Yeah, large ships and planets do not work together good yet. At least without docking.
The planet turns slowly around its own axis, when you ship is touching it, being pulled to it by gravity, there are some problems:
- The planet has multiple segements, that try to pull the ship, not sure about the full details on edges or zones with large or curved ships, but only one segment at a time will pull, and if moved over the edge the next will take over, this may have unlucky combinations of playing tennis with the ship on some combinations
- The planet also rotates slowly, this causes a ship with maybe a full plain contact on 50x50 blocks to vibrate a bit, as the turning angle and the gravity will mix up to several forces being summed up.
1) Turn planet -> collision pushing the ship up with additional rotational force as the collision happens only on a few blocks
2) gravity -> pulling it towards the planet, softening the push-away from collision and also slowing down the turn as the starting rotation will collide on the other end of the contact area -> resulting in out force slowed down by gravity again.
On small ships, this bumping around will settle fast, and mostly fast enough to make it only feel like its jumping one frame or so, like a small vibration from time to time, but on large ships that have their rotational dampening interfering and big mass will result in permanent jumping/bumping around.
You should consider docking any ship above one 'base dockzone' in size to avoid this.
Docking also disables physics and collision calculations, this may not stress your pc with one ship, but having 30 ships bumping around on a planet will stress your pc.
- Andy
