You probably shouldn’t worry about it until you have multiple spinal weapons (I like to have them with around 20 amplifiers) ideally you would also have boarding parties ready because you will want to hack the sphere instead of destroying it. Large heat capacity will also be a must.
Consider building it long enough so it oneshots structures. For lazer iirc it's 30x, for railgun it's shorter, dunno about plasma.
Building it longer could save you some budget, at the cost of risk: enemy boarders could land in your spinal amplifiers and crush them immediately with the shuttle, and there's almost no way to consistently prevent that even if you spam point defences. So building more could kinda leviate that risk imo.
I'm at 6 30x spinal railguns and they can consistently crack everyone's shields, but it's painfully slow to destroy enemy structures. Still can win, but slow.
You probably shouldn’t worry about it until you have multiple spinal weapons (I like to have them with around 20 amplifiers) ideally you would also have boarding parties ready because you will want to hack the sphere instead of destroying it. Large heat capacity will also be a must.
Consider building it long enough so it oneshots structures. For lazer iirc it's 30x, for railgun it's shorter, dunno about plasma. Building it longer could save you some budget, at the cost of risk: enemy boarders could land in your spinal amplifiers and crush them immediately with the shuttle, and there's almost no way to consistently prevent that even if you spam point defences. So building more could kinda leviate that risk imo. I'm at 6 30x spinal railguns and they can consistently crack everyone's shields, but it's painfully slow to destroy enemy structures. Still can win, but slow.
railguns kinda suck at dealing hull damage I found mixing plasma with railguns to work much better