Thrusters and basic aerodynamics, for dogfighters and capital ships.

[Akblabla]

At the moment, thruster position and orientation doesn't matter, only the amount of thrusters multiplied with the number in the group to the power of something I am not sure of at the moment.

This is both linear, and unnecessarily punishes multithruster units on smaller ships. I think instead the game needs a thruster/movement system that naturally diversifies the movement type of different ship shapes, without statistacally punishing ship designs that prioitieses the visual aspect, like the current power system that works well with creative and beautiful designs.

So first of, at the moment, thrust is a single dimensional property that increases acceleration in all directions, with no way of currently improving turning speeds other than reducing mass. This gives large ships a rather heavy feel, which is needed, but because of the low max speed in comparison to the acceleration that can be acquired to larger ships, they feel really nimble when strafing and reversing.

Now to the meat of the thread. What I think could work is a combination of three new mechanics, thruster position and orientation affecting speed and rotation in the different dimensions individually, increasing the slowdown of mass to the power of 1.05 or 1.25, as well as decreasing damping/drag with mass to compensate, and lastly, adding basic cardboard aerodynamics.



The first one, which is the most important one in this case, is thruster positioning and orientation.

There will be a bunch of new properties introduced to the ships, this includes:

One thrust property for each direction in the dimensions, being 6 new properties, frontal, reverse, right, left, up and down thrust.

Another thrust property will be added for each turning direction, being, roll left and right, yaw left and right and pitch up and down.

The first model I want to show, is a somewhat simple model, that is however, not realistic in any shape.

That is the thrust direction is based on the orientation of the thruster system with its thrust value being defined by the following formular, where A is the relative angle from the block to the center mass in to the positive z direction of the ship, F is the thrust output value and T is the number of thrusters in the system.

F=cos(A)^2*0.75+0.25

The angular thrust however is based on a similar, simpler formular, where F_A is the angular thrust. What the angular thrust will translate to in terms of roll, yaw and pitch is relative the the position and orientation of the block.

F_A=sin(A)^2

This will generally mean that thrusters on the back will provide much greater speed, but wing thruster will provide more maneuverability.



Alternatively you could go the slightly more realistic route where the formulars are changed to the following.

F=cos(A)

F_A=sin(A)

And then have it so that having the angular thrust of multiple blocks of the same orientation with different turning directions be able to be combined into a directional thrust, though I think this could get unnecessarily complicated for newer players, so I would personally go with the first solution.



The second mechanic, having accel decrease at as a inverse potens function of the mass of the ship, to make bigger ships feel weightier without increasing max speed.

This one is rather straight forward, but is also really neccessary when introducing the previous mechanic. With the previous mechanic, there is suddenly no hard limit to how fast a ship can turn based on mass, which was previously the only thing small ships had as an advantage over larger ships. Therefor, to both make it harder to make large nimble ships without nerfing there topspeed the acceleration formular needs to be changed a bit.

At the moment it looks like this, where a is the acceleration, F is the thrust and m is the mass

a=F/m

This is straight out of a basic physics book, which I can understand the appeal to keep, but with the needed low speed limit it needs to be changed a bit. I would suggest setting m to the power of something between 1.05 and 1.25.

If the formular was to be changed to

a=F/m^1.25

A ten doubling in mass and thrusters would result in a decrease in acceleration of around 44%, and if we reduce the power to 1.05 it would result in a decrease of around 11%.

Rotational thrust should also be affected by mass by this, and maybe the mass might even be powered to a higher number than the directional thrust, to make the larger ships feel really heavy.

The damping/drag at the moment seems to be unaffected by mass and will always be the same (I think the default is around 0.1). The damping/drag amount should be changed to follow the following formular, where D is the dampning, m is the mass, and K and Q are constants for balancing and ini purposes.

D=e^(-m^0.5*Q)/(K+e^(-m^0.5*Q))

My suggested values would be K being -1 and Q being 0.02.

This would make it so that small ships with a mass of 15 would have a drag of 0.25 and ships around 500 mass would have a drag of around 0.19 and lastly 10k mass ships would have around 0.05 drag.

What will these two mechanics currently do in combination? Well for smaller ships, inorder to strafe at a fast speed they would need maybe a single or two thrusters on the sides, but they will be able to strafe and turn a bit without any addidtional thrusters, due to the core.

For larger ships however, inorder to get a decent frontal acceleration, you would often have to sacrifice strafing, reversing and turning thrusters inorder to get a good frontal speed. This would naturally make big ships more clunky, but it will still allow having slow large ships with a relatively fast turning speed and reverse speed, for more defense oriented ships for example.

The last mechanic that would be introduced is a simple "cardboard" style aerodynamics system.

