Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebalance

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Hicks wrote:Personally i would like to see all the ships gone through 1 by 1, rebalanced and retextured (for most). Start with the Llama, use it as a baseline and extrapolate to all the other ships based on their role/size/race
That's way too greedy.

Besides, balancing cannot be done 1-by-1. It's a "trees vs forest" thing.

Deus probably had the most experience with this, since he made that patch way back... we should divide ships into classes, and specify acceleration ranges for those classes given what has been discussed.

The specifics can be tweaked later, but we could start with getting the generalities right.

Deus?

All without gravity, lets take gravity into account but it cannot be implemented yet. I'll try to make an option to enable gravity even if we don't have the support to enable it by default, so we can start experimenting. I'm beginning to convince myself we can't do a half-job on it, as was mentioned, orbits are complex, and if we try to simplify it we might end up with unfixable instability. Rather, I'll make correct gravity calculations an optional part of the engine, and later work on adapting AI and navigation assists to be able to enable it by default.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Hicks »

and the earlier question about spec drive and arriving at planets, why not make spec drop you out at either a geosynchronous orbit around the equator in the direction of rotation, or instead of geosynchronous, maybe 2 times the height of the atmosphere. If we get real good at this we can have the nav computer set up so you can choose the height to come out at, with varying spec energy consumption
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Hicks wrote:and the earlier question about spec drive and arriving at planets, why not make spec drop you out at either a geosynchronous orbit around the equator in the direction of rotation, or instead of geosynchronous, maybe 2 times the height of the atmosphere. If we get real good at this we can have the nav computer set up so you can choose the height to come out at, with varying spec energy consumption
There are a lot of details to work out for that. For instance, how exactly does it work when you use manual SPEC? What if you abort autopilot?

I have no answers yet.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by pheonixstorm »

While all the ships do need a good tweaking, especially on sizes, starting by unit class would probably be easiest for now.

As it stands now a great many of the ships seem to be on the large side, even for a simple frigate/destroyer.

Here is some info on a few human ship sizes from jackS
Looks like the Archimedes should be scaled up just a bit more. Exactly how much is hard to tell from the perspective angle.

Last I checked, the in-game lengths (tip to tail) are:

Archimedes: 4845 meters
Kahan: 1840 meters
Watson: 1458 meters

I actually prefer the inversion of relative sizes of the the Watson and Kahan as per your depicted models.
Likewise, the Archimedes can be closer in size to the Kahan and Watson than it currently is.

Something like:

Archimedes: 2500 meters
Watson: 1900 meters
Kahan: 1500 meters
I think its high time we set some limits on ship lengths. There is nothing as far as I can tell on how long each ship or ship class should be. So, here's a first draft.

Fighter/Interceptor: 10-20 meters
Bomber/Assault Craft: 40-60 meters
Corvette: 80-160 meters
Frigate/Destroyer: 200-500 meters
Cruiser (all classes): 400-900 meters
Battleship/Dreadnaught: 1000+ meters
Escort Carrier: 400-800 meters
Fleet Carrier: 1200+ meters

I think no ship should be over 7km (the so called mobile base) and no station should exceed 20km. Even the most heavily populated planets (and heavily defended) would not need an installation larger than that.

The above gives us a good range of ship sizes and still has the huge ship scale people want w/o have everything over 1km in length.

Now, I did not have freighters in that list because those ships are a pretty special case. A freighter can be nearly any size unless we break it down to a few categories.
Inter-system haulers
Light, Medium, and Heavy freighters for long haul.
Planetary transfer haulers
and let us not forget the hodgepodge smugglers ship. Fast, nimble, armed, and able to carry a decent sized payload.

