- Joined
- Nov 6, 2015
- Messages
- 95
- Reaction score
- 34
My suggestion is this: acceleration on ships should use total thruster count across all entities (semi-old style) and max speed should use total thrust across entities(new style). Long, rambling explanation for why incoming in 3...2...1...
So I was going to reply to a certain other thread, but after thinking about it I decided this was a separate, but related, idea. At the moment, motherships inherit total thrust from docked entities, not thruster count, which allows you to sidestep the diminishing returns from thrusters that made large ships harder to get good acceleration on before the update. But it does sort of make sense to have large ships have better engines and be able to travel faster. The issue is that, once again, small fighter style craft seem to be left behind, which goes against what I understand to be the intent of the development team.
But what would be the actual advantages of a small ship in space? Realistically, not much. there's no noticeable drag until you reach near light speeds, and assuming the ability to construct in zero g, no need to worry about weight. Landing on a large body like a planet or moon would be an issue, but Apollo had that solved decades ago: don't bring the whole ship with you. And the positives for large ships are enormous: better accommodations, larger, more efficient systems, more stuff like hydroponics, medical facilities, etc. In fact, the only real, tangible benefit to small ships is that less inertia means it's easier to accelerate (which includes changing direction and stopping.)
Now for science as we currently have it, there is a certain point where more acceleration is undesirable since the squishy part behind the joystick tends to blackout and die, but in Starmade we can counteract that with the magic of artificial gravity, which as Einstein or Newton could tell you, is the same as acceleration( they just had different ideas about what that meant.) Yes that magical thing that even the smallest shuttles in Star Trek had access to can be made to exactly counteract the effects of acceleration on the human body. The calculations would be fairly trivial once artificial gravity of the type we see in game is a reality. So realistically, while top speed (which is an accepted conceit of the game that I won't challenge, with a sort of analog in the real world that has very little indeed to do with this game) can be better on large ships, certainly acceleration ought to be greater on smaller craft. Thus my suggestion: allow large ships to keep their bonus from docked thrust, with all the space and weight saving implications of that bonus (with maybe a tweak to make dozens of tiny thruster entities less appealing, just saying), But make acceleration dependent on total thruster count with the diminishing returns, making smaller ships that don't rely on docked thrusters more nimble.
So I was going to reply to a certain other thread, but after thinking about it I decided this was a separate, but related, idea. At the moment, motherships inherit total thrust from docked entities, not thruster count, which allows you to sidestep the diminishing returns from thrusters that made large ships harder to get good acceleration on before the update. But it does sort of make sense to have large ships have better engines and be able to travel faster. The issue is that, once again, small fighter style craft seem to be left behind, which goes against what I understand to be the intent of the development team.
But what would be the actual advantages of a small ship in space? Realistically, not much. there's no noticeable drag until you reach near light speeds, and assuming the ability to construct in zero g, no need to worry about weight. Landing on a large body like a planet or moon would be an issue, but Apollo had that solved decades ago: don't bring the whole ship with you. And the positives for large ships are enormous: better accommodations, larger, more efficient systems, more stuff like hydroponics, medical facilities, etc. In fact, the only real, tangible benefit to small ships is that less inertia means it's easier to accelerate (which includes changing direction and stopping.)
Now for science as we currently have it, there is a certain point where more acceleration is undesirable since the squishy part behind the joystick tends to blackout and die, but in Starmade we can counteract that with the magic of artificial gravity, which as Einstein or Newton could tell you, is the same as acceleration( they just had different ideas about what that meant.) Yes that magical thing that even the smallest shuttles in Star Trek had access to can be made to exactly counteract the effects of acceleration on the human body. The calculations would be fairly trivial once artificial gravity of the type we see in game is a reality. So realistically, while top speed (which is an accepted conceit of the game that I won't challenge, with a sort of analog in the real world that has very little indeed to do with this game) can be better on large ships, certainly acceleration ought to be greater on smaller craft. Thus my suggestion: allow large ships to keep their bonus from docked thrust, with all the space and weight saving implications of that bonus (with maybe a tweak to make dozens of tiny thruster entities less appealing, just saying), But make acceleration dependent on total thruster count with the diminishing returns, making smaller ships that don't rely on docked thrusters more nimble.