I am not sure if there is an official term, but it is the most basic form of aerodynamics that you can see when you fx let go of a piece of rigid paper/cardboard and where you can see its downwards velocity being coverted to velocity in the direction where the paper pierces the air.

I don't quite want to write the formular down here as it is a bit clunky, but the idea is that if your ship's angle is lets say 20 degrees of the angle of your velocity, the velocity would start being converted to frontal velocity instead. The strength of the conversion in the x axis would be based on the length of the z dimension times the y dimension divided by the ships mass and similarly for the y and z dimensions. This would make it so light ships with wings would be able turn and dive without having to use their thrusters to destroy, and regain their kinetic energy, while it would be mostly unavailable for larger ships due to their mass. It would also add a Tie fighter esc combat system and discourage strafing battles with all ship types.

All in all, this could greatly improve the flight system as well as add more depth to creating a good dogfighter. Especially if cannons wasn't crosshair aimed but based on the orientation of the cannons



Thoughts on the matter?

 

[AppLeNaToR]

Don\'t make it too complicated but give it some more depth.



Current system is to simple, your suggestion is on the other hand to much for a Game. (Actually tbh i did not even read everything as I kind of agree that there could be more, but just the sheer amount of text you wrote makes it look complicated )

 

[Kossen]

At your 3rd point or idea or whatever (I\'m not sure what to call it) No, just no. The core of aerodynamics is air. Aero = air. In space there is no air so any properties of aerodynamics do not apply.



Next,

In my opinion: Thrusters/maneuverability at this point are pretty well balanced. The way I see it: the game\'s thruster/maneuverability system make ship effectiveness based on size similar to that of a wet navy. I think any changes could unbalance the game and is unnecessary as the system in place already works and encourages diversity in large fleets which I think in the long run would work better than any other system. Schema also has other, more important things that I think the community as a whole would like him to focus on, like balancing shield tank vs. hull/armor tank and AMC vs. missiles/rockets, adding more block types, fixing economy, more planet related things, etc.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

It would be nice to see something like that in the game, but it\'s pretty complicated and would probably kill server performance through excessive calculations.

You get an A for effort though, very detailed and refined suggestion

 

[Chosen Mimes]

improvements on the thruster-system.

like some directional thrusters or navigation-computers.

I just hope it won\'t become too difficult. what i really love about this game is the fact that you don\'t have to be a rocket scientist to launch a cube of matter into space. (unlike kerbal space program(which is a very good game too))

I\'d love to see more options, but please don\'t ruin what\'s good.

 

[Akblabla]

Well, I know the calculations behind this suggestion would be rather intimidating, but in practice, these systems would have some pretty straight forward and have rather intuitive effects on manuevability. Need some more turn speed? Put some more thrusters on the side of the ship. Need some more strafe? Put some oriented to the left and right.



The main point is that you will always be able to turn and strafe and all that due to it being an inherentfeature of the core, but when building bigger ships, manueverability will fall, if it only has a single thruster in the back, which seems rather natural to me



Kossen made a point about there shouldn\'t be any aerodynamics in this game because it is in space and therefore no air. Well of course that is true, but there already is a low air resistance in the game, and I am pretty sure the game is about emulating all the classic sci-fi space tropes more than anything realistic. In lets say Star Wars, all the fighters are flying and fightning as if their aerodynamics had an effect. Therefore I believe having basic aerodynamics play a role would fit the traditional sci-fi theme of Starmade.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

I was thinking about it in terms of turret mounted thrusters. The idea behind it is that thrusters apply linear thrust and turn around to improve maneuverability of a ship. However you need to remember that in space, anything you do has to be cancelled out. Same amount of thrust applied when turning a ship needs to be applied to stop it from spinning around.

Handling as it is, is good enough - it emulates roughly what would happen in space. With the exception of orbits and any form of drag that is not based on gravity. There isn\'t any drag in space apart from miscellaneous drag caused by light exerting pressure on the ship and friction caused by gravity.



In other words, it\'s good that ships don\'t handle like planes, since that just would not happen



As a bonus effect, they should generate heat and a light animated feature - where a trail of light equal to the amount of power generated by the thrusters divided by the thruster area would show behind a ship.

 

[Jolkanin]

Starmade could learn from KSP in terms of movement. Maybe the attachemet of inline and external RCS thrusters can boost the turning stat from your idea?

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

In the end, I thoguth it would be odd to suggest another game as a solution to this one. Still, principle stands.

It\'s a more realistic way of handling spaceships - out of any and all games about space travel it\'s probably the best.

RCS would work but it wouldn\'t provide any thrust. It could be implemented but it would need some kind of fuel or new resource to generate within a ship. But we really need a way of making large ships more maneuverable.

