Larger thrusters = less thrust?

[5xad0w]

I noticed when I accidentally merged some separate thruster blocks together than my overall braking thrust dropped down significantly.

 

For example, despite filling the same area, a 5x5 large thruster seems to put out way less thrust than a cube of 25 1x1 thrusters occupying the exact same space.

 

Should thrusters not be merged to get decent effect from them?

[Tiberiumkyle]

Thrusters rely on surface area, not volume, for effectiveness, along with distance from center of mass. Many thin panels of thrusters work better than single large blocks of them.

[Thundercraft]

Yep, I definitely noticed this. And this property can add up to ridiculous size differences.

 

As an experiment, try making a matrix of incredibly tiny thrusters - say, about 0.05 x 0.1 x 0.1. Start with about 9 of them, then copy and paste to make a matrix of 81... and copy that a few times to give several hundred. (Just be sure to give thrusters plenty of air space. They don't seem to work if completely covered.)

 

Now compare the thrust of those several hundred small thrusters with one big thruster of the equivalent volume. There's no comparison.

 

I heavily exploited this effect (i.e., cheated) when I created my Eos series of ships. The amount of Brake Thrust, Yaw, Pitch and Roll I get is just insane. It practically turns on a dime.

 

Then again, I've seen big ships other people created with a comparatively tiny amount of Brake Thrust, yet those can sometimes decelerate faster than mine? Either the physics engine this game uses needs an update or the thruster needs to be recoded or at least tweaked.

 

Another benefit is that small thrusters allows us to spread them all over a ship, making it difficult for an enemy to destroy them all. Regardless of how big they are, it seems that one hit by enemy fire is enough to destroy a thruster. Spreading them out means that you will likely still have thrusters to use.

[Xaoc]

First, thrusters don't care if they're covered up or not. Second you can actually take the idea of copy-pasting thrusters to a crazy extreme since you can change the size of the thruster array while pasting, allowing you to place thrusters thinner than 0.05.

[Subquake]

First, thrusters don't care if they're covered up or not. Second you can actually take the idea of copy-pasting thrusters to a crazy extreme since you can change the size of the thruster array while pasting, allowing you to place thrusters thinner than 0.05.

 

Yeah, but the game can't handle many thin thrusters. I have some modules, that are made up of thin sheets of thrusters, however whenever I engage them by moving sideways, turning, rolling or breaking, my game starts to drop fps and lag unless I zoom out really far away from the ship, so that the animations no longer render on the thrusters.

 

Theoretically they shouldn't render the particles if they are covered up, but they do even if inside the ships hull and that makes the frames drop.

 

And my PC should handle the load more than enough with these specs:

Motherboard: ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0

CPU: AMD FX-8350 4.00GHz

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 WINDFORCE OC 8GB

RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) DDR3 1866MHz Kingston Hyperx

SSD: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB

SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 512 GB (For games, Avorion is installed here)

HDD: 1TB WD Black

Display: 40" 4k W-LED Monitor Philips BDM4065UC/75

OS: Windows 10 PRO x64

[LordHavoc]

I would reset the in-game graphics to their default values and see if that helps.

Chances are, there may be a graphics effect you've got turned on that isn't optimized at this stage. A lot of games that are in beta often include graphics settings that aren't ready yet; for testing purposes.

 

My spec of PC is similar, but with an older GFX card; and I've not seen any slowdown yet. I've not touched my settings except for turning bloom down to reduce glare.

 

Did you mess around with the shadows settings? It could be the thin plates are rendering shadows when they're not visible.

[Subquake]

This is the ship in question (click images for larger pictures, the first picture is taken outside in my drone to see the scale):

 

 

Here's the stats:

 

And it has 8 of such thruster arrays, that look like this on the inside (click the image and zoom in the picture, there are a lot of thin sheets):

 

As you can see, I have a lot of thrust going on there.

