RCS or Reaction Control System

[Thattree]

Basically small thrusters used to turn/change the orientation of a ship faster at a moments notice. RCS thusters do not use electricty but instead used compressed air, this of course means they can eventually run out of fuel and you would be back at your normal turn speed.

Obviously this would be in relation to the mass of a ship, otherise larger ships would become far to overpowered. If done right this would be a huge boon to smaller fighters and frigates since only the smallest of vessels can turn fast.

 

[Present_containing]

For fighters you would have to make sure the RCS system isn\'t too bulky or have it integrated fluch into the hull so it doesn\'t stand out.

 

[IVIicroshot]

it would be better i the rcs thruster needed to be on the outside so people can target them to make the enemy ship turning really slow (the ennemy ship will be using the engine\'s thrust vectoring). And if the engine are destroyed too the ship wont be able to turn

of course RCS wont be blocks but instead some kind of 2d item like plants

 

[taiiat]

maneouvering engines will most certainly be important!



but i don\'t think ships should require them to turn. the slow as hell turning we have now with just primary engines is sufficient as a backup turning, but puts you at a severe disadvantage.



but as OP stated, even medium size ships already move like beached whales, when they\'re not even that big!

 

[Jcewazhere]

But this is Starmade not KSP so here is a wall of text for this game\'s physics (at the time of this post, to the best of my knowledge):



Experiments and results:

60mass, 100m long, controlled from core/center 0 thrust: ~12 seconds to do a 360

60 mass, cube shaped, controlled from core/center, 0 thrust: ~12 seconds to do a 360

60 mass, cube shaped with 237.3 thrust controlled from core/center: ~12 seconds for a 360.

60 Mass, 100m long, controlled from core/center, 237.7 thrust: ~12 seconds

60 mass, 100m long, controlled from core/center, Side facing thrusters at the far points of the \"ship\": (odd note, the animation for the engines still points to the rear despite making sure thruster is facing sideways) ~12 seconds

60 mass, 100m long, 237.3 thrust Controlled from the cockpit at front of ship: ~12 seconds

60 mass, 100m long, 237.3 thrust, Controlled from rear of ship: (rather disorienting controlling from the rear) ~12 seconds.

Conclusion: the only thing that matters for turning (as of the time of this posting) is the mass of the ship. Not where you control, nor how much thrust you have.

Hopefully the turning physics will be improved, either by adding \"Manuvering thrusters\" or making turning physics be bassed off of thrust/mass so you can design more manueverability or more shields/weapons/whatever into your ship.



A simple method 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 pretty sure they don\'t affect the ship\'s mass. Yet.) 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 but 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 >.>



tldr: 36*(mass/thrust)*Tier = spiffy