Clydesdale troubles

[ThN1saHead]

I've got a Clydesdale because I were bored of the purist's ones ever killing me.
After launching, I found a navigation trouble: I can't change the direction of the SPEC drives. I can only move with afterburner, because the spec is monodirectional. Can anyone help me?

[smbarbour]

SPEC is non-directional. It is a multiplier of you current velocity vector. Since the Clydesdale is such a massive ship, your velocity vector is probably different than the direction you are pointing. You are effectively sliding around in space until your engines can push your ship in the direction you are pointing. To give you an example (not a great one but similar in thought): If you throw an object that will spin like a hula hoop and place backspin on it, it will move away from you until the forward momentum is less than the acceleration vector caused by the backspin at which point it will begin to come back to you.

On a sidenote, I would think that in the future when this takes place, a ship as massive as a Clydesdale would have equally massive engines to maneuver the ship properly. That said, it is most likely that the way it should travel is to fly in a straight line from point A to point B with a squadron of fighters for defense. A capital ship should most likely not change course often.

[ThN1saHead]

So, how can I change the units files to get more power in the engines?
I tried to change the data about the clydesdale in the tree files:

/units/clydesdale/clydesdale
/units/clydesdale/clydesdale.blank
/units/clydesdale/clydesdale.template

I started by changing the hull resistance, to test if the changes has effect.
Then I killed the file containing the upgrades I made im my game, but when running VegaStrike, the hull resistance of a clydesdale were the same as before changing.

[smbarbour]

I make the changes to the file corresponding to your ship in the game (i.e. \.vegastrike\serialized_xml\Save Name\clydesdale.csv) The values that you are particularly interested in for these changes are:

bottom_accel, left_accel, right_accel, top_accel, forward_accel, and retro_accel

I generally set these to the same value except for retro_accel which I set about 10x higher to stop on a dime . The larger your ship, the larger these numbers need to be in order to have the same effect.

Other variables that are of interest are the three Maneuver variables (Pitch, Yaw, and Roll) as well as the governor variables for pitch, yaw, and roll. The units.csv file has a row at the top that describes how to calculate these variables (It relates to degrees per second versus mass)

I hope this helps. (BTW, this is what I mean by "Modified" in my signature )

P.S. Also, be careful when buying and selling upgrades (particularly selling). Some things have a tendency to recalculate the fields based on the ship template.

[fizze]

*sigh*

the clydesdale has been flawed since 0.4.1.

spec isnt functional, nor is/was the warp thingy.
you'll just have to wait for another release.
other capships are flawed too.

[klauss]

IMO, capships are not flawed. They're simply little maneuverable, which is quite like what it would be like in RL. They need different tactics, like relying on turrets for defense. However, the fighter-like interface controls may be inconvenient for flying capships. One should say: "I want to head this way", and the autopilot should do the maneuvers. Kind of like "Helm, 108 - 108, aye sir!" but in space (and in 3D).

[energyman76b]

Hi,

I had a Thales once and it was not bad, spec, jumping worked and it was way more maneurable(?) than a clydesdale...[/u]

[fizze]

the word is "manouverable" FYI.

well, as soon as u apply ANY upgrade to a capship, its SPEC drive dissapears, and other stuff as well.
I, for one, would consider that as a flaw.

maybe it's been fixed on CVS, who knows. But this is a known issue.