So, final word. Since we have so many different tweaks to take care of do we want to further split this topic so we don't have anything left out of the discussion or lost in the discussion?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Hicks »

here is a topic from about a year ago, classes in this were mass based http://forums.vega-strike.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=18012
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

pheonixstorm wrote:Now, I did not have freighters in that list because those ships are a pretty special case. A freighter can be nearly any size unless we break it down to a few categories.
Inter-system haulers
Light, Medium, and Heavy freighters for long haul.
Planetary transfer haulers
and let us not forget the hodgepodge smugglers ship. Fast, nimble, armed, and able to carry a decent sized payload.
Well, those ought to be classified too, since it's quite pertinent to the acceleration discussion.
pheonixstorm wrote:So, final word. Since we have so many different tweaks to take care of do we want to further split this topic so we don't have anything left out of the discussion or lost in the discussion?
Go ahead and create a new topic for the concrete discussion, though I believe we should discuss both sizes and accelerations in the same topic (decisions taken have to be in concordance in both respects).

So, a good start would be to get a classification of military, freight and passenger ships in both size, acceleration and maneuverability, also station types since we're at it, and lets not forget the always talked about and never really implemented superstructures (I'd like to make one or two of those).

Then I or some charitative soul will go through units.csv and tweak stuff according to that classification (I'll get support for max accel stats).

Notice one important thing: sizes cannot be changed arbitrarily. Stations, most importantly, have docking ports that have calibrated sizes, so they cannot be so happily rescaled. It's gonna take some effort.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by pheonixstorm »

For starters klauss is the only one really doing any major coding on VS at the moment. I do what I am comfortable with which is mostly hunting for oddities and bugs on the windows side of things.

For the most part I can code but once I start reading over the VS code my eyes glaze over and I start drooling like the village idiot. I understand it, I could probably rewrite a good bit of it, but for the most part I start to touch something and decide against it.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

pheonixstorm wrote:For starters klauss is the only one really doing any major coding on VS at the moment. I do what I am comfortable with which is mostly hunting for oddities and bugs on the windows side of things.
And it's a really valuable contribution the one you make in that regard. Look at what happened to the Mac side just for not having someone like you to maintain it in tip top shape.
pheonixstorm wrote:For the most part I can code but once I start reading over the VS code my eyes glaze over and I start drooling like the village idiot. I understand it, I could probably rewrite a good bit of it, but for the most part I start to touch something and decide against it.
How do you feel about the audio part? (the new part, the one in audio)

I've been meaning to continue work there, but time has been short.

If you feel like you can and want to, I might let you know my short-term plans for it, and maybe you could push it further.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by pheonixstorm »

Will look it over in the morning. Time for bed so I can get my little one off to school in the morning.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Deus probably had the most experience with this, since he made that patch way back... we should divide ships into classes, and specify acceleration ranges for those classes given what has been discussed.

The specifics can be tweaked later, but we could start with getting the generalities right.

Deus?
Well I feel you can cleanly divide all craft into four groups.

You start by dividing them up between the smaller "aerospace" craft and then the hulky space-only ships. The aerospace craft are meant to land and takeoff from planets and be piloted by players manually (and by fun to fly). The space-only ships are rarely owned by players and very sluggish to try to maneuver manually. I would draw the line between the two at 200 meters length.

Then you divide those two categories by what the primary role is- transport or combatant. Aerospace transports are "shuttles" and aerospace combatants are "fighters". The main difference between the two is not acceleration but payload. The shuttles carry cargo, the fighters carry additional firepower and armor, though there can be a great deal of overlap. When loaded for combat, fighters have only a slight acceleration advantage on unloaded shuttles of a similar size and quality. The big space-only ships fall into "freighter" and "warship" categories, with warships likewise having a slight acceleration advantage over unloaded freighters.

No craft can ever go beyond 10Gs acceleration as a hard limit, and performance approaching that is only reached for short periods by special-purpose aerospace craft ("kamikaze" or "interceptor" fighters and "messenger" or "VIP" shuttles for examples). The bottom limit for sustainable acceleration on aerospace craft is equal to the gravity of a world with the highest gravity that is healthy for the human body in the long term, since these craft are meant to safely land and launch from them. This is somewhere between 1 and 2 Gs I would guess?

The space only ships have accelerations between 0.1G and 1G.


...So how's that?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:...So how's that?
Good detail.

