Rotational Caps and Max Speed

[TESL4]

So one thing I've noticed is that it's always better to have a bigger ship in this game.  Large ships have the ability to have a much higher top cruising speed than small ships which makes little sense.  I feel like the mass of the ship should greatly effect maximum cruise speed of ships, making heavy large ships have a much slower speed, while smaller ships are much faster and can hit and run while not being overloaded with weapons.  Currently large ships are so much better at hit and run because they are faster, and can fit a nightmarish array of long range weaponry with no real downside.

 

Additionally, for balance's sake, I think that the rotational cap of a ship should depend on a ship's slot size.  It's a little silly when you have super star destroyers sized ships turning 4rad/s and are faster than smaller ships that are 50% engine.

  An example of rotational Caps:

Ship slot size - Yaw/Pitch/Roll

1 - 4 rad/s

2 - 4 rad/s

3 - 4 rad/s

4 - 4  rad/s

5 - 3.75  rad/s

6 - 3.25  rad/s

7 - 2.5 rad/s

8 - 1.75 rad/s

9 - 1 rad/s

10 - 0.85 rad/s

11 - 0.7 rad/s

12 - 0.5rad/s

13 - 0.4  rad/s

14 - 0.3  rad/s

15 - 0.2  rad/s

These are just example values, they could be different.  Players would still need to equip maneuvering blocks to get their ship to rotate, there would just be upper caps depending on ship size.  Alternatively, volume could be the factor for limiting a ships rotation.

 

Overall, I think this would help pvp and pve, as players won't be relying purely on huge overpowered ships.  It would enable massive warships to be swarmed and outmaneuvered by smaller light ships, making them useful.

[Sir Charles]

I like the basic idea of this, it is a good approach against „bigger is better“ and also makes sense since rotation speed for large ships has to be limited in „real life“ (if you think about some physical values, the crew would be dead otherwise).

While I would prefer a soft cap, I still can only directly agree with rotation limits... instead of speed, acceleration should depend on mass, the max speed can still be higher than that of small ships, but it would not be as easy to get to that speed.

When it comes to breaking, a general limit would make big ships unplayable I think. Instead, thrusters and interim dampeners should scale in a way that thrusters are the more useful, the smaller your ship is and vice versa for interim dampeners which would be much better in big ships. This would not only address the braking problem on big ships but also make small ones more manouverable (I honestly think the manouverability of small ships is pretty bad in comparison to big ones...

 

BTW TESL4:

I LOVE YOUR SHIPS MAN, they are amazing!

[TESL4]

I think that acceleration could be a good part solution as well.  The only thing that you have to be careful of is the straifing acceleration provided by thrusters.  If you limit the forward acceleration by a ton,  but do nothing with the thruster acceleration, you can end up with a ship that straifs faster than small ships can go forward and accelerate just as fast given enough thrust.  That also brings into consideration of how good breaking thrust would be.  It would make inertia blocks much more valuable.  But definately think that rotational limits are the way to go for a part fix to the bigger is better meta.

 

And thanks!!  :)

[storm6436]

Part of how that effect comes out in real life is that the power and space requirements do not scale linearly and that ultimately one is limited to maximums dictated by a combination of the limits of the materials and relativity butting its head into the equation since momentum is not a linear function either.  Past a certain point for a ship of sufficiently large mass, the instantaneous velocity of a given gyro to affect the dP (momentum change) needed would exceed the speed of light.  And given each unit of dP generated by said gyro costs a certain amount of energy, the energy costs to run it would approach infinity as the outer surface approached c.  So yeah...   

 

That said, I'm not sure if we're still inside those bounds much less what the material limitations actually would be for the given mineral set in the game... soooo *shrug*  This also has some interesting complications I don't think are being simulated.  You actually want your gyro to be heavy since it's using its own momentum change to affect the entire ship's momentum change, which means per unit volume trinium should be the *least* useful gyro material barring anything I might've forgotten.

 

There are days where I am tempted to question my sanity over choosing physics as my undergrad major... thankfully once you've sacrificed enough sanity, you realize that questioning such things is pointless. :D