A plausible Idea for Thrusters and Ship Turning.

[Daxwern]

Firstly I don't have any problems with how the systems are at the moment and I'm sure that things such like what I am going to suggest have been thought of in one shape or form, but I think it is still a worthy idea to get the ideas out for public approval or even for consideration (if it is a good enough idea). I constantly hear alot about how people say that small ships and large ships move and turn at the same speed, and here are a few suggestions in which could help.

Here is a quick overview of what my suggestion will cover

- Thrusters Tab
- Ship Acceleration
- Ship Turning

Firstly the Thrusters Tab, this would be much like the ships weapons tab, but in this tab you can edit a ships acceleration (which i will cover later) and a ships max speed (all based on the servers set max speed) things like this can be useful for many different scenarios and the set max speed can be very useful to roleplayers who want different ships to travel at different speeds.

Next up is Ship Acceleration, through the use of the thrusters tab there is an option to either increase or decrease a ships acceleration (default being in the middle, or '50') increasing a ships acceleration will allow the ship to reach its max speed quicker, and if set to lower the ship will reach its max speed slower. but there is more to it than just this, to make it more realistic, higher acceleration would require more power, smaller ships would require very little power usage penalty for faster acceleration, where bigger ships would incur a very large power usage penalty, but once a ship reaches its max speed the power usage penalty would disappear and your power drain would just be from thruster use. where as having lower acceleration would allow your ship to hava access to more power so it can use its weapons more freely. also with power usuage penalty would also be applied when trying to leave the gravity of a planet, this would discourage larger ships from trying to land on planets and encourage the use of smaller planets which help with servers as it lowers the risk of collisions with large ship on planets.

Lastly we have ship turning. this is more to do with the introduction of inertia. the faster a ship is travelling, and also depending upon its size (as in mass), it would make a larger ship harder to turn when travelling at higher speeds, where as smaller ships would be able to turn more easily at higher speeds.

Thanks for your time, let me know what you think of this. i would like the feedback.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I think the current idea for thrusters is very similar to this idea. When you build a ship you will be given the option to distribute that thrust in the various directions. So you could build a ship that can fly forward really fast but not straif worth a damn. Additionally there was speculation as to add afterburners where you could dump more power to increase thrust (still based on distributed thrust so you can't put 0% thrust forward and fly on nothing but afterburners). I also hope turn speed is one of the things we can distribute thrust points into.

I'm not sure how balancing large ships will take place with the proposed thruster system so they cannot accelerate like fighters. Of course having to put points into turning may encourage faster turn rates at the sacrifice of acceleration.

 

[ArgoContar]

Your idea for thrusters is really good and about ship turning, we already have that. Large ships turn really slow and small ships turn fast, but being able to place thrusters sideways and with that increase the turn speed will be great. With limitations of course as some people will make their titans as agile as fighters.

 

[WolfChild]

I like the idea, but I'm a little confuse on something.

You say a tab like the weapons, with assigning a percentage to the acceleration and top speed. But what does the top speed mean? Is it 50=50% server max speed? Or is it something else?

 

[Daxwern]

the Thrusters tab would contain all the stuff needed for messing with the thrusters. turning would probably also be in the thrusters tab, but yeah like how the weapons tab has a total of 100 points allocated to the thrusters would have the same so that way you couldnt over power a large ship. but i think thrusters to help with turning is probably a bad idea, it would mean that you would need to have a completely different thrusters system to just control turning. I also think that if you have a thrusters attribute with nothing allocated to it, then it wouldnt work, which atleast forces you to have stats on all of your attributes.

I think that if you increase a ships ability to turn would remove the need for sideways thrusters.

The max speed will be independant from the stat allocation like the rest of the thruster attributes, it is purely for your use if you feel like it, and does help with role players who would like to have ships at different speeds.

 

[NeonSturm]

I like the idea behind the OP.

But I think evasion is the important factor, less acceleration (for combat)
Evasion by turning = shipSpeed * sin(turningAngle)
Evasion by strafe and velocity changes = (delta(v1, v2) / shipSize) * reactionTime=(network lag, newly-created-projectile speed, human/AI reaction time, ...)

