Controlled Ship Stop While AFK

[MacThule]

Not sure if the best way to do this would be a timer, a distance calculator, or something more complex like a function that reads your ship's distance from your current waypoint and stops the ship if it ever starts increasing.

This way if you send your ship forward to a destination and step away to get tea, get a call, and come back 4 minutes later instead of 2 you won't be in a star, humping a pirate station, or drifting aimlessly in deep space far from your intended destination. It would help empower impulse travel while retaining the vastness of space.

No reason players should have to babysit if there is a simple function to do this, and in a game without round breaks or other intermissions, on a live server, any opportunity to step away for a couple of minutes can be a welcome break (and of course if not, players can just sit on their jump drives for all travel).

 

[rocketman221]

It would be better to just have some sort of navigation system. The ship could use it to travel between multiple waypoints automatically. That would be more useful than taking a direct path to the destination since you probably want to stay clear of stars and enemy territory.

 

[MacThule]

It would definitely be better to have a comprehensive nav system. Particularly if you could schedule jumps with it as well.

 

[Briaireous]

Ya, a sort of multi waypoint travel would be the ideal, most likely much easier to program compared to an ai for navigation. If ever implemented, people can also retreat and manually kite opponents by getting into turrets.

Would be very handy if the devs ever change thrusters to operate in only one general direction (more realistic).

 

[Nosajimiki]

Ya, a sort of multi waypoint travel would be the ideal, most likely much easier to program compared to an ai for navigation. If ever implemented, people can also retreat and manually kite opponents by getting into turrets.

Would be very handy if the devs ever change thrusters to operate in only one general direction (more realistic).

More realistic for airplanes, completely optional for space ships. In fact, it would be a very poor oversight for an engineer to ever make a spaceship that can't strafe since it would require the exact same thrusters you already need for turning, just fired in a different pattern.

 

[Briaireous]

More realistic for airplanes, completely optional for space ships. In fact, it would be a very poor oversight for an engineer to ever make a spaceship that can't strafe since it would require the exact same thrusters you already need for turning, just fired in a different pattern.

No that's not what I meant, I mean that a single thruster block being able to apply thrust in every possible direction would be unrealistic. Compared to a thruster that applies it in only a single direction (which is the part with the output hole.)

 

[DrTarDIS]

No that's not what I meant, I mean that a single thruster block being able to apply thrust in every possible direction would be unrealistic. Compared to a thruster that applies it in only a single direction (which is the part with the output hole.)

Any society that can control gravity gives no shits about thrust direction.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

More realistic for airplanes, completely optional for space ships. In fact, it would be a very poor oversight for an engineer to ever make a spaceship that can't strafe since it would require the exact same thrusters you already need for turning, just fired in a different pattern.

Poor oversight is having your turning thrusters as powerful as your main thrusters when the two use separate resources, unless resources aren't a big deal or turning is really important (with the distances involved even in StarMade relative to attainable speeds, it is not).
Turning in spacecraft is usually incredibly slow, except for ascent/descent, where there's the atmosphere to help (and even then, for ascent, turning is mostly done with engine gimballing, where you are using your main thruster to turn while it's firing!)

Now, realistically, with StarMade levels of tech, you could have extreme engine gimballing rotating little engine pods about that can give you equal thrust in any direction, but that would look rather silly and be hard to build (engine turrets, anyone?)

My main gripe with StarMade's engines is actually that exposure doesn't matter at all. We have these lovely engine plume effects, but no incentive to show them, and we have integrity mattering for thrusters, but no reason to expose them.

 

[Briaireous]

Poor oversight is having your turning thrusters as powerful as your main thrusters when the two use separate resources, unless resources aren't a big deal or turning is really important (with the distances involved even in StarMade relative to attainable speeds, it is not).
Turning in spacecraft is usually incredibly slow, except for ascent/descent, where there's the atmosphere to help (and even then, for ascent, turning is mostly done with engine gimballing, where you are using your main thruster to turn while it's firing!)

Now, realistically, with StarMade levels of tech, you could have extreme engine gimballing rotating little engine pods about that can give you equal thrust in any direction, but that would look rather silly and be hard to build (engine turrets, anyone?)

My main gripe with StarMade's engines is actually that exposure doesn't matter at all. We have these lovely engine plume effects, but no incentive to show them, and we have integrity mattering for thrusters, but no reason to expose them.

Ya, completely agree with everything except the point about turning in space. The speed is decided by how powerful your engines are along with how far the thrusters are away from the center of mass and how heavy your ship is.

Also, love that idea about a engine turret, would love some sort of rotational block like the turret one, but specifically for engines. Or maybe integrate that ability into the turret one. Looks alot better on ships if they would turn so that the back of the engine points in the opposite direction of movement/intended path.

 

[Nosajimiki]

No that's not what I meant, I mean that a single thruster block being able to apply thrust in every possible direction would be unrealistic. Compared to a thruster that applies it in only a single direction (which is the part with the output hole.)

What you expect and what can be done are two different things, there is no reason a ship would not have just as powerful of strafing thrusters as aft thrusters if doctrine called for it. It just takes more total thrusters to do which is reflected in you thruster balance settings. At most you could argue that a ship should default to something more like %50, 5%, 5%, 40% instead of %50, 33%, 33%, 33%, but that is totally just a matter of preference, and should remain configurable

Or, perhaps you would prefer that thrusters be set by block orientation instead of a dialogue box, but that would make ships less customizable which I think goes against a lot of Schine's more recent push to make modding ships easier. Also, translating that to inherited thrust would be a nightmare.

Ya, completely agree with everything except the point about turning in space. The speed is decided by how powerful your engines are along with how far the thrusters are away from the center of mass and how heavy your ship is.

Also, love that idea about a engine turret, would love some sort of rotational block like the turret one, but specifically for engines. Or maybe integrate that ability into the turret one. Looks alot better on ships if they would turn so that the back of the engine points in the opposite direction of movement/intended path.

This is just asking for lag.

 

[Briaireous]

What you expect and what can be done are two different things, there is no reason a ship would not have just as powerful of strafing thrusters as aft thrusters if doctrine called for it. It just takes more total thrusters to do which is reflected in you thruster balance settings. At most you could argue that a ship should default to something more like %50, 5%, 5%, 40% instead of %50, 33%, 33%, 33%, but that is totally just a matter of preference, and should remain configurable

Or, perhaps you would prefer that thrusters be set by block orientation instead of a dialogue box, but that would make ships less customizable which I think goes against a lot of Schine's more recent push to make modding ships easier. Also, translating that to inherited thrust would be a nightmare.



This is just asking for lag.

Ik all that already, but it's never bad to at least think about it