so you can get in idea of what you should be looking for in an APS CIWS, long story short a high turret turn rate, rate of fire and shell speed along with a laser targeter and a timed fuse for explosive or munition defense shells is what you should strive for, this will allow your CIWS to deal with both large groups of small projectiles and big projectiles as well as having a better chance to hit fast-moving targets.

After your APS cannon or other turreted weapon is built all that's left to do is to place down a CIWS Controller and hook it up to an AI, the CIWS controller has a ton of different settings and rules that I'm not even going to pretend to understand, all I know is that you can program in specific rules for what projectiles are prioritized and which ones are de-prioritized or ignored, however similar to the LAMS node its default settings should work fine for most situations but don't be afraid to tinker with it a little bit and see how the different settings work, although you might come out of that learning experience with a software engineering degree. One simple setting you can tweak is the priority the CIWS Controller has over other weapons controllers, if you have both a CIWS and a Local Weapon Controller (LWC) on the same turret you can set the CIWS to have higher priority, this way the cannon will normally shoot at the enemy craft but the second a munition warning comes in the CIWS will override the LWC to deal with the incoming threat, this dual setup is really helpful for dealing with fliers that try to bombard your ship with missiles since it can work on both keeping your craft safe and shooting the enemy that's shooting you.

Whether or not you've decided to tweak the settings these CIWS cannons are the bread and butter of your Active Defense thanks to their ability to hit beyond the max range of the LAMS giving them the ability to more effectively deal with fast moving projectiles, Now we've been talking about destroying projectiles a lot but not a lot about distracting them, thankfully our last weapon system offers a lot more flexibility in that department.

As you might've guessed form the section header we're all about missiles now, since regular missiles have a variety of lock-on methods there's also a variety of methods to distract those missiles from their intended target, missile-based active defenses usually tend to be the most space-efficient but it does come at the cost of only being able to take on Missiles and CRAM shots, we'll talk about good use cases for each of these defenses later so for now let's talk about flares and how to set up Automated Control Blocks (ACBs) for them.


Pictured here is an example of a basic flare system

On a basic level, sticky flares and other distraction equipment work by creating a bigger target and fooling the enemy missile into thinking it's heading for a juicy target, in the case of IR sticky flares are used to burn hotter than the craft they were launched from, and radar/sonar target simulators try to create a radar/sonar signature bigger than the craft, this is why small flares are often used on fliers since it's very easy to create a small distraction that looks like another plane. The missile part of a flare system is very easy to set up, all you have to do is set all the components to sticky flares or another target simulator for the best effect, slap an ejector on there and you're good to go! Hooking up an ACB takes a little more work, after placing down the ACB next to the missile controller, you'll have to set some conditions.

On the left we have the condition the ACB will trigger on, on the right we have the action the ACB will perform once the conditions are met

To set up an ACB for active defense, we first go to the conditions tab, look for Missiles/torpedoes under enemy and select it, then set the range we want our flares to fire at along with if it'll trigger on missiles, torpedoes, or both. Next we go to the target/action tab and look for weapon systems under Weapons/Defenses and select it, then set it to fire the weapons, after that scroll down to the filter affected components section and set the range to 2m.

With this configuration we are telling the ACB to fire off the flares when a missile is detected at a certain range by the munition warners or passive radar/sonar, just remember the affected range setting is very important, if it's not set you'll fire every weapon on your craft every time a missile warning goes off. if you've set everything up correctly you should see a similar result to the screenshot above, this should go without saying but you should be testing your active defenses in the designer mode against the enemies you expect to be up against to see if they work properly, I've mostly been using the Duster's missiles as target dummies in my examples however later enemies will have more robust missile systems using signal processors to filter out decoys, which is where our next distractor tech comes in.


Here we have an example of a distraction stick system, note the harpoon module

Distraction Sticks are exactly what they sound like, they're typically medium size missiles of considerable length with every module slot filled with radar/sonar target simulators and sometimes sticky flares. Where distraction sticks differ from flares is that flares are typically throwaway items that can be fired continuously throughout the battle, however distraction sticks are not fired nearly as frequently thanks to their increased ammo cost and instead the focus is on making each stick last as long as possible. There are a couple things we can do to achieve this, firstly including a regulator module greatly increases the lifespan of each missile and is a no-brainer for a distraction stick, secondly we include a harpoon module on the missile along with a winch system with the break cable at max length setting turned off, this will allow us to drag the distraction stick behind the craft and to keep the distraction stick in view of any enemy missiles being fired at the craft, the range can either be adjusted in the missile settings with the total cable length or in the winch settings.

Again if everything is set up correctly these should fire on their own once a missiles is detected, just remember to add the proper passive detection systems and adjust the ACB settings to only fire on missile or torpedo detection so you're not firing these off for missiles/torpedoes that won't see them. While these distraction systems are good for distracting missiles there is still the possibility that the enemy is using either remote guidance or a lot of signal processors, allowing their missiles to ignore your distractions and still go for the main craft, in these cases is where missile interceptors come into play.