 

[MrFURB]

Well, that is one rather well thought out OP.

Let me put in a quick TL;DR for those of you who aren\'t English-gifted: Thruster orientation determines the direction of thrust, and thruster placement determines turn speed.

Having a lot of backwards-facing thrusters will make your ship very good at moving backwards but not as good at moving forwards. Having your thrusters on engine nacelles that are away from your ship\'s center will incrrease turning speed but also lower your acceleration.

That means in order to have a capital ship that turns fast, you\'ll be giving up on acceleration/max speed, or you could have a big blockade runner engine setup and have very fast forward movement/acceleration but not much turning speed or strafing power.

The OP\'s setup makes it to where all of the math-y calculations are done only when the thrusters are being placed/destroyed, and the only things that the players need to know is how to get the specific property they need. It\'s actually quite graceful.

The only problem I see with this suggestion is that it requires Schema to change how thrust and turn rate works so that ships can have directional thrust/turning instead of a single thrust/turning value... But to be honest, I think that\'s going to make it in-game eventually, one way or the other.

All in all, an ingenious idea that broadens currently existing mechanics while keeping everything intuitive. It gives users more control over their designs (Thus adding more personalization and uniqueness) without making the game so overly complicated that it pushes newer players away. As an added bonus, it isn\'t an idea that so radically changes mechanics that Schema would have to design the game around it, instead fo the other way around. These are suggestions that are more likely to get implimented sooner rather than later.

 

[Omni]

An important part of the StarMade design philosophy is that no matter how you build your ship, it flies and works. That\'s something that always needs to be kept in mind. A giant flying penis needs to be a viable ship; StarMade thrives on its creative freedom.

That being said, the concept above DOESN\'T mean design doesn\'t matter. We all know reactors need design, and where you put your guns or where your armor is thickest DOES matter. If you left your core exposed for aesthetic reasons, yes shields may be able to keep you safe, but if those shields go down you\'re begging to get blown up. So the designer of an aesthetic ship understands that there are still gameplay principles to keep in mind, and that while they CAN design anything they like and fly it around as a viable ship, design still has an effect on how effective that ship is while doing so.

In that vein, I think this design, or at least the basic concept behind it, is actually quite solid and adheres to the above design philosophy. (With tweaking.) I like the idea of capital ships having to choose between forward thrust potential or rotation. I like the idea that thrusters in different positions can provide different benefits, though it\'s worthwhile to note that (if I understand the design correctly) paired thrusters on the left and right sides of a ship would work effectively for both roll and turn; the only axis it wouldn\'t work with is pitch, as the two would be directly situated along the pivoting axis. This also means that a ship that is long and thin would be able to turn and pitch extremely effectively, but would have difficulty rolling. My point is that thrusters positioned at the extremes of any axis would offer excellent rotation along both other axes, which may or may not be a good thing/work. But there\'s always room for tweaking the idea.

On the whole, I like this as a basic concept for altering the thruster system. I\'ve been wanting rotational thrusters (or the ability to position thrusters to focus on rotating) for a long time. It feels strange that the thrusters on the back of my ship do everything thrusters can do with maximum efficiency. It felt strange from the first ship I built and still feels strange. I was glad the first ship I built could fly the moment I got in the metaphorical pilot\'s seat, but felt like I should be finding my rotation a little lackluster and at some point going back into build mode to add rotational thrusters.

If a more direct application of this concept was undesirable, due to creating ships that rotate too quickly or other strange/undesirable quirks, the positioning of thrusters could be changed to affect percentage or rotation compared to thrust along different axes, similar to how the weapons computer can be configured to put a greater percentage of the weapon\'s power into damage at the cost of firing rate. For example, perhaps placing a small number of thrusters to serve as rotational thrusters for turn and roll would make turn and roll function 15% better, but at the cost of a percentage of the forward thrust. (Of course, strafing also needs to be kept in mind for what percentages are going where.)

For those commenting on the lack of aerodynamics in space, while I always think a space simulator should always have an option for Newtonian flight, it would make perfect sense for smaller fighter ships to use a fly-by-wire system that accomodates for changes in direction by applying thrust where needed, allowing the pilot to fly in a more straight, predictable and controllable manner. While that might appear to be aerodynamics in space at first glance, it is simply the same flight characteristics being acheived through entirely different means.

 

[Tarkus117]

Thanks for posting this friend, im not a good english speaker, and i have this idea for weeks but it was too dificult for me to write it in English, good explained, and i think it would be interesting to see it In a Server, maybe not change the game like this, make servers to have the option to get this Thrust System, or the old one.In case somebody dont Like it.