Turning thrusters/thruster overhaul

[RychschaX]

I'm currently building a very large ship, and have run into a problem that while i am no stranger to it as it is, is quite problematic. my issue is that, as a ship grows larger, it turns slower and slower. while i do not deny at all the sense that this makes, I do have a problem with the fac that there is absolutely no way to increase a ships turning rate short of simply making it smaller. before i go any further, yes, I am aware that the structure of a larger ship simply would not be able to handle the stresses of turning at a rate anywhere near that of a smaller fighter or gunship, and would likely shear itself apart if it tried. thankfully, this is not real life, this is starmade. I have two propositions/ideas for how at least reduce this problem:

1. dedicated turning thrusters
exactly what it says on the box, these are dedicated thruster groups for ship rotation. these would be placed like normal thrusters. Their texture would have exhaust nozzles on the top, bottom, left, and right (bonus points if the turn thrusters are green, considering what i am building). each additional turning thruster would allow a ship much more agility with its rotation. a ship with the thrusters would turn faster, start and stop turning, and generally be much more capable of reorienting itself than one without.
I'm just gonna say that the placement of the turning jets relative to the ships center of rotation would not matter (at least for now), as that would overcomplicate things.
2. Thruster tuning
we can adjust the stats of our cannons and missiles, so why not be able to adjust our ships' max speed (which makes no sense in space, but...), acceleration, and turn rate. that would solve the problem right there. then we could, for example, have a rather small tug that is not very maneuverable, but can output such a massive amout of thrust that it can move capitol ships around.

 

[Fates]

I think this could be explored a little but as for the main issue with turning speed, if they made it that huge ships could turn on a dime like small ones that would defeat the purpose of the game, so what if it's a game why should we throw physics out the window.
In space you still have limits to speed, though speed is measured a little differently in space.
A Rocket's speed is judged by Inertia * Mass. The Greater the Mass the more it will take to get up to speed and the more it will resist being moved. but because of the Reduced Friction and gravity in space an object will take longer to come to a complete halt. but there will always be a maximum speed.

 

[Dogsonofawolf]

I've thought a bit about this issue as well, it is kind of a bummer to be so slow and not have any way to deal with it. The speed limit is also slightly bothersome. However, both have very obvious gameplay/balance benefits; we have to be careful if we were to change them at all.
I don't think being able to throw more thrusters at your ship to increase turning is a good idea; then there literally is no reason to stay small. Ideally you could only gain turn speed by giving up something non-renewable. What if you could exchange turn speed for top speed? The current limit is a bit fast for capital ships anyways, I think. Unfortunately, this would mean top speed couldn't vary otherwise, else you could just throw more thrusters at it again.
Alternatively, fine tuning could probably solve a lot of these issues. Maybe thruster power could be distributed to all areas (turn, max speed and acceleration), but the distribution rates would ensure you could never fully negate your ship's mass. For instance, say each thruster applied to turning negates 0.2 mass (an engine is 0.1). To completely negate their turning inertia from mass, as ship needs to spend half of their mass on turning thrusters, and you still need engines for speed and acceleration, weapons and armor. So turning is possible, but expensive.
Incidentally, there should be no top speed in space by Newtonian physics; an object will continue it's current velocity until another force act on it. Drag is introduced purely as a gameplay mechanic to make spaceflight more intuitive to us earthlings. Space is, for most purposes, devoid of gravity and frictional medium; the only top speed in a vacuum is the speed of light, which is a bit out of scope for Starmade I thnk.

EDIT:

Did some poking and it turn out Schema and others have already weighed in on this and similar topics:
http://www.star-made.org/comment/710#comment-710
Schema indicates that rotational thrusters are already planned in some capacity. Removing the speed limit and/or varying it with thruster power was apparently in an earlier version of the game and didn't work out, it sounds gone for good.

 

[rob1992]

I\'m fine with it being slow, but i would like it if it was key bound. So i can turn with the arrow keys for example and still aim my weapons somewhat. Altho if you\'re talking about being unrealistic to begin with, i dont think you can \"normally\" strafe that fast in such a ship. If you take any of the stark trek ships like the voyager or the enterprise for example they sometimes are seen to make short lateral bursts but they often fly forwards after that.

 

[Comr4de]

Using star trek as your benchmark for \"realistic\" is a pretty poor choice. Realistically, since there is no friction in space, it\'s entirely possible to fire your thrusters forward and then rotate and continue to strafe. What star trek gets wrong consistently with the science half of science fiction is that space tends to consistently have some sort of mass or volume, lending itself friction. In real life, that doesn\'t happen.

 

[racingspider]

Actually, there is a speed limit based on the actual engine. The exhaust velocity is the speed at which the stuff shot out of an engine travels - thus different engines could have different top speeds.

For instance, take two hypothetical blocks:

Standard Engine: provides 1 point of thrust (or whatever it currently does) and has a max speed of 100% (as set by the server, so by default - 50).

Heavy Engine: provides 5 points of thrust and has a max speed of 50% (so, 25 in a standard server).



Those numbers are just thrown out there - what that also does, is open up the game for additional engine types and recipes, etc. I think this game could be extremely awesome with a heavy dose of player manufacturing. So, the more types of modules that can be made adds considerable depth.

 

[Visitor]

While I do think that OP is going in the right direction, personally I\'d rather settle for already advocated alternative of making two types of thrusters. First is basically what OP suggests but I don\'t think that it needs to be coded like that - just make the current thrusters \'push\' ship mainly forward with quite some strength but with very limited turning and barely existant strafing. They also would need at least a few blocks of free space behind the nuzzle to work so one won\'t be able to just contain them easily in a small block of reinforced hull.