Here we have a compact and efficient Vertical Launch System (VLS) style of Missile Interceptors

Missile Interceptors are a nose module in the missile menu that will allow the missile to target incoming projectiles detected by the warning system and destroy them with a cloud of shrapnel once the interceptor is close enough. Since they are only available as a nose module the only way to increase damage is to put them on bigger missiles, small/medium interceptors are typically all you need though, especially since larger missiles are less maneuverable. Due to the fact that they are only a nose module that allows interceptors to be quite short, only needing maneuverability modules making interceptors the most space-efficient system out of all the active defenses.

Pictured above are the modules used in the interceptor example

In the example above I've shown the modules I'd consider to be necessary for an effective interceptor, while it's true that there's only 4 strictly necessary modules (thruster, fins, fuel and interceptor), the minimum setup will cause the interceptor to miss its target due it's inability to account for the enemy missile's speed. I've placed the fins and the turning thruster at the extreme ends of the missile to provide the most amount of turning force, the turning thruster is needed since this is a VLS and the interceptor will need to turn quickly to acquire the target. We're using a variable thrust for this to allow the missile to slow down and turn quickly while still acquiring the target, this effect can still be done with a short-range thruster with a start delay but variable thrusters make more efficient use of the available fuel and besides, our goal with active defenses is to essentially be a soccer goalie and get in the way of a projectile, not to be faster than it. our next and most important module besides the interceptor itself is the APN guidance, this is what allows our interceptor to account for the speed of the projectile and get in the way in time to destroy it, a similar effect can also be achieved with prediction guidance but in my experience I've found APN typically works better. And lastly of course the interceptor itself, there's a couple settings you can tweak with the interceptor to have it only go after missiles or CRAMs as well as whether the interceptors will communicate with each other for target prioritization, or only go after the CIWS controller aimpoint at launch, the first setting is the default and usually what I go with.

One last thing to note: Interceptors can work with either an ACB or a CIWS controller, the ACB has the advantage of being more cost and space efficient than a CIWS, but you lose the ability to set targeting rules for the interceptors. While I haven't messed with the CIWS rules myself given their complexity you should be able to program your own patriot defense system form the rules available. A couple other things you can do with interceptors is 1. You can set them to take out torpedoes by swapping out the thruster for a propeller and including a ballast tank, along with setting up a passive sonar, and 2. you can stick them on your flares to create a honeypot effect where the flares draw in any missiles and the interceptor head blows up any missiles that fall for it, this will destroy the flare in the process which is why this isn't recommended for distraction sticks, in any case interceptors are a very good way to deal with any offending missiles.

As for use cases for these 3 systems, flares combined with radar target simulators are obviously going to be good on your fighters and other fliers to distract any IR or Radar tracking missiles, it's a good idea to try and keep your fliers's radar profile low so the target simulators have a better chance of distracting the missile. Distraction sticks are very good on subs and small ships as well as larger aircraft to help ensure that high-damaging missiles/torpedoes using the respective targeting systems will be fooled and won't delete the ship/sub. Lastly missile interceptors are a very space-efficient way to destroy any missiles that aren't fooled, best used on ships and fliers that can't afford the space for a LAMS or a CIWS.


As you might've guessed from reading through the different active defenses, these do not have the same problem as the ring/projector shields. Meaning instead of having to pick one sole system and stick with it, you can layer these different defenses together for a very cohesive and robust defense. For example you can have a low-gauge CIWS to take out relatively small and weak targets at a distance, and have a backup high-power LAMS for anything tough enough to punch through the CIWS defense, this can raise the initial cost of the craft along with the volume so you will have to make a decision for your low volume/cost crafts.

Now that we're done talking about both Passive and Active Defenses it's time to take a look at Composite Defenses that don't quite fit in either category.

As we've discussed previously Composite Defenses are typically a mix of both Passive and Active systems, performing functions that cover both categories. While some of these systems may seem redundant they do have their own use cases and niches to fill, so let's discuss what they can do.


From left to right we have a Chaff Emitter, Heat Decoy, Radar Decoy, Sonar Decoy, and Signal Jammer ECM

Our first set of composite defenses make up the majority of the defenses in this category, these block-based decoys serve similar functions to flares and radar target simulators but in a block-based form. The advantage of using a block variant is that pretty much all of these blocks are engine-powered and can generate distraction signal levels far beyond that of flares or distraction sticks, the downside of course being that without spinblock assistance, these decoys are stationary and likely to be destroyed. Heat, Radar and Sonar decoys all work off of this engine-powered system and thus serve similar functions for their respective avenues, I did mention spinblocks earlier and that's because if you put these decoys at the end of a beam on a spinblock, the fact they're spinning around the outer edge of a circle means there's less of a chance of them being destroyed, allowing you to create a homing beacon system on your capital ships and other crafts too big for traditional distraction sticks to work.