 

Graphics settings:

 

Ship file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxRhohzf8a4KVzdyOFhtVUhKanM (warning: needs a big crew to operate)

 

P.S. From one side I really like that we can "design" thrusters in such a manner to make them very effective, however the more you have of those thin sheets, the stronger the influence on the performance. Instead I would rather have them work like forward thruster engines, that get more powerful based on size and not count.

 

P.S. This is definitely not normal (look how little forward break thrust such a large piece would add (same thruster array, just bigger)):

 

Conclusion: Bigger thrusters should be more powerful! Having thruster 3x larger than the ship itself and giving + 30m/s break thrust is wrong (60ms if Trinium material, but still!)

 

In fact, thruster power degrades the bigger the block:

 

 

And this should be more powerful? Paper thin thrusters? That makes totally no sense by having thrusters with nano components being significantly more powerful and having almost no mass at all. How can something without mass push something forward? That's not Newtonian physics.

 

I understand that sometimes to have fun in games, you have to compromise between reality and fun, but this totally doesn't make sense. Less than a paper thin thruster sheet gives lot more thrust than thruster, that's larger than the ship itself. What's the insides of those thrusters? Lead? Wolfram (Tungsten)? Osmium? Black holes?

 

[Xaoc]

Nice ship, Subquake!

 

You can avoid the lag from the thruster effects by covering up the thruster completely, but you have to design your ship so that the thrusters are perfectly in line with other blocks. The best way to do this is to make an array of thrusters that has sufficient amount of thruster for your purpose and then copy it. While pasting make sure your ships scale is same as your other blocks and then just make it just large enough to fit with the other blocks and then cover it up with some armor or hull or whatever. Make sure you place your blocks on the thruster so that you don't need to place any blocks to the sides of the thrusters. That can cause issues. Also unless you want your game to completely lag out, don't try to place two dense thruster arrays close to each other.

 

Also you can reduce the amount of thruster blocks you need by just making the arrays wider. So you can replace your 8 arrays with 2 arrays that are 4 times wider and get better performance. I usually just use 1 array of thrusters in each direction and place them off-center, that'll give me all the thrust and rotation that I need. For PvP you might, however, have more thruster arrays. For visuals you can always have "proper" sized thruster that don't lag the game out when they make particle effects.

[Subquake]

Thanks for the advice Xaoc!

 

However it still feels unnatural, since I have experience with games like Space Engineers and Empyrion, Kerbal Space Program and many other space games. Thrusters shouldn't be like that. They are for the most part not much different than the forward thruster, though why they are implemented differently?

 

I would prefer for the game to be more intuitive and get rid of maneuvering thrusters at all and have only one type of thruster and the thrust is determined how you rotate the block and just like now it is with them, the bigger, the more powerful they are. Because there are a lot of people, that are already complaining, that their ships look like Swiss cheese all covered in thrusters.

Also I am a bit disappointed, that forward thrusters don't get better in therms of actual thrust with better materials, in fact it gets worse, because end game materials tend to be heavier.

[Xaoc]

I have to say, I agree with you on all counts.

[Ahdaymz]

It is certainly silly that thruster power scales only with surface area. It should probably be proportion of surface area and volume so you get thrust for the extra mass. This would somewhat nerf the thin thruster "exploit" but I think it would be balanced overall.

 

Face thrust = (face surface area / block surface area) * block volume * thruster constant

[Tsunamik]

Yeah, I agree on all points.

In my opinion, thruster block as it is now should be completely removed. Imo there should only be basic engine block, which could be rotated to any direction so we can create lifelike propulsion system, which actually needs some careful positioning instead of using exploits :) Especially considering that less blocks=better performance, this can be quite an issue in some cases :)

As offset, I would just make engine thruster slightly bit effective to compensate, as main engine block isn´t really that effective right now.

Also, having requirement that your thruster output should be uncovered sounds quite reasonable imo, huge thruster block completele covered in heavy armor is weird... Right now my ship has its BRAKE thrusters on the back side of its wing, so it thrusts into the wing :D

[SageThe13th]

I think the combination of surface area and volume solution makes the most sense.

[Tchey]

Surface + Volume

 

Agreed