Dream Boat - Slug Boat, the Need for Attitude Thrusters

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    So I finally ventured out of my safety zone where I had always built only tiny, stealthy ships. I had worked up the resources to build a ship that would not be intimidated by a few pesky pirates. I have spent two days building my marvel, a beautiful piece of engineering (in my eyes anyway). Finally it's assemblage is to the point where I feel secure enough to take it out asteroid hunting, though there is still much to be added.

    Oh the pain!

    My 8500 mass, 63 block long ship turns so slowly, mollases does not do as an adjective! The idea of ever building anything bigger like those marvels I see on YouTube, is instantly forgotten! I am seriously considering going back to my spindle sticks. This is absolutely no fun to fly, it is so tediously frustrating as to be physically painful!

    Attitude thrusters are a MAJOR part of real world spaceship design. They have even been featured in media fiction (like Babylon 5) to great visual effect and believability. Yet they are nowhere to be found in Starmade. There is no mechanism whereby we may affect our turn rate. Ships turn only by an immutable law of magic, no engineering possible or necessary.

    Please let us have a block that reduces mass solely for the purposes of determining turn rate (so as to not have it affect cloaking, etc.). I would be happy if the block had special effects and placement advantages, etc., but that would just be icing. What is simply (and in my opinion, desperately) necessary is something that will just do the job.

    Maybe make it an effect module that uses a computer and some on board energy, with the degree of effect dependent on the ratio of effect modules versus total ship mass.

    I do not want to have to be forced to choose function and gameplay over aesthetics. I would like to be able to build those beautiful ships, but not if I will never bother to fly them. For now, to heck with hull cladding, roleplaying interiors, etc.. If the cost is to loose the desire to fly, it is too much.

    Edit: Actually, I was just struck by the ease of the perfect solution. There is already a plan to have ship's thrust be configurable, with the player deciding upon what ration they wished to apply to the various X,Y,Z directions. We simply need to add an extra slider, for rotation, not just acceleration.
     
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    As far as I know turning rate is currently judged based on the box dims of your ship not the mass.
     
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    As far as I know turning rate is currently judged based on the box dims of your ship not the mass.
    Nope. I'm sure it factors in somehow, but I started with the same 63 block box. When it was just a frame, it turned on a dime. Now that it's reached 8500 mass, it turns like a slug.
     
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    it's a combination of mass and dimensions. You can change the turnrate multiplier in server.cfg to make large ships turn faster. It's horrendously unbalanced at the moment.
     
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    I think they made it so the rule "Bigger ship = Better ship" rule doesn't apply anymore. I've seen the frustration of players who thought that making a big squadron of fighters would help them against a big ship.

    I'd personally prefer that big ships are supposed to turn very slowly although I agree that they should be able to pay a (Very high in my opinion) price for having a fast turn rate. Yeah you need 2 minutes to align to an asteroid, but you just need one click (not true but you know what I mean) to mine it all. That said, I must add I haven't tested big ships thoroughly, so I'm not saying that it's balanced, my only conclusion is that big ships should pay a high price if they want to turn fast, but otherwise shouldn't bother trying to turn towards a fighter, for example.
     
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    Using tedium as a balance feature is generally not wise game design. I agree that on principle, big ships 'should' be slug boats compared to fighters. But a provision must be made to allow those big ships to compensate for that. I agree that a big ship wanting to be as maneuverable as a fighter should entail a high cost, but it should be doable. Right now there is no mechanic available to do so.

    My suggestion would be that if one of those behemoth battleships were to dedicate fully 20% of it's mass solely to attitude control thrusters, it should be able to turn like a small/light ship. It would take proportionately less mass to compensate for ships smaller than that.
     
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    I would also say they need to be activated and power-draining. Large ships have ridicolous amount of interior and can still have good DPS even if they put 5% of their blocks into this.
     

    kiddan

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    A theory I still have to try out may help you. Pretty-much I think that if you have ship cores in tiny rooms in your ship -in the front and back ends- and have them hit by pulses=push weapons they could possibly turn your ship, with both momentum and faster rate. Totally un-tested atm, but I hope to try it soon. :)
     

    jayman38

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    I would say the turn rate slows down way too fast in reference on a graph that follows mass and dimensions. I think the vanilla-game turn rate should slow down much slower in proportion to the ship's mass and that maybe large thruster counts should have even higher energy consumption. Higher energy consumption is generally our anti-gigantism tool of choice, versus playstyle limitation.

    I would leave ship dimension out of the turn rate equation entirely, since that only serves to limit the ship-shapes for players who want to optimize their ship's performance.