Chaff emitters work off of a different principle, instead of using engine power, these things will use material to cover the entire area around the craft with metal strips that will interfere with active radars and missiles increasing their error and thereby making the craft harder to hit. The downsides of using chaff emitters is that 1. they will burn through materials pretty quickly without something to control them when they're active, and 2. throwing all those radar returning strips in the air make it more likely that enemies will know you're there, nullifying any stealth measures you may have taken, that all being said, chaff can be good at throwing off the aim of any AA cannons utilizing radar.

And lastly Signal Jammer ECMs will use engine power to interfere with any wireless connections the enemy has with other vehicles and with any remote guidance missiles or wireless detection buoys the enemy may be using. This can be incredibly useful for distracting and otherwise messing with the aim/detection of enemies utilizing the tech mentioned, however the main downside is the incredible power draw needed to cause the jamming effect, just one jammer on it's own will consume 1,000 power at default settings and can draw an upper limit of 20,000 power, combine this with the fact that the jamming effect doesn't stack and this means that for a craft to be able to jam remote guidance effectively it'll need to sacrifice a substantial chunk of it's engine power. Despite those downsides this block does fill the niche of messing with the aim of remote guidance missiles so it can be worth the power cost.


On the left we have the laser warner block, on the right we have a smoke dispenser

One of the easiest to set up composite defenses, the Laser Warner and Smoke Dispenser combo should be a familiar setup process if you've messed around with active defenses, this defense works by the laser warner detecting a laser impact and sending a warning signal to any available smoke dispensers in the warner's set radius, the smoke dispensers will deploy a smokescreen to reduce the enemy laser's intensity according to their set parameters. By default the warners are only able to detect impacts in a 20m radius but this can be adjusted up to a max of 30m in the settings, however this will require the need to dot laser warners around the craft in order to cover the whole vessel. there's also a couple other settings in the laser warner to worry about like the radius that controls how many dispensers get the signal, how many smokes are deployed and how much time there is in between warnings along with a button for warning on a missile targeting laser, other than the range settings I don't typically touch the others since the defaults for those work just fine but they can be useful for fine-tuning the warners. As for the smoke dispensers there's only 3 settings, material use/second will control how fast material is burned when the smokescreen is deployed and directly effects how strong the smoke is, the 2nd setting controls how long the smokescreen will be active after receiving the warning signal, and the fraction of material will set when the dispensers stop using smoke to preserve material stores. Again, defaults work perfectly fine for the dispensers, the only setting I usually tweak is the material use so I can set the smoke strength I'm looking for.

Since smoke dispensers are one of the only 2 defenses capable of mitigating laser damage these tend to become pretty important to include on any well-rounded ship, the downside of smoke though is that if your craft is fast enough it can outrun the smoke cloud and you won't receive the benefits of sitting in smoke, so it's a good idea to only include this on your surface ships or any slow airships, doubling up with the planar shields from earlier is also a good idea for maximum laser defense.


Above we have a simple platform set up with a Warp Drive

Warp drives are the ultimate coward's defensive tool for your vehicle, they require battery energy to function and after charging for a certain amount of time they can be triggered by controllers like ACBs to instantly teleport the craft up to 5km away in the direction the warp controller is facing, all controllers in the same direction will trigger at the same time and after the warp each drive must be stabilized before the craft can warp again. The warp drive is made from 4 parts, the warp controller has all the settings for the drive and is where everything connects to. The warp rod converts battery energy to warp energy and is more efficient at doing so as the rod length approaches vehicle length along the same axis. The warp stabilizer is what's used to stabilize the drive (duh) so add more of these to warp faster, and the last piece is the warp terminator, which goes on the end of the warp rods and allows you to connect more stabilizers. As for how to set up these things, since warp rod efficiency is based on how close the rod length is to vehicle length on the same axis I'd recommend placing the warp controller facing the parallel to the shortest axis on your craft, for example if your vehicle is 100m long but only 20m wide then you'd place it parallel to the width, preferably in a spot that'd allow to get close to the vehicle width in terms of rod length. After that just slap on a terminator and some stabilizers to shorten the time between warps, tweak the warp settings to your liking (I'd recommend turning the range down unless you just want to leave the combat area) and then set up your controls for when the warp happens, how I've seen these used most commonly on SD ships is with an ACB set with a timer to warp when the timer goes off, you could get more complex with it and set it to only go off when munitions are detected but you're at least guaranteed to dodge something with the timer setup. Obvious downsides are energy costs and costs of the components involved but some might consider that a small price to pay for avoiding that doom CRAM shot or just barely dodging a killing railgun shot so I'll let you be the judge on whether your craft needs this tech or not.

That's all the information I have on defenses at the moment, hopefully you've left this guide knowing some more about defensive systems. As always if you've noticed that I missed something please let me know in the comments and if you have question about improving your defenses the FtD Discord is a great resource that I'll link below, otherwise thanks for stopping by and take care!

FtD Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fromthedepths

Other guide(s) I've done:

https://steamproxy-script.pipiskins.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2377067295
https://steamproxy-script.pipiskins.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2330679762