Physics completely missing?

[R36]

Am I missing something? Mass distribution and engine placement makes absolutely no difference? You can seal cannons inside the ship and they not only wouldn't destroy it, but will shoot as per usual? You can slap together all parts randomly and it will just work anyway?

Is it disabled by default for the sake of letting people incapable of designing proper spaceship to enjoy the game or is it just completely missing altogether? I'm not even through tutorial but this already off-puts me majorly.

If I can turn this off (enable proper physics), please tell me how. Otherwise, if you plan on implementing that, I'd want to know just about when should I expect that. Otherwise, I want my refund.

 

[CyberTao]

This is alpha, some things are subject to change. However, Starmade is a sandbox, so expect the choices it makes to be the ones that allow the most freedom in ship design. If blocks required certain patterns and layouts to get max effect, it would probably end up favouring the all mighty doomcube™ (since this is a cube based game).

Maybe you should have tried the game before you bought it?

 

[Mork2]

To make pretty and weird looking ships mass distribution and engine placement don't count at the moment for movement. Have a large block with a multitude of small thrusters looks a little weird so you can made decorative engines that look like engines and stash the actual engines elsewhere. It also means you can make a ship look like it has using some weird alien drive rather than lots of tiny rocket engines.

Still in alpha so it could change, has been changed before, the design rules for various things have changed over time.

Also depends on what you define as physics. Dimensions do determine your turn rate. Its possible to change the effectiveness of thruster blocks or the turn rate of ships. Its possible through server settings to turn on collision damage. Make asteroids movable and some other things. There are actually a quite a few server settings that can be modified that effect how the game works. Higher max speed. AI weapon accuracy. Mining rate. etc....

Weapons can be put behind things as long as its the same entity it will shoot through. Another docked entities it will impact on though. This allows you make some pretty nice looking ends for weapon barrels or large bore weapon barrels as decorations rather than being stuck with a block with a circle on the end.

Yes you can just slap everything together. Making something efficiently or nice looking can be a bit trickier. Check out the Community content for some nice looking ships. Most of those are made possible by dropping the restrictions you mentioned. When you start out you usually don't have enough resources to decorate so you don't have too either, but you can.

Have fun.

 

[Winterhome]

This isn't a Space Engineers clone.

It's a soft sci-fi building+survival game where you can make any kind of artistic ship you feel like, rather than being constrained by "realism".

Less Kerbal Space Program, more Star Wars.

 

[TheOmega]

Center of mass is already in the development build I think. Stick with the game over the next few updates and see what entails. Also, if you want a challenge, and to see that you can't really stick things together randomly, there are 2 blocks: the Cloaker and the Radar Jammer. Try making a ship that can reach 600m/s and have both of those active at the same time.

 

[R36]

Maybe you should have tried the game before you bought it?

Yes I should have, that was my mistake. I've seen numerous other similarly themed games and I really expected this game to feature at least some basic things, like you shouldn't be able to put main thrusters IN FRONT of the ship. Or for that matter if you only have a single thruster on topmost part of the ship, e.g. a long pole, then it shouldn't be able to fly any other way than "spinning in circles". And that you sohuldn't be able to bury a gun deep inside the ship and have it fire through it's whole thickness without damaging anything. Corneroids had all that, and it was a tiny one-man project with no money in it whatsoever.

Also, completely ignoring engineering part is not a good thing. This isn't about realism, it's plain logic. Even Minecraft doesn't have it that you put a trap somewhere and have it kill an enemy completely elsewhere. From the aforementioned Corneroids, maanging ship weight and thrust impulse manually could be a massive pain in the ass. But let's say Navigation Computer blocks would handle that for the player by carefully adjusting each engine's thrust so that the whole thing moves nicely, yet you still have to put at least a little thought into ship design, not like building a lego ship that flies and shoots not because it has thrusters and cannons, but because the player would steer them around the room holding the ship in their hand and make"pew pew" noises. I hope you understand.

 

[Jaaskinal]

If you want that, I don't believe this is your game. Try space engineers.

 

[iceman6491]

the engineering challenge can be found within the countless logic and rails possibilities. As it stands at this moment in time the game is more focused around the creative.

But if you want a challenge, go build a 5 floor elevator with rails and logic, which has queueable call commands, a call button and indicator on each floor, current floor indication, floor selection buttons inside the lift and a blast door (on rails not plex) on the lift shaft and the elevator itself.

Oh and yes this is completely possible. I love MC, but now go make this in MC, with no mods.... Each game has its defining features, sometimes you just need to open your eyes to them. And with the rate at which this game is developing, all those things you mentioned may be just around the corner...

 

[Mork2]

Well they use to use boxdims as bonus thrust like the power reactors but moved away from that since engines ended up taking up around 1% of the ship or less on large ships. But they removed that a while back. At the moment the either thrusters lose effectiveness or consume extra power as they get really large.

There was talk about making engine thrust have settings for directions and roll so you could break down your total thrust and assign portions to certain directions or roll. Allowing you to specialise you ship a bit, I think they were considering this but I'm not sure what they have planned or are planning.

If your looking for a reason for the engines working the way that they do assume that they are vectoring reactionless system that changes momentum. Kinda like the reactionless drives out of Traveller RPG. That being the case you can put them anywhere....

Though you can put them on the front generally a lot of people don't since the weapons or salvagers usually go there, and if your closing with an enemy and the shields drop the first thing they trash is your engines they can run away if they have to and you can't if you need to. System locations for damage and distribution of systems still count somewhat when your shields go down.

 

[Groovrider]

Seriously, How could you pick this game up and not know exactly what it was like? making a good ship in Starmade takes skill and planning. Sounds like you need to go play Space engineers or Kerbal Space Program and leave us to our "lego ships".

 

[Lancake]

The latest devs have new ship systems in the works.
Center of mass has been added
"Ship HP" got added
"Armor HP" got added.

I would not be surprised if new thrust systems would be implemented, with a config option to keep the old-ish system or to switch it around to a new but more realistic system where blocked thrusters would be less inefficient or just not work.

It's alpha and we already saw a lot of things getting reworked, quick examples: new GUI and new docking system. I'm not sure if you can get a refund but you can always try to make a support ticket about it, you never know.

 

[Belhalhar]

I think being forced to place thrusters on the outside of a ship whould ruin a lot of great ship designs. Having a 2000km long Titan being moved by thousands of tiny engines isn't that realistic too. I mean who tries to equipt an oil tanker with hundrets of tiny sportboad motors?
For that to work here you'd have to have several different forms, sizes and colors of thrusters.
The same goes for weapons, energy distribution and several other things (I mean real planets are propably a bit bigger than a few hundred meters and a little further apart from each other^^ )
If I had to chose between realistic physics or great design freedom, I'd always choose design freedom. That's kinda the reason I'm here