Side Propulsion

[LoLzboi]

So I have been thinking about how my big ships turn slowly, but turn exactly the same as other big ships. This brought me to the idea of side propulsion engines, basically to help you turn better.

So the way the game is currently if you add mass to your ship it requires more thrust to get her going and reduces turn radius, I have no problems with this. The only thing with this is that it makes both attacking, and defending your creations hell seeing as it takes you about a sector to turn around (if your moving). My solution for this would be to add special thrusters designed to move your ship faster when turning, this makes designing large ships that can fight a bit more challenging since you have to add the turning thrusters instead of just loading it down with power/shields/guns.

The way this system would work is having these as an option, but a heavily suggested one. Take this example (sorry if I suck at explaining):

*CURRENT*

-10k mass ship approaches 20k mass ship

-10k opens fire, and 20k reacts by trying to turn around

-20k loses shields in the time it takes to turn around and destroy 10k

*SUGGESTED*

-10k mass ship approaches 20k mass ship

-10k opens fire, 20k reacts by trying to turn around

-20k turns around much faster than 10k thought and 10k does not have the turning ability to get away

-10k eats space dust

Basically with the turning thrusters the larger ships are more dangerous but I'm not saying they should turn like fighters. Take a coin, a plate, and a pencil (sizes should be about right for this, and remember these ships are moving at top speed).

-coin represents a fighters turning radius

-pencil represents a ship with turning thrusters (when one end is stationary)

-plate represents large ship without turning thrusters

This way it is easier to pilot large ships, but they still have a disadvantage to the smaller faster ships.

Hopefully this makes sense, thanks for reading.

 

[mou]

CURRENT : 20K ship goes backward and fire on the 10K ship, 10K ship destroyed

 

[LoLzboi]

Remember that there is a speed limit so assume the other ship has better acceleration as it is smaller.

 

[KillerOfPie]

I agree with this fully and think that it will help greatly. its also annoying outside of battle when your trying to get somewere and you over shoot because you cant turn fast enough.

 

[Jcewazhere]

I think big ships should turn slowly, but not glacially like they currently do. Also what constitutes a \"big\" ship? To me those 10k mass figures were impressively large, the biggest thing I\'ve built (and completed) so far is about 1500 mass. Even my 147 mass fighter turns too slowly for me, which is partly why I haven\'t tried anything much larger.



Wall of text explaining my proposed fix:



A simple way to improve turning mechanics, other than adding new blocks, 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 also saw a suggestion to make engines configurable like weapons, which I thought was spiffy.

And I saw a post about ships not naturally being able to reach the speed limit of the server, instead blocks are needed which increase the maximum possible speed up to the speed limit depending on mass and how many of the blocks you have.

tldr: mass/thrust is spiffy

 

[LoLzboi]

I really don\'t want Titans to be flying around like fighters (should have been more clear) but rather have your proposed turning capabilities. Since starmade is an open sandbox game you cannot really place difinitive size ranges for ships (someone out there will make a ship large enough to defeat those calculations, and then we are back to the beginning), but I do like the idea of calculating turn-to-thrust. Perhaps instead of simply relying on the mass of a ship the calculations could factor the length/width/hieght of the ship to determine how fast it can turn (really suck at making formula so :P).

With this system in place (since no matter how small you make your ship there will still be one of those even if it is just 1=one block) we can get a more defined and accurate turn scaling for large ships. Your fighter will be able to turn on a dime while the 700 block long battleship has to take some time and commit more to their turn. Something in the field of

*UNDER 100 BLOCKS* turns quickly

*OVER 100 BLOCKS- UNDER 200 BLOCKS* turns are slightly wider but can still turn efficiently

*OVER 200 BLOCKS-UNDER 300 BLOCKS* turns are wider and take a small amount of time to complete

*OVER 300 BLOCKS-UNDER 400 BLOCKS* turns are wider still and take a bit longer amount of time

*OVER 400 BLOCKS-UNDER 500 BLOCKS* turns are wide and take a longer amount of time

*OVER 500 BLOCKS-UNDER 750 BLOCKS* turns are wide and take a decent amoung of time

*OVER 750 BLOCKS-UNDER 1000 BLOCKS* turns are very wide and take a long amount of time

*1000+ BLOCKS* being half the size of a sector it takes about a sector to turn and a very long time



Hopefully something like this is not too hard to implement, and makes sense.

 

[Jcewazhere]

I just fail at math tonight so my formula only works on ships with thrust>mass. So anyone with a titan that has one thruster on it could turn ridiculusly fast.

For example: 10,000Mass/1Thrust = 10,000 * Tier(lets call it .01) = 100 * 36 = 3600 degrees per second of rotation >.>

 

[LoLzboi]

The formula doesn\'t really matter seeing as this is a suggestion, but maybe just roll the way of configurable engines like you mentioned before.

 

[John Sheridan]

This is a good idea, except it should be based on MASS, not width/length/height, just MASS.

And roughly, after 200 mass you start slowing down

300 mass you have a nasty peice of equipment. That UMC_Collector is about 350 mass to give you an idea. It should not turn as quick as a 50 mass fighter.

 

[refirendum]

how about an inertial model?

the more mass placed further from the center of mass of a ship, the slower it will turn? and thrust would also instead of being applied directly to the center of mass of the entire ship, but rather applied to the center of mass of all thruster blocks?

 

[Skaterkid2478]

The developers will most likely add RCS thrusters, which are basically mini thrusters that are attached to certain areas of the ship to make it turn and bank in space.

 

[War Dog]

The ONLY advantage smaller ships have over large ships is maneuverability (Perhaps not being a giant target too but I digress). Why take away that advantage too?

If your giant ship is even TRYING to turn to hit a smaller ship, you\'re doing it wrong. We have turrets for this reason.