Boosters

[Zovc]

Take the thruster and break it up into 2 groups,

1. Thruster

90% of the thrust of thrusters goes to speed, 10% to turning

2. Booster

90% of the thrust of boosters goes to turning, 10% to speed

I would love this cause i make big ship that have 1k mass and has 7k thrust but i turn super slow, the ship is less then 50x50x50 (meters). I would then in this case have 6 units of thruster and 3 of boosters, lowering the speed the speed goes up by but making it more versitile in combat. My "monster" turns slowly and is only good at the purpose i made it for, and barely that, catching fighters in safe and carrying them out in the mouth of my ship (a big box), and shooting them after i boost them out with the pulse. But cause it turns so slowly if the fighter was actively ready he would flying out using my pulse come up behind my and exhaust my 400k shields by staying behind my cause i turn so slow, 450k shields is useless if they can hide behind me, i would love this so i can turn around faster to kill that annoying pest, this will also make big ship more agile and therefore less open to attacks and horribly slow when turning sectors.

 

[iamsinistar]

big ship should turn slowly, but i think, medium sized ships turn too slow for their sizes in this game

 

[Zovc]

yes they need to turn slowly but what fun is it if i turn as fast as i can and i still see the shop (turning horizontally) after like 30 seconds.

 

[Archer6621]

This.

No need for additional blocks imo.. Just change the scaling a bit so ships of similar size of the Isanth (and slightly larger) actually feel like fighters regarding turnrate..

 

[Jcewazhere]

But what constitutes a big ship? My 147 mass \"fighter\" turns far too slowly for me to call it a fighter, and it\'s only 19m long. That is the same size as the fighters and bombers in Freespace and far smaller than the ships in Eve, yet it takes ~25 seconds to turn 360 degrees.

A simple way to improve turning 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.

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.

And I saw a post about ships not naturally being able to reach the speed limit of the server, instead blocks are needed which increase the maximum possible speed up to the speed limit depending on mass and how many of the blocks you have.

tldr: mass/thrust is spiffy