Ship turn speed

[Slyke]

Hello,

What effects a ship's turning and rotation speed? I've got loads of thursters and it can accelerate quickly, but it turns like a truck on ice, I've even tried setting the orientation of the engines to many different directions.

 

[whitewolf147]

mabey put engines on the sides in the front or somthing

 

[therimmer96]

The overall mass of a ship is what affects the turning speed, and there is curently no other way other than lowering the mass to increase turn speeds

 

[Sortin]

No power steering in space!

 

[Guard13007]

I\'m thinking a second thruster block called a maneuvering thruster or allowing the direction of placed thrusters to change what kind of effect they have would be cool. From a code perspective it\'d probably just be easier to make a maneuvering thruster block. From a physics-are-awesome standpoint, direction of thrusters would be cool, but personally I don\'t like that because it limits creativity and how many ships actually have thrusters balanced properly for forware motion? I mean even if they\'re pretty close, you\'ll always be drifting a little unless you precisely design things, and this is supposed to be about designing crazy fun things, or so I think.

 

[eLemonnader]

I think this is a balancing effect. This bigger the ship the slower the turn. I laugh when I hear people say how huge their AWESOME ship is and and how they can one shot planets and take out spacestations and kill... etc. But what they forget is that my little tiny ship can out menuever anything their ship can throw at me. So all it really comes down to is evading their shots until I get their ship\'s sheilds down. Now if the menuevering thrusters were implemented, and your huge ship could turn as fast as my tiny ship, the biggest most powerful ship would alway win any fight NO MATTER WHAT. The only balance right now is menueverability.

 

[Guard13007]

I see your point, but I think there should be a way to make your ships turn a little faster. Maybe it scales so each thruster adds less effect until the point where it\'s not worth it anymore. My frigate can turn a little faster, a crusier can turn just a smidge faster, and it doesn\'t really help capitol ships too much. I can have a little more fun in my frigate but it doesn\'t upset the balance too much. Dunno, may or may not be a good idea in some manner, just throwing up these ideas...err, just throwing it out there.

 

[Slyke]

It\'s not the ship\'s turning speed that\'s the most frustrating, it\'s the fact that I can\'t quickly turn the camera. Your view should move immediately (Within 120 degrees of the ship\'s front), but the ship\'s direction can stay the same speed.

 

[Tomino_sama]

I improved my ships turning rate by making it longer than it was wide, while increasing the mass each time.

It is now quite Long. but it definately turns better now. There are suggestions for a directional type thruster.



I use Build Mode a lot just to look around, It seems like I almost spin 359 degrees sometimes to find my next waypoint :D lol

 

[Acsidol]

As far as big ships with slow turning radius go it only sucks for driving. The ship should have turrets for fighter defence.



Having directions thrusters would make sense because you can always use symetery to place them and it would function like a real spacecraft\'s manuvering thrusters.

 

[Anarchy1996]

yes and no because in real life mass has any in space weight is still there if you have a person building a flat bed spaceship. maybe 500m in lenth by 400m in wide and 600m tall for power and shields. but throw on 300 thrusters its going to turn like shit no matter what even with side thruster it might go faster but still in going to turn real slow but if you wanted side movement you should be able to go into an thruster setting we you can adjust how much of you motion coming from the thurster and choose which was you wanted it to go but with a defect of you losing speed. so sure you flatbed ship can turn faster now by lets say 10mps(meters per sec) but for such a big ship you only able to max out 40mps instead of the orginal 80mps you were running.

(now im my own opinion i think there should be engines in the game instead or powergen for you really have to think about you ship.

 

[wickerman123]

I think it should stay as it is.

If you added the ability for Frigate-Class ships to be as manueverable as a fighter the game would become heavily unbalanced.

Look at Sci-Fi movies - Star Wars for example:

The destroyers aren\'t very manuverable but what they have that fighters don\'t is a huge array of turrets - and a dock full of Fighter-Class ships.





I\'m yet to see a Sci-Fi film where a huge ass captial ship is weaving around space chasing fighters like it was the same size as a fighter. It jsut seems silly.

 

[Zaflis]

Depends on what your classification for fighter is. If it\'s over 300 mass, then it\'s already equally maneuverable as a titan. As mentioned in other thread, i\'d also hope for the mass limit to go little higher where turning speed is set to lowest constant. So that we can have little bigger fighters than currently.

I was considering to draw a picture of the turning speed illusion on high ship lengths, but do i really have to? Angular rotation speed is the same on 300 mass ship, and 3000000 mass ship. But if you rotate 500m long ship 1 degree, the camera moves much longer way sideways, than 50m ship. If those small and large ships are looking at same station when they do that 1 degree turn, obviously it looks like big ship rotates faster, when it actually doesn\'t.

 

[wickerman123]

I agree the limit does need some fine tuning.

Ideally we would have some sort of serverside configurable constant or whatever to change the efect of mass on turning speed.

 

[Jcewazhere]

Conjecture:/*I don\'t know if comparing this game to other space games is fair but: in Freespace the fighters and bombers are around 20m in length yet they turn quickly, like a fighter should. In comparison to Eve ships in Starmade are ponderously slow. The Minmatar Rifter is 58m long classified as a frigate, but turns much faster than my 19m fighter.

I\'m guessing that it\'s not fair to compare, so I\'ll just experiment with the Starmade physics for a bit.*/

A flat buff to the turn speed for every size ship would be good. My 51m diameter Borg inspired sphere should not take ~45 seconds to turn 360 degrees. Especially since it is only half finished and has 1700 mass with 9400 thrust. The odd thing to me is that if I were to lay out the 17,000 blocks in a line the ship would turn just as fast, even though the rotational inertia would be much higher for the rod shape than for the sphere shape. One of my other ships, a much more fighter shaped one, has only 147 mass but takes close to 30 seconds to do a full 360. Quick question: Do turrets add to the mass of the ship they\'re attached to? Even if they do the total mass of this \"fighter\" is less than 200.

Or maybe not a flat buff, but a scaling one favoring \"fighter/bomber\" class ships (50-500 mass imo). Maybe have turn speed slow down gradually up to 500-1000 mass, then faster over 1000 mass? I\'m open to suggestions.

I just experimented with a couple tiny ships: A ship with a core, thruster and single power block turned almost as fast as my mouse moved across the screen. Just a core moves similarly. So a flat buff might make tiny ships hard to control.

Making the turn speed be based off of ship dimensions, and/or thruster placement would be neat.

A config option to change the speed modifier for all ships would be a great middle ground between completely reworking the physics and how slow it is now.

 

[Jcewazhere]

Have turn speed be based off of a thrust to weight ratio instead of total mass, that way we could choose whether to have more dakka or more manueverability.

I haven\'t played with large ships (my biggest was 1500 mass) because even medium ones are too slow for me, but I think the thrusters already have diminishing returns. The more you have the faster you acceleratre, up to a point then they stop adding as much thrust. If I\'m wrong and they don\'t then with this turn physics diminishing returns would be neccessary or a 2km long ship could end up being as agile as a 20m one.

 

[Jcewazhere]

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 simpler method than calculating engine position compared to the core and facing, or adding another block type 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 not sure if they add to the total mass) 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 so 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 >.>



I just saw an idea that I really liked. Make all ships unable to naturally hit the server speed limit, instead have a block that adds to the maximum possible speed of the ship, up to the speed limit, and with diminishing returns for larger ships so making a huge ship able to hit the limit would take away from a decent amount of shields/power/dakka.

 

[Danhen100]

Only benefit i have ever receivd from adding more thrusters in terms of maneuverability is the fact they can change the dimensions and gives me more speed and breaking