On Thruster Mechanics

[Avitus12]

YES finally, volume based thrusters :D

 

Pancake thrusters should not be a thing, kill them with fire XD

[Tsunamik]

yeah, especially as it may be only unfinished state on beta branch :)

[Deakn]

I like the new changes BUT!!!!!!

 

I'd like to be able to put on reverse engines, why? because one does not simply turn a dreadnought... or other capital class ships.

 

It's simply impractical for ships of a certain size to turn around when it needs to stop... if we look at this realistically.

[Tsunamik]

you have directional thrusters, which is basically little bit weaker engine that can be used for maneuvering aswell.. what more do you need? :)

[Garo_64]

Copy-Pasta from the other thread:

 

Most of all, I'd like you to know that I won't be doing the new thrusters without proper compensation. To give you some numbers: With the latest changes I'm getting brake thrust of ~60 m/s² without too much effort and without making the ship an ugly mess. But if you relied on thruster pancakes then you'll have to rebuild your ship. This is not debatable, since thruster pancake stacks make no sense. Same goes for solar panels, but I'm looking into a different solution on these.

 

 

Just a suggestion take a truster pancakes combined Break force lets say a pancake that is 2x2x2 and amply the same B-forc to a breaking thruster of the same size.

 

No one will do pancakes anymore all hapy you included and we go on.

[Val]

I'm confused. Could somebody please explain to me why my X3 Boreas shaped ship with a ton of little thrusters on each side (no stacking), which was rotating fine with the old system, has now gone to small low pitch/yaw values like 0,0x rad/s with the new system?

 

The reason I had covered it with many small thrusters, was the better appearance, but the yaw/pitch went down a lot with the new system:

 

 

I just don't get it. To make the ship rotate as fast as before, I have to double the amount of thrusters and fill half of the ship with gyro arrays.

 

So, the question after reading all the positive opinions about the current thruster system, is: What am I doing wrong? Obviously it doesn't speed up the ship's rotation, but vastly lowered it.

 

Sorry, I don't get the point.

[MrVorgra]

Gryos are ineffective at the larger the vessel relative to how effective Directional (and omni-directional) are for a similarly large vessel.

[koonschi]

Scale your gyros/thrusters bigger. Rotation by gyros is (by principle) limited by the inertia tensor of the ship. If your ship is long, gyros won't have that big of an effect along the axis perpendicular to the main axis.

[AstroOwl]

Update removed the artificial 6x multiplier for rotational speed.

 

So, the question after reading all the positive opinions about the current thruster system, is: What am I doing wrong? Obviously it doesn't speed up the ship's rotation, but vastly lowered it.

 

Basically, what you want to do is to use directional thrusters, and place them where the lever arm for the corresponding direction would be the highest. For example, left/right oriented thrusters would give you more yaw when placed far to the front/back of the ship.

Just making a some thrusters and placing them somewhere won't get you much.

Best option is to dedicate furthest from CoM places to some reasonable volume of dir. thrusters in a way which benefits the most from lever arm.

 

As for the gyros, they are mostly for lighter, smaller ships. They don't get the benefit of an increased lever arm.

 

P.S. and yes, there is no need to ruin appearence of the ship: dedicate the internal space for necessary amount of thrusters, and thrusters on the outside can be as small as appearence requires.

[koonschi]

Also: Large masses simply require large forces to move. Build more/larger gyros, build your directional thrusters at the corners of your ship, build them larger. You can even cover them up (intentionally) if you don't like the looks of them. But they will be required to make a battleship move. I think you don't realize what dimensions your ship has. A normal window on your ship is ~1x2 meters.

 

Large battleships will never be as nimble as frigates or corvettes. That's why you can build turrets at every place on your ship, why turrets can turn around, why you can move the camera around your ship, and why you have fighters. Controlling a large battleship should be a small challenge, but it's relatively easy once you know how.

 

Edit: And it looks pretty cool, congratz on the nice build!

[AstroOwl]

Large battleships will never be as nimble as frigates or corvettes. That's why you can build turrets at every place on your ship, why turrets can turn around, why you can move the camera around your ship, and why you have fighters. Controlling a large battleship should be a small challenge, but it's relatively easy once you know how.

 

Really wish more people would understand that.

Broken thruster mechanics and buffed rotation was around for some time and people fell under the wrong impression that battleships rotating at huge speed is how it should be :c

[Val]

Thank you guys for the explanations, very insightful! And thanks Koonschi for the compliment, it means alot to me!

 

So, in my case it's all about building thrusters further away from the CoM, because I really want to leave the current part of the design untouched as is. So the best thing would be to attach a nice light weight tail specifically designed to hold thrusters en masse, I take it? And may be a similar front construction, to increase strafe stability/power also?

