UNSC ships

Here is a pretty typical UNSC ship type from the website UNSC Preview which until recently was a direct link from GZG. Key things to note are the use of the graser weapon system and the three rather than four rows of hull boxes.

Having only three rows of hull boxes costs 3 per box instead of 2 per box. It's open to question whether this has been fully tested out, but the principal benfit is to make it take a little bit longer to get to threshold checks. Kind of academic with light vessels, which usually get blown right out of the sky too quickly for system degradation to be an issue. With this Lake Mk III it's the difference between a first row of three and then three rows of two, and the three rows you see. Pretty marginal with such a weak hull in the first place.

Also note the slightly mad false economy of a single fire control for four weapon systems. Anyone using this thing full time would be thinking about junking one of the PDS systems or one of the beam turrets to get a bit of redundancy in fire control. That said, you're probably going to be seeing a lot of Lake Mk IIIs, and it seems only fair to direct you to the source materials. It's fiddly enough putting in ship diagrams that I'm probably mostly going to direct you to the websites with them.