However, I surmise people do want to fly some of the smaller warships/freighters. Especially corvette-class. I notice you include them in the aerospace section. Maybe that's good as a guideline, but not all corvettes I imagine are able to land?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: However, I surmise people do want to fly some of the smaller warships/freighters. Especially corvette-class. I notice you include them in the aerospace section. Maybe that's good as a guideline, but not all corvettes I imagine are able to land?
The central thought behind making a fundamental divide between aerospace and space-only craft is that whatever has enough acceleration to land will be fun to fly for at least some players, and whatever doesn't have that kind of acceleration will be such a pain in the ass to fly that a player will only use an autopilot.

Any craft that breaks this rule by being both small and slow is going to be very undesirable as a playable ship. So you want to limit these exceptions to a very small number and give them unique applications. Like autonomous space debris harvesters or deploy-able repair vehicles like the "pods" in 2001: a Space Odyssey or repurposed "missile barges" used by forsaken and pirates in kamikaze fashion.

As for corvettes, even the biggest one might make a believable landing (at least on some planets) if it is a tail-lander design, so that it resists the gravity with its most powerful thrusters. Or it's main thrusters could be inside pods that rotate straight down like real world VTOL aircraft such as the Osprey and Harrier or the Firefly transport from the series of the same name.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: However, I surmise people do want to fly some of the smaller warships/freighters. Especially corvette-class. I notice you include them in the aerospace section. Maybe that's good as a guideline, but not all corvettes I imagine are able to land?
The central thought behind making a fundamental divide between aerospace and space-only craft is that whatever has enough acceleration to land will be fun to fly for at least some players, and whatever doesn't have that kind of acceleration will be such a pain in the ass to fly that a player will only use an autopilot.

Any craft that breaks this rule by being both small and slow is going to be very undesirable as a playable ship. So you want to limit these exceptions to a very small number and give them unique applications. Like autonomous space debris harvesters or deploy-able repair vehicles like the "pods" in 2001: a Space Odyssey or repurposed "missile barges" used by forsaken and pirates in kamikaze fashion.
It's not about breaking the rules, it's that some players may put their threshold acceleration a bit lower than what's required to land.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

klauss wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: However, I surmise people do want to fly some of the smaller warships/freighters. Especially corvette-class. I notice you include them in the aerospace section. Maybe that's good as a guideline, but not all corvettes I imagine are able to land?
The central thought behind making a fundamental divide between aerospace and space-only craft is that whatever has enough acceleration to land will be fun to fly for at least some players, and whatever doesn't have that kind of acceleration will be such a pain in the ass to fly that a player will only use an autopilot.

Any craft that breaks this rule by being both small and slow is going to be very undesirable as a playable ship. So you want to limit these exceptions to a very small number and give them unique applications. Like autonomous space debris harvesters or deploy-able repair vehicles like the "pods" in 2001: a Space Odyssey or repurposed "missile barges" used by forsaken and pirates in kamikaze fashion.
It's not about breaking the rules, it's that some players may put their threshold acceleration a bit lower than what's required to land.
Which brings me to...

...we'll need some control paradigm different than a joystick and a cockpit for capital ships.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: It's not about breaking the rules, it's that some players may put their threshold acceleration a bit lower than what's required to land.
But as far as this rebalance is concerned, the reason for distinguishing the aerospace category from the rest of the fleet is that it needs some of the biggest changes and the most precise balancing, because it is the meat and potatoes of VS as of today.

But the kind of changes aesospace craft need versus space-only ships is very different as well. Aerospace ships have extreme accelerations but their sizes are fine, whereas the larger than 200 meter ships have more or less reasonable accelerations but dramatically over the top scale.

A while back I loaded all the VS ships from 0.5.0 into blender and scaled them according to their units.csv values, and seeing the actual size gap between the small ships and the big ones is nothing short of insanity inducing. The small ships grow linearly bigger until you get to the goddard and mule, then they jump up 1000 fold to kilometer long "corvettes" and freighters. Then the linear size progression continues again for the larger ships until you have the multi-kilometer "Capital" ships that clearly none of the dwarfed assault/bomber craft could scratch the paint on. They are literally ticks compared to the ships they're designed to kill. The VS engine cannot simulate the amount of fighters it would take to assault a leonidas or ageapolis, and then it would have it's own swarm of escorts. We're talking many thousands of entities for this to be believable.