 

As a side note: I'm happy to see what the physics system looks like and I hope it will become even more realistic in the future (i.e. by lowering AI ship rotation speed). I love space colosses being slow to maneuver so you can "feel" the mass.

 

A suggestion to increase this "feeling": If a ship exceeds a certain size and/or weight, trigger a deep lengthy collision sound instead of the metal "clonk" sound. It's kind of funny with a big ship though.^^

[Tsunamik]

Also: Large masses simply require large forces to move. Build more/larger gyros, build your directional thrusters at the corners of your ship, build them larger. You can even cover them up (intentionally) if you don't like the looks of them. But they will be required to make a battleship move. I think you don't realize what dimensions your ship has. A normal window on your ship is ~1x2 meters.

 

Large battleships will never be as nimble as frigates or corvettes. That's why you can build turrets at every place on your ship, why turrets can turn around, why you can move the camera around your ship, and why you have fighters. Controlling a large battleship should be a small challenge, but it's relatively easy once you know how.

 

Edit: And it looks pretty cool, congratz on the nice build!

 

Now to make those fighters worthwhile and I would be one happy mothership.. :D

 

I like my new ship, I built it from scratch with new system in mind, and it has atleast 1.0 rads on all rorations while having 200k tons... so much fun now, when you really have to design your ship for its function... its final design then comes in place naturally :)

[War Viper]

People have to learn to control their speed and understand the size of their ship. Expecting your 3000 block creation to rotate and brake on a dime is just silly and I would highly suggest using the alternate control set up where you can adjust the throttle position. If you build a giant dreadnought then you should expect dreadnought style handling. So far I like the updated mechanics but I still need to test the newest update with the gyros and inertia dampers.

[Garo_64]

Scale your gyros/thrusters bigger. Rotation by gyros is (by principle) limited by the inertia tensor of the ship. If your ship is long, gyros won't have that big of an effect along the axis perpendicular to the main axis.

 

i do the same thing as he dos but if there is a way to make the texture stop scaling at som point i would not need to put na extre thin layer of small thrusters over a a large one would be nice

[Two]

Really don't like the new inertia stabilizers. Not only do they destroy the fun of crashing your ship, they are also so overpowered that you just have to have them in your ship even though they are only available in iron.

 

Also it teaches new players entirely wrong values. Before you had to learn how to steer a ship with newton-like mechanics and that flying isn't that easy, now you learn "Lol, put in this module, bro!"

[DotSplat]

How about using boost to also boost thrusters like it does engines?  Just like engines boosted thrusters use up energy.  I still like the idea of rotatable engines with the stabilizing feature of thrusters.  Relatively, a thruster is just an engine but smaller.

[Nazaxprime]

So far we have all the tools needed for dynamic control and I like it as is.

I am just wanting to use a hotkey to toggle power to the friction break blocks so I can make my ship work like I do in Elite Dangerous. "Flight assist on - Flight assist off"

 

[Enzo Matrix]

Also: Large masses simply require large forces to move. Build more/larger gyros, build your directional thrusters at the corners of your ship, build them larger. You can even cover them up (intentionally) if you don't like the looks of them. But they will be required to make a battleship move. I think you don't realize what dimensions your ship has. A normal window on your ship is ~1x2 meters.

 

Large battleships will never be as nimble as frigates or corvettes. That's why you can build turrets at every place on your ship, why turrets can turn around, why you can move the camera around your ship, and why you have fighters. Controlling a large battleship should be a small challenge, but it's relatively easy once you know how.

 

Edit: And it looks pretty cool, congratz on the nice build!

 

Well... I think I may have disproven this.. I like your current setting though for 10.5! It took serious effort but you still can make a massive ship move very nicely. I have to say "never" should be "possible" when you use alien engineers to make your ship ^_^ lol

 

 

[SinBad]

I just swapped to the Beta branch last night.

this is what i made my ship into

 

 

I know. its a bit boxish, but the cube:square law works in games as well as RL. i chose a box over a sphere because volume per block is king in armor land.

its 19*19*19 and solid trinium (except for the dampers)

i found that a solid panel (17*17*1) of directional thrusters on each side didnt perform as well as i had hoped, so i split them up into sections. that helped a lot. i think that a solid panel doesnt provide differential thrust across its face. in other words, the whole panel thrusts, or none of it does. by breaking it up, the sectioned panel can provide differential thrust. i started sectioning from the outer edge, gradually trying larger perimeter sections until i got the turn rates i was after. the parts of the panel closest to the centre i merged into as large of plates as i could to take advantage of the volumetric gains.

im using a fair few gyros close to centre of mass as well as some inertial dampers. the dampers to compensate for the lost directional thruster area on the rear panel due to engines. that took some trial and error.

the inside isn't perfectly uniform density. the cargo bays form a ring around the middle, their volume swapped for engines in the rear panel and dampers/generators in the front panel. so i get a bit faster roll than pitch or yaw.

all in all i think its a fairly nimble little death cube that lets me dance around the wreckage of my fallen foes with ease.

im still working toward my desired weapon loadout. i want 8 factory made Awesome Lasers and 4 of some Long Range Alpha Hit Weapon(Pat. Pending) that i havent decided on yet.

