50km Speed LIMIT

[Winterhome]

Speed limit upped based on thruster count.
Acceleration lowered based on mass.

Big ships = Move faster after taking a good 20-30 seconds to accelerate, but can\'t move well *at all*.

Problem solved.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I don\'t like the default cap being so small. Also, caps per vessel would just defeat the purpose of adding more thrust to large ships since there\'d be no point. You already need a lot of thrusters to get reasonable acceleration on large ships. Putting a lower cap on speed for them will hand over battles to fighters.

 

[FCJester]

Weight is not a factor; you\'re in space.

 

[starcitsura]

Thrusters just need to have diminishing returns in their \"thrust\" equations like a logarithmic curve. After a while, you adding another thruster would give you an additional near 0 thrust. This shouldn\'t reduce the top speed of capital ships, but should increese the time it takes them to change velocity. Once a capital ship is moving, fighters are gonna have a hard time killing it, they would be able to keep up, but wouldn\'t be able to get any closer, making targeting anything other then the butt end of the ship difficult.

 

[Nootau]

So such thing as a fighter or a capital

 

[starcitsura]

Average mass per block should be about 0.0002 mass

dV is your change in velocity per second, and to find your potential dV, I am using

dV = Thrust/Mass

To calculate thrust, let x be your total number of thrusters,

Thrust=LOGe(# of Thrusters)+1

With this set up, each thruster gives reduced thrust per block, and because of their mass, you can actually reduce your dV by adding to many thrusters.

Here are some example ships from my spread sheet:

A \"small\" ship with 500 blocks, and an additional 110 thrusters, for a total of 610 blocks. This ship has a mass of 0.122. It produces 5.7 thrust, for a dV of 46.72 kph. It will accelerate to 100kph in a blazing 2.14 seconds!

A large ship with 100,000 blocks, and an additional 11060 thrusters, for a total of 111,060 blocks, and a mass of 22.2. It produces 10.3 thrust for a dV of 0.46 kph.It will take about 56 seconds to accelerate up to 25kph, 1.7 min to get up to 50kph, and just over 3.5 min to get up to 100kph.

A huge ship that has 1,000,000 blocks, and an additional 90,000 thrusters, having a total mass of 218, will produce 12.4 thrust, and have a dV of less then 0.06 kph. This monster will take 3 min to reach a mere 25kph, and to reach 50 kph will take 7.3 min. Just before 15 min, you will finally make it up to 100kph. With something this big, you would have to plan to stop well in advance.

These figures are based off a very quick formula, and would have to be tweeked, small ships get to much thrust, large too little. But with these figures, planets should have a gravity that create a dV of between 0.2 kph to 0.5 kph. This would make it so only smaller ships can be used to enter a planets gravity, as large ships would not be able to lift off.

Ship cores could have a mass of 0.5 reducing the acceleration of the \"small\" ship I described so that it takes a full 11 seconds to reach 100 kph, while not really affecting the larger ships in any way.

 

[Zyrr]

I like how you imply that a hyperdrive is 100,000 km/h when lightspeed is 298,792,458 km/h, and hyperdrive = FTL drive. More likely for schema to add is a \"warp drive\". Instead of moving absolutely insane speeds and having to load well over 20,000 sectors in less than a second, he\'d likely implement something along the lines of an alternate dimension. Think Halo functionality with a Nether look. Therefore, you\'d only have to load this \"dimension\", and not half the universe.

 

[KuramaFox]

Its hard enough hitting each other if you are both in well-designed fighters even at that speed, if you both know how to strafe properly. Don\'t even get me started on servers that increase that limit past that. Messing with speed too much will completely break combat ability for anything over the size of a large fighter. And anything that size or smaller will effectively become an evasion tank that is almost impossible to hit if they don\'t want you to.



The way to deal with speed is to add jump drives, warp gates, or something of that nature.

 

[2hu]

Mass (NOT WEIGHT) already does decrease acceleration. And not everyone is saying that thrusters should increase max speed.

 

[normskilight]

The size of a ship shouldn\'t effect its top speed only its acceleration/deceleration.

To add higher speed you could add a second type of truster or jump drive that requires so much power to operate that it requires larger reactors. This puts interplanetary travel out of the ability of small craft. To maintain balance you would have to spread out the stations and shops much much wider. You\'d then use the existing (impulse) drives for local travel on small ships

and for slow acceleration of larger ships but for interplanetary travel you would use the newer jump drive.

I imagine a scenario where you dock your small impulse craft to a mothership or dedicated jump drive use its FTL drive to travel to another region space, undock and go visit the local shop or station.

Or imagine dropping out or warp and deploying your fleet of agile impulse fighters.

At the moment the way massive destroyers can accelerate at an incredible rate in any direction but take nearly a minute to turn around is unbalanced. A ship with a large mass should be hindered equally accross all its maneuvers.

Apparently the reason large ships currently turn so slow is for balance so you cant just build a huge monster and go around eating everything in your path but it doesn\'t work in my opinion. There are many youtube videos i\'ve seen of people owning everything with a massive ship, they just don\'t turn around to fight, they simply reverse adjust position and re-approach. I feel it would be far more balanced if they turned maybe a little quicker but had much lower acceleration. This would make a massive ship useless in a dog fight just like it should be.

Detaching one ship from another poses problems for people who play alone. So maybe have a cloak and jammer that can stay on when you exit the ship. People of the same faction would still be able to find it however even when cloaked.

oh and there has to be a speed limit to the impulse drives, yes in theory they would just continue to accelerate at a constant rate but in context of this game and its physics engine and region loading abilities there has to be a limit. and the jump drives would do exactly that, jump instantly. there cant be any wizzing\' through space at faster than the speed of light. maybe a few animations to make it feel like we are warping but rendering of regions at that pace is unrealistic.

 

[Nathaniel.Fenris]

The problem with capped speed and mass of ships can be fixed without an arbitrary limit. what is missing is a stress system on the ship. Inertia (mass and speed in a particular direction) can damage a ship\'s hull if the force exerted by the change of velocity exceeds the structural integrety of the ship. While in many cases in real life this can be mitigated by design changes, in the game a simple rule set which increases the stress (ie damage) done to the ship with changes in velocity. The damage could be logrithmic so that the greater the inertia the larger the potential damage. In normal game play the computer system could keep the ship within safe limits but that system could be turned off at the risk of the ship. note that the top speed is handled because there are always slight changes in the inertia to a powered system and at certian speeds even a fly by wire computer system cannot make the calculations needed to avoid damaging the ship; the safe opperating speed would then be set by the innertia. this change is one of the reasons that larger ships have to be slower in space regardless of the frictionless conditions. This solution both creates the desired experience without breaking the suspended disbeleif.

The effect was used successfully in the game Terminus but the numbers were built into the design of a given ship and not as dependent on modifications if I remember correctly. Also terminus did not limit the player it simple put out a warning and if the player continued to accelerate then the ship took damage. Implemented correctly either system will work.

 

[mou]

Weight is a factor even in space dude --\"
Its basic logic you need more power to pull something more massive even if in void even a very small thruster could push big ships very fast after years
And yes if we use your logic there will be no speed limit (except if you want speed of light limit bru?)

 

[mou]

You want a price? You correct and who cares thats not the point here

 

[jojomoko12]

There is no speed limit in space you can go as fast as you want it may take days to get to any speed but it is possible. Your only limitations are acceleration and the speed of light. (which is no longer a limitation in theory)

 

[Wade]

multiple speed calcualtaions on a server would be horrid for stability

 

[Bhunji]

It\'s not so much weight as it is mass in space. Weight varies. Mass is constant (unless you lose mass but that\'s not the point).