While building, I seem to notice that any ship will pivot about the ship core as its center point. However, for extraordinarily large crafts (and sometimes while considering functional design), it may become difficult to ensure the ship core remains in the center of the craft.
Due to this, would there be an easy way to have Starmade recalculate the center-of-gravity of a ship based on mass of each block in the design and its relative distance from the ship core upon the placement of a new block during build mode/free flight? As the game already calculates mass, thrust, individual block positions and identities, and other statistics on the fly, could a center of gravity calculation also be run?
Perhaps, a COG point can be calculated as a floating point var using the integer positions of each of the blocks and then rounded to the nearest values and reconverted to integer values.
Then, instead of pivoting about the ship core (which can be strange for ships with the ship core far off-center in the vessel), ships may rotate more realistically in space. I believe this would add an additional layer to functional ship design, as denser hulls (hardened hulls) or planetary materials could significantly skew the weight distribution and cause the vessel to pivot unconventionally. For instance, imagine a 'heavy wing' fighter in which the entire craft pivots about the wing. It would be strange motion but also potentially interesting motion while flying guns-D.
If this calculation is already done and I am mistaken in assuming the ship pivots about the ship core, I apologize in advance. However, I've not yet found information confirming this (other than my experiences in-game).
Thanks again for all your hard work Schema!
Due to this, would there be an easy way to have Starmade recalculate the center-of-gravity of a ship based on mass of each block in the design and its relative distance from the ship core upon the placement of a new block during build mode/free flight? As the game already calculates mass, thrust, individual block positions and identities, and other statistics on the fly, could a center of gravity calculation also be run?
Perhaps, a COG point can be calculated as a floating point var using the integer positions of each of the blocks and then rounded to the nearest values and reconverted to integer values.
Then, instead of pivoting about the ship core (which can be strange for ships with the ship core far off-center in the vessel), ships may rotate more realistically in space. I believe this would add an additional layer to functional ship design, as denser hulls (hardened hulls) or planetary materials could significantly skew the weight distribution and cause the vessel to pivot unconventionally. For instance, imagine a 'heavy wing' fighter in which the entire craft pivots about the wing. It would be strange motion but also potentially interesting motion while flying guns-D.
If this calculation is already done and I am mistaken in assuming the ship pivots about the ship core, I apologize in advance. However, I've not yet found information confirming this (other than my experiences in-game).
Thanks again for all your hard work Schema!