We could just increase the mass the faster something is. That would decrease turning speed and direction changes equally to acceleration penalties.

For ships, we should just assume that 1/2 mass is at 1/2*1/3 distance from the ship's centre, if there is no better way to calculate this (I know one, but will it get implemented? - this is easier for newbies).
Faster = more mass = less turning. Smaller ships, lower distance to the centre.

 

[z1967]

Since there is no/very little drag in space, mass and inertia should be a focus of thrusters. Acceleration in any direction should be harder for larger ships (more mass creating more inertia) and should require directional thrusters in order to move in that direction. But, rolling and turning could be based off of ship torque (or maneuvering thrusters). Small ships will likely not need these but can equip them if they want.

It would mainly be just to distinguish small, medium, and big ships from each other.

 

[Daxwern]

I still think that additional thrusters for turning is not a good idea. it would require more thruster systems and would mean less space for other systems.

 

[NeonSturm]

But, rolling and turning could be based off of ship torque (or maneuvering thrusters).

I still think that additional thrusters for turning is not a good idea. it would require more thruster systems and would mean less space for other systems.

Except they are in exchange more powerful.

I think the peoples which talk to schema (Omni, Tupu, ...?) said that you can divide % of your thrust for actions like strafe or acceleration/brake, maybe also for turning vs thrust.

Acceleration in any direction should be harder for larger ships (more mass creating more inertia) and should require directional thrusters in order to move in that direction.
...
It would mainly be just to distinguish small, medium, and big ships from each other.

I think that large ships in films have lower acceleration is mainly because they gain less evasion from the same difference(v1, v2) or from the same turning rate (look into my previous post) in combat.

For non-combat ships, while you can spend 20% more money on a small thrust-efficient shuttle doesn't mean you can spend 20% more on a big ship carrying this shuttle.
Also big ships have volume^3 vs surfaceArea^2. If thrusters require surface area on some side of a ship, this is an important factor.

If we would have fuel and sublight thrusters drain linearly while FTL gets more efficient with size, peoples would build an FTL ship with sublight shuttles for planet/trade-trips.
It depends on what you want it to be like (what schema want it to be like) and the reasons which take account in this decision.

 

[Daxwern]

The larger a ship is, the more inertia that acts upon it, so turning is slower otherwise it'd rip the ship into pieces, having additional turning thrusters in some cases may help a ship to turn, but then again, it may cause the inertia to rip that ship to pieces. the only way to stop that would be to further reinforce the ships super structure and hull to allow the ship to take more structural stress from turning, which is why most large ships always make the correct turning adjustments before going on long distance trip or if they use ftl or hyperspace or etc. its so that they dont have to make fast decisions in an instant and wreck there ultra super expensive ship. so that is why i think additional thrusters are a bad idea :P plausible on smaller ships horrible on larger ships.

 

[NeonSturm]

For turning yes - maybe I thought about acc/deceleration.

But I think that should have it's own thread as capital-lovers might throw clutter in this thread if we start discussing realistic behaviour for this feature

 

[Daxwern]

oh well. which ever ends up happening for thrusters and what not, there will be some who love it, some who dont care, and those who will hate it, but in time they will all conform if they wanna continue playing :P

 

[CodeBlack]

I like the idea of distributing the Thruser Power between Acceleration and turning, but please no Additional thusters...dont wanna make my ships look like crap because of thrusters sticking out the sides XD

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I think using the point distribution system is a poor replacement for an actual turning system. It should take a system with actual blocks of some kind on the ship to affect turning rather than the numbers you put in to your ship with giant single thruster array in the back. To prevent affecting design poorly, such a system would have to scale pretty well so that smaller ships only need a block or two, but it's very doable.

While I know this is a sore topic for some due to game competition and a certain company's history, I once again bring up Space Engineers on account of its very-well-planned ship systems. It handles turning via both thrusters and gyroscope blocks. Thrusters can do a little, but gyroscopes are the most important and both allow rotation and stabilization of a ship (say there are too many thrusters on the top. A gyroscope can prevent it from tilting and spinning downwards while accelerating).