The idea would benefit especially form addition of \'center of mass\' thing which, if I recall, is considered for the far future. It would allow setting several different thruster batteries, rotated properly so some of those thrusters would work for the sake of turning and maneuvering, while players would actually have to pay fairly for the sake of maneuverability of their behemoths (added bonus - space battles where you can actually cripple certain \'areas\' of mobility of some vessels)

Additionally, creating a type of omnidirectional gravengines which would work as thrusters do now, but would be greatly affected by ship\'s weight, with their power demand going up somewhat faster than movement stats when grouped would be great for small vehicles with little space or power generation potential, but also little weight.

But that\'s probably far future..

 

[Savage117]

I have a tendency to make my ships to scale and have rooms and multiple decks on some. And some of these ships are useless in combat without turrets, but the turrets have to be half the size of the ship just to be a viable turret for combat. But like some others have said it needs a limit so people don’t just jam huge blocks of RC Thrusters (RC= Reaction Control) on their ships and make them fighters.

Education inbound, don’t read if you don’t like science or education for that matter. There is no friction in space if you are perfectly orbiting a planet outside its atmosphere you will keep orbiting that planet forever, unless you hit something else or something else hits you. You could call solar wind a kind of friction but it is so negligible that any object of sufficient mass is practically unaffected

I don\'t think passing the speed of light is impossible its not a barrier, per say, its more a fuel barrier, the problem is that you would need extreme amounts of fuel to get a ship to the speed of light, and more fuel equals more mass, so even more fuel is needed to get there and you end up with an exponential increase of mass until infinity. But if you some how had unlimited fuel that massed a fixed amount you could potentially reach the speed of light and pass it in time, it would only take time depending on how much thrust you are putting out. Oh, and mass only changes acceleration in space there is no max speed in space.

Lecture over, thank you for reading feel free to put your own opinion,

Savage

 

[TBterra]

the idea of tuneing thrusters sounds good to me. my main ship accelerteds to max speed crazy fast but takes upwards of a minite to turn round. i would love it if i could trade some acceleration or even top speed for extra turning speed

 

[KuramaFox]

I actually put in a suggestion to this effect in the suggestion forums. Which due to its nature at the moment is a bit flooded with lots of \"repeat topics\", but here. The topic also has a second suggestion regarding item tiers, just ignore that if you aren\'t interested.

http://star-made.org/content/split-engines-different-types-different-effects-also-add-item-levelstiers

The idea basically is to replace engines as they are with 4 different types of blocks.

One which determines acceleration (like currently). But only forwards and backwards.

One which determines horizontal and vertical acceleration (strafing ability, and ability to operate on planets where gravity happens)

One which determines maximum ship speed.

One which determines how fast you turn.

All of them are naturally weighted based on how large the ship is, like engines currently are.



Basically, by doing something like this, you would give ship designs a much more unique feel based on how their engine systems were set up. And it would give design importance for things like combat (being able to blow up any ship is pointless if most ships can outrun you), where your ships can go (you need sufficient numbers of the second type of engine to be able to take off a planet after landing on it), and potentially for things like racing (do you want a ship that sacrifices turning and side-to-side ability for the highest top speed for straight-aways, or do you want a ship that can make a quick turns for a loopy section of the track?).

 

[Jcewazhere]

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 quite like the suggestion of making engines configurable like the weapons are.

tldr: mass/thrust is spiffy

 

[Ciggofwar]

Try using reverse and forward for swinging, big ships are fire power in direction.

 

[John Sheridan]

Unless the developer schema makes turning thrusters require shitloads of blocks for big ships (like shields - they get less efficient the more you have)... otherwise I do not like this idea.

Basically its always the same people with juggernaught ships wanting to turn like a tie fighter. It\'s BS.

No one wants to see your 500 metre ship turn like an x-wing. I\'m also quite sure schema would never go for this either, please provide a middleground solution like my first line above.

Summary: Can\'t have giant ships turning almost as fast as small fighters, unless they pay a (damn) heavy price somehow.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

I\'d prefer if the game at least pretended to be logical. If your ship is a massive \"500k block\" of turning thrusters attached to a power reactor and core (with no weapons, no hull and no other blocks), then it should turn faster than some weenie little fighter despite its huge size.

Instead, what I\'d prefer to see is power regen blocks that consume fuel (rather than making power out of nothing). That way, a huge ship is going to need lots of extra blocks/mass for storing fuel; and to keep the ship running you\'re going to need to buy (or mine) fuel to fill the fuel tanks. If a huge ship turns fast, then it consumes lots of fuel to turn and it\'s going to cost you lots of $$$ to keep it running. If the same huge ship turns slowly then it\'s going to be cheaper to run.

I\'d also like to see solar panel blocks that don\'t consume fuel, but generate less power per block and must be mounted on the exterior of the ship. This would make power drain beams useful for enemies (as the power wouldn\'t be hidden behind hulls) and make power drain beams useful for players (e.g. they could build a \"vampire\" ship with power drain beams and power tanks to avoid paying for fuel).

That way people can choose their own compromises between refueling costs, vulnerability and turning/thrust (without having any \"it\'s big, therefore it must be slow\" nonsense).

 

[lman94]

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. even if your exhaust doesn\'t end up going backwards, you still end up going faster. if what you say was true, aircraft could only move one direction (depending on where they are and what time it is) simply because the earth is orbiting at almost 30km/second.