Thrust issues, unneeded friction and imbalanced environment. Except this isn't a workplace.

[Matt_Bradock]

The "balancing" on thrusters completely murdered all ships, especially big ones. The new effect is simply not enough. Earlier, we used to build engines on the ships, now we need to build ships around engines. There are however multiple means to balance that out. This is a suggestion to server admins (BlockBehaviorConfig file in Starmade\Data\Config folder) and devs alike.

1. The simplest way: increase per block efficiency.
PowTotalThrust>0.8</PowTotalThrust is a bad joke, and the group bonus is undetectably low. Currently, ships struggle to reach a speed over 50 km/h even with a 100% efficient Overdrive system, since Overdrive only affects top speed, not acceleration. For a ship to have a half decent thrust/mass ratio, it has to have third of its mass as thruster blocks, which is ridiculous.

2. The wrong way: change the scaling.
Why is this wrong? Because if thrust goes up by group size or box dimensions, it once again encourages neglecting smaller ships as you get better per-block efficiency if you go big. Big ships are necessary, especially if the server has stronger-than-default pirates, but smaller fighters, gunships, corvettes and runabouts ( <10K blocks) need to have a place in the game. At least for RP purposes.

3. The realistic way and its consequences.
Thrust should generally affect only acceleration, not top speed, the later should be capped in the server.cfg only. The friction, a.k.a the PHYSICS_LINEAR_DAMPING line in the .cfg should be set to 0. Of course, this would make physics completely Newtonian, which would bring up a few problems, for example, maneuvering would be more difficult, a pushed asteroid would keep moving forever, or your ship, if you accidentally pressed R mid-flight (or got disconnected/crashed) would drift indefinitely. This however, would let huge, sluggish ships with worse thrust/mass ratios to accelerate to top speed except it'd take them longer to do so. Still it would be possible to travel long distances within a reasonable timeframe.

To solve the adrift ship issue, the AI module's behavior should be changed. Namely, an Auto-Brake capability should be added. This means the ship would automaticly slow down and stop if it has a passive (not activated) Bobby AI module on it, but nobody in control, and also do that when out of combat with an active AI. This would also make collecting drones after a battle easier. Of course, this is something only the devs can do, and falls out of server admin jurisdiction.

4. FTL travel
Some servers already have a warp gate network, and during the second dev Q&A, FTL drives and warp gates in the vanilla game were also mentioned. If the thrusters stay nerfed, we gonna need those more than ever.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

There is another post on this, in which a block is discussed that will remove friction only fir the ship itself and only when you are in the ships core.

 

[Ithirahad]

There is another post on this, in which a block is discussed that will remove friction only fir the ship itself and only when you are in the ships core.

...But what if you WANT to cruise ("coast") while not inside your core? Sometimes I like leaving my core room to go organize my PlexStorages in the cargo room, or something else similar...

 

[Matt_Bradock]

...But what if you WANT to cruise ("coast") while not inside your core? Sometimes I like leaving my core room to go organize my PlexStorages in the cargo room, or something else similar...

You can organize your inventories in the ship core too now, so I can barely imagine a situation other than RP when you have to leave the core on a moving ship with no one to take the helm. Better do that stuff using build mode. But if you do exit core mid-flight in deep space, you're taking a very, very high risk. Are you aware of the "magic missile" bug, that a missile explosion blows through shields and outer hull and actually reaches and damages players and docked ships in the hangar if they are in the initial blast radius? A freshly spawned pirate with lock-on missiles can blow you clean out of your ship if you exit the core, even if it's only a puny fighter, because lock-on missiles have a 2K range while cannons and beams (a.k.a. your turrets) only have 1K?

That aside, I (and I presume many of us) have been wishing for a programmable autopilot for a very good while now. An AI that flies your ship to the sector you want and stops when it passes the border of that sector, automatically.

 

[Yetimania]

My favoured option by far is implementing some way to turn off friction. Whether that means its on all ships by default but you disable it with a block or blocks (maybe a defensive system that reduces linear damping), or if its off on ships by default and there's a block or blocks to enable it, or its on for all ships all the time unless they're firing their engines (read:holding down a movement key), I'd be happy either way. It's really the only way we can get fast fighters and slow battleships (in combat) without having any ship bigger than a fighter or shuttle take twenty minutes just to get to the battle.

 

[ltmauve]

What I want is friction at low speeds and then it disappears after you get moving faster then some config value.

 

[Planr]

The new thrust mechanic changes are just fine as long as we have an also-appropriate power taxation for increasingly bigger engine arrays.
FTL is necessary too. Bigger ships should naturally be slower, so that fighters have a greater role. The big ships in turn will need those FTL mechanics very soon to appropriately compensate for being difficult to travel with.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

The problem is, the engines now take too many blocks (along with their power needs that require a better power generation value) from the other systems. If you need to have your ship made out of one-quarter thrusters, and one-quarter power (generation and tanks) in order to have a half-decent speed and acceleration, you have half your ship's total mass taken, and the other half remaining for everything else including outer hull, interior, shields and weapons. And oh look, shields and weapons now require at least (without effect systems) double the blocks, and who knows how much more energy, to operate.

In my honest opinion, this thruster nerf should have waited until the FTL mechanics (I even made a suggestion about that on the old site) have been implemented in the official build too, and not on just a few servers that fabricated warp gates for their own good, in order to offer a means to travel for the sluggish battlecruisers.