[darkconsole]

i agree on the engines/thruster power ratios... but the engines need severe help. they are way underpowered. way. way. way. underpowered. plus finding the balance between size and weight seems to be near impossible once you get to the 10mil volume range.

 

i have this one ship that no matter what i do, what size i make it, adding an engine causes lost of thrust and lost of max speed. seems like the trust to weight ratio is just weak.

 

finding the balance between realistic and movie-like is probably pretty difficult. though i do imagine most players will be coming at it from the movie-like expectation.

 

[Tsunamik]

nah, engines are fine, you just fucked up because you apparently don´t have enough crew for your engines so they cannot run on their maximum power (and their efficiently is lowered by increasing the disparity between needed and available crew which comes with making it bigger)

[Enzo Matrix]

I agree.. engines are quite powerful, my screenshot personally I have 0 engineers so they are only at 20% power lol. I don't see any reason to touch engine / thrusters.

[darkconsole]

nah, engines are fine, you just fucked up because you apparently don´t have enough crew for your engines so they cannot run on their maximum power (and their efficiently is lowered by increasing the disparity between needed and available crew which comes with making it bigger)

 

i confirmed this was not the issue on discord chat before coming here to post about it.

[Degan]

Oh, thruster mechanics, how I love em.

 

So... the Devs have put together a rather cool new idea in the gaming world;  They have given us a (relatively real) ship building engine with some pew pew... heck ya!  On this, have any of you (who are complaining) ever thought - I mean really read on the subject - of physics?  Particularly mass, inertia, thrust, etc?  From what I read, I'd say the answer is "NO".  Here it is, broken down Barney-style for all you fidget-spinner basement dwellers who want instant satisfaction for no real equity ...

 

If you build a huge item of mass and send it flying through space at 1000 m/s it's going to take a LONG TIME to slow it down and turn it around.  That's basic physics.  At some point, no matter how many thrusters, gyros or engines you put on... mass is proportionately more difficult (IE., "Slower") to respond to directional changes - even in space.

 

One camp is complaining that they cant fly through asteroid fields at 1000m/s without hitting something.  Ya think?!  You're maneuvering a few thousand metric tons of material at an ungodly speed .... wait... lemme give you an analogy...

 

Swallows (birds) are small, fast and nimble.  They are able to reach high rates of speed and maneuver to catch mosquitoes in flight.  This is because they are SMALL.

 

Hawks or falcons are able to catch swallows in mid flight because they are fast (stupid fast) BUT they must pre-plan their flight, anticipate their prey's movement and HOPE they haven't forgotten about the cliff face or barn building in their flight path because they aren't going to STOP in time to avoid it before going splat (unlike the swallow).

 

Condors (really big birds) can also fly crazy fast because of the size of their wings.  However, they cant maneuver like smaller birds because of their mass.

 

Now... you see a swallow flying and, for some stupid reason you decide you wish to test a theory by throwing a load of rocks at the swallow (suspend your snowflake triggers here for a second, girls)... the swallow *may* be able to dodge those rocks because is is small and nimble.  Catch that hawk we talked about earlier at the same time and he will be going home with a headache.  If the condor were chasing the hawk, he'd never dodge the rocks, hit every one and probably pancake into the ground because he can't maneuver for crap at speed.

 

Now, if you don't like my real-world answer, I have a friend who is a NASAR engineer on the Mars program who designs engines for space travel for a living.  I can have HER explain all this but frankly, it would be PAGES of math.  I don't like math.

 

Lastly, read a few of Nick Webb's books.  He's a fairly talented space sci-fi writer who has done a remarkable job at describing space combat with large vessels.  He actually asked physicists about this very issue when preparing to write his books.  I dare say, the dev's may have read some of his stuff :)

 

Now onto MY request...

Please give me a no-BS formula on thrusters to mass and engine design in relation to acceleration with mass so I can finally quit screwing around with my ship design and head to the core :)

Thank you, to all the Devs who have worked on this game.  It finally brings realism to a space combat sim.  Eve was (and still is) my visually favorite in this regard but Avorion fills a gap Eve never could.