 

[NeonSturm]

I space engineers, gyroscopes have huge amount of mass.

You do a lot better with avoiding too many of them and have low acceleration/brake.

 

[HerrColonel]

I space engineers, gyroscopes have huge amount of mass.

You do a lot better with avoiding too many of them and have low acceleration/brake.

Even if this solution belongs to another game, I agree something like this could be a good way to balance the turning speed in StarMade.
Maybe a torque block, his mass should make you not want having too many on your ship if it's not required. They could provide us the ability to turn at the cost of power.
If there is no torque block on the vessel, the ship core will do this job but very inneficiently. Just enough to fly around with a core like we are used to.
But when we add blocks on the core, turning get difficult and slow as the mass and size of the ship increase. Maybe the torque provided by the core could be balanced to turn a little fighter (50-100 mass) well but quite slow.
Additionnaly, the thrusters should have the possibility to provide torque while thrusting forward, using thrust vectoring like the normandy in "Mass Effect". Making possible for a ship with low torque (like our actual big carriers and titans) to turn faster by thrusting forward and doing a large turn.

 

[ltmauve]

I would vote for the ability to change the amount of torque by reducing the thrust in the configuration, provided that the energy penalty for maneuvering stays the same regardless of how you divert the thrust.

 

[NeonSturm]

I think in atmosphere (gravity), you should have higher thrust. Else peoples will crash too often :D

 

[rece ktore leczo]

Each thruster block give some thrust to the ship (as it is now, but not with this weird calculation system).

The overall thrust can be divided to acceleration and turning.

Acceleration can be divided in 3 different directions (forward/back, up/down, left/right), 6 directions is kinda weird, so i think 3 would be fine. It would mean that we could accelerate/decelerate in the same direction with the same speed.

Acceleration would work similar as it does now - the faster Your ship is going, the slower it is accelerating, until it reaches max server speed or the thrust is too small to gain more speed (without reaching speed limit).

The bigger mass of the ship, the bigger need for acceleration value, but it wouldn't increase linearly but exponentially or something like this, so for bigger ships, achieving the same maneuverability as small ships would require a lot of thruster blocks or it would be even impossible. Thus bigger ship with less thrust/mass ratio wouldn't be able to fly as fast as little fighters. Maybe to even compensate this differences, bigger ships would focus mainly on transferring their thrust mostly to one direction (i.e. being very slow at flying up/down, but being pretty fast at going left/right) or on rather placing FTL blocks (if implemented).

But to prevent abuse of this mechanics by giving all the thrust to acceleration and to only one direction and making this way a super-fast ships going only forward/backward, once the ratio between values for different directions exceed certain treshold, there would be disadvantages like growing energy consumption or smaller value of thrust, or even both of these.

Turning values also would be divided to 3 directions, this time around different axes of the ship. I don't think i need to describe it.

Turning also would "punish" high mass ships.


Example:
- our total thrust is 400 and mass is 200

- we divide thrust, giving 300 for acceleration and 100 for turning

- as we are making fighter we want it to be agile, so 100 thrust for each direction

- but we would like it to be faster at turning up/down and left/right rather than doing fast barrel rolls, so we give according directions values of 45/45/10


In this system, as we would use thrust also to turn around, we would need to build ships with bigger thrust/mass ratio or thrust calculations could be adjusted ( i.e. by multiplying thrust by 2)



Small note - I'd like to see thrusters not getting their max thrust the moment we click a wasd button, but rather after some time of starting accelerating (after the system is warmed up). It would mean that we won't accelerate 1-50 km/h with this fast "jump" as it is today, but it would be more fluent.
With this, there also may be a mechanism for keeping all the thrusters warmed up (useful during combat) but it would drain some energy because the system wouldn't be idle.

 

[bryther]

It would be an interesting idea for the game. a cosmetic suggestion: possibility to give a different colour to the thruster. It would make variation possible because all ships with the same colour of thrusters is lame.