Agility Scaling and smaller ships

[priestizzle]

I feel like the agility of your ship suffers way too quickly when mass piles on. The giant behemoths should be very difficult to turn, but a relatively smaller ship shouldn't start to suffer the same issues with agility so quickly as their giant brethren. I believe the scaling should be turned down a bit. I also think that because of this scaling ramping up too quickly it becomes next to impossible to toss hull onto a smaller fighter/frigate like ship without losing its agility.

I have a few suggestions for smaller ships (beyond simply tweaking the mass scaling) which I much prefer over a huge lumbering impossible to turn behemoth.

1. Introduce "light" hull pieces, offering very little in protection and allowing us to cover our ships in hull and not lose as much agility. I'm not sure if this is planned since I'm relatively new, but also maybe make these a sort of half block? These half blocks can also help not turn your sleek ship into a blocky mess by taking up half the space of a regular block. Wedges are already around, how about some half blocks!

2. A new thruster class for localized thrust. This could increase agility for roll, pitch, and yaw but not increase max speed and acceleration. Make these have diminishing returns so they can't be abused on huge ships, but still benefit those ships as well to a certain degree.

3. New modules that benefit certain sized or certain "classes" of ships but not others. Something like modules that give increased benefits to ships under a certain weight (for sake of example, a power module that has increased power output if your ship is under 70 mass). Once your ship weighs more than that weight, instead of benefits you actually get less output than the normal modules already in game. Could help smaller ships pack more of a punch in certain areas without sacrificing real estate on their ship. Balance here will be tricky but worth while in the end I feel.

Of course the idea of changing the scaling of mass and agility to help out those smaller ship classes trumps these but they are ideas none the less that I think can benefit the game. I would love to hear you guys build upon these ideas or even offer suggestions better than these!

 

[Archer6621]

I only agree with the statement that smaller craft suffer way too quickly from in-maneuverability.

And the only good way to fix this in my opinion, is to adjust the scaling a bit, just so ships that are ~ the size of an Isanth will be a lot more agile, like actual fighters.

 

[Montblanc]

Anything over like, 400-500 mass should turn extra slow =P I certainly agree with this, and have heard extensive talk about this before. The new modules should be relevant to mass, rather than \"Class,\" seeing as mass decides the class more than the other way around. Just my input, but whatever. Cool idea!

 

[KuramaFox]

If they are not adding maneuverability thrusters any time soon (which may be planned), it would be good to adjust the scaling a little. Big stuff can still turn slow, but loosen up the rules a little bit.



Also, a bit of unrealistic whatnot the game COULD use would be a bit of the classic Wing Commander/Star Wars/Freespace/even Star Trek style of flight. That is, if you turn, much of your forward momentum turns with you and your ability to strafe side to side or up and down is lessened compared to your ability to move/accelerate forwards and backwards (perhaps set max speed for those axis lower).

Yes, its unrealistic. But there is a reason that the majority of space sim games have it. It just works. It prevents jousting matches from being the only really viable method of combat. I\'ve actually HAD fights with fighter-sized ships in this game as another fighter-sized ship, and they are not dog fights. They basically are just wild-strafing fights where you randomly change your ship\'s movement direction and possible try to fly past them and turn around and hope that a second of lag makes them lose you long enough to get some shots in. Also, its bloody hard to actually hit something that small, even when the speed limit is 50. I say, if its hard to hit them, it should be because they are looping around to throw off my aim, not because they just have a small ship that can accelerate from 100 m/s left to 100 m/s up-right in one second.

 

[priestizzle]

Great ideas guys. I\'m happy to see that I\'m not alone with the weight scaling being completely overboard. I just want to fly small ships that aren\'t completely gimped and lose their one advantage, speed and agility.

 

[pudd1npop]

I tend to agree with the original post. ships get sluggish way too fast in my opinion. I know the devs are probably really busy working on new content but I feel that improving the performance of smaller ships, that are well below the size of the several hundred meter long monsters, would considerably increase motivation to make smaller, agile, light ships instead of the current system which nearly forces everyone to build as large as possible. It just seems that this could add a lot more depth to the combat and provide a viable 2nd option as a small supporting attack ship instead of only a fleet full of giants.

 

[Jcewazhere]

Why not 1/3 blocks, that way you can stick them to the center-side of a block and keep top/bottom symmetry. With 1/3 the mass, hp and armor of the full block I think it\'d make nifty \"armor\". Although until hull gets buffed it\'s more like \"paint\" than armor.



Wall of text for an idea to use mass/thrust to calculate ship turn rate instead of just mass as it currently is.

A simple method to improve the turn mechanics may be to simply change from using total mass to mass/thrust in the turn speed calculation. Obviously some tweaking in the code would need to be done to use this smaller number but that should be simple. Thrusters have diminishing returns as far as I can tell so while using mass/thrust super massive ships shouldn\'t ever be able to be as maneuverable as much smaller ships.


With this system you could add more engines, upping your thrust, to increase turn rate. Or you could choose to be more powerful in other ways.

A more complicated calculation should be used so \"fighters/bombers\" turn faster even with an equivalent mass/thrust ratio to a \"titan\". For example my current fighter is 147.5 mass (not counting turrets, I\'m not sure if they add to the total mass) and it has 204 thrust so that ratio is .723. With the current system it takes ~25 seconds for this ship to do a 360. I\'d like that to be around 10 seconds I think (I\'d need to play with it, but with this system a ship could be easily customized to turn at a rate you like, within reason). However if a ship had 72303 mass and 10,000 thrust it would also have a .723 mass/thrust ratio; but it shouldn\'t be able to turn as fast as the fighter, so some sort of consideration must be taken to prevent titans from turning like fighters.

Maybe a tier system: 0-300 mass = fighter, 301-600 = bomber and so on, each with it\'s own configurable speed multiplier. These are totally off the top of my head so feel free to suggest different tiers, or make them configurable (I love messing with config files). So a \"fighter\" could have a tier rating of 1 giving a calculation of (147.5/204)*1 so a .723 ratio. Whereas the \"titan\" could have a tier rating of .5 giving a calculation of (72303/10000)*.5 equaling a .3615 ratio. Then maybe make the ratio be 36 degrees per second * the ratio, giving my \"fighter\" a turn rate of 26.028 degrees per second. That would make it take ~14 seconds to turn 360 degrees. The \"titan\" would therefore turn at 13 degrees per second or one rotation per 28 seconds (that seems fast, maybe make the tier smaller?). Again, these are off the top of my head number that seem to work so if you have better ideas I\'m open to suggestions.

tldr: 36*(mass/thrust)*Tier = turn rate in degrees/sec. Tier = 1 for lightest craft, to .000000000001 for heaviest possible craft.

Edit: I\'m a derp, this only works if thrust>mass, would someone fix my math, while I go study for my trig test because I obviously need to >.>



I also saw a suggestion to make engines configurable like weapons, which I thought was spiffy.

I\'m a derp, this only works if thrust>mass, some fix my math please.