Which brings me to...

...we'll need some control paradigm different than a joystick and a cockpit for capital ships.
It would help to have a freely rotatable 3rd person perspective outside your capital ship that would allow you too look in any direction using the mouse. And then be able to lock weapons onto whatever target you were currently looking directly at and manually fire at least the big ship-to-ship guns in that direction with the left and right mouse clicks. I am actually coding such a system in python for another space sim.
Last edited by Deus Siddis on Tue Dec 04, 2012 10:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:It would help to have a freely rotatable 3rd person perspective outside your capital ship that would allow you too look in any direction using the mouse. And then be able to lock weapons onto whatever target you were currently looking directly at and manually fire at least the big ship-to-ship guns in that direction with the left and right mouse clicks. I am actually coding such a system in python for another space sim.
Funny... I was thinking just that.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Split threre
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

Deus Siddis wrote:What is more realistic and would make space fighters fly more precisely and coincidentally more like air fighters, is to move the secondary power thrusters from the front to the bottom (or bottom and top). Now three things happen:

1) you can make tighter turns without overcompensating or drifting so much
2) you have to bank in the direction of the turn to make said tighter turns
3) when near the surface of a planet, level flight, landing and takeoff are easier because your bottom thrusters resist gravity while the main thrusters keep you flying forward
I'm for making bottom thrusters more powerful as well since a spacecrafts would be expected to hover. Actually the proposed keybinding layout I have just revised assumes this is a fact to work the way it was intended.
klauss wrote:
Hicks wrote:and the earlier question about spec drive and arriving at planets, why not make spec drop you out at either a geosynchronous orbit around the equator in the direction of rotation, or instead of geosynchronous, maybe 2 times the height of the atmosphere. If we get real good at this we can have the nav computer set up so you can choose the height to come out at, with varying spec energy consumption
There are a lot of details to work out for that. For instance, how exactly does it work when you use manual SPEC? What if you abort autopilot?
I have no answers yet.
This is a good idea to put the ship into an orbit upon arrival. My thought was that the arrival orbit would be customizable during SPEC, or while escaping gravity inhibition in preparation for SPEC travel, since that is under utilized time currently. Manual SPEC would simply not synchronize until you tell it to. In proposed new controls one would target an object or coordinate then press backspace to match relative speed, then when manual spec is activated the relative speed synchronization process would continue more rapidly
Deus Siddis wrote: No craft can ever go beyond 10Gs acceleration as a hard limit, and performance approaching that is only reached for short periods by special-purpose aerospace craft ("kamikaze" or "interceptor" fighters and "messenger" or "VIP" shuttles for examples). The bottom limit for sustainable acceleration on aerospace craft is equal to the gravity of a world with the highest gravity that is healthy for the human body in the long term, since these craft are meant to safely land and launch from them. This is somewhere between 1 and 2 Gs I would guess?

The space only ships have accelerations between 0.1G and 1G.

...So how's that?
I like it, though I think ships should be able to try to land even if they can't safely land. AI would make a calculation to see if it has enough thrust and fuel to land on a particular planet and if it is worth while. For pilots the instrument approach system would give notifications of approaching and passing thresholds. Pressing for instruments approach system would put on the screen a HUD overlay to show graphical information and data that helps with approaches and landing. Upon approaching a planet the system would make the same calculations AI would and send highly visible warnings when approaching points of no return, and more like, points of no course reversal. If they don't listen let them crash because maybe if they keep their speed up high enough during a sort of slingshot manoeuvre the point of no return will dynamically keep on moving closer to the planet so that they never cross it. When flying within the point of no course reversal the point of no return would begin to be displayed. It would show a line of optimal escape and if not followed the point of no return would begin to shrink by approaching the ship as the escape margin shrinks and the potential favourable outcomes shrinks. If the point of no return was crossed then the pilot would know that they need to dump cargo or use afterburners otherwise be doomed to crash. Battles within this zone would be interesting to say the least. Hilarious to say the most.
Deus Siddis wrote:As for corvettes, even the biggest one might make a believable landing (at least on some planets) if it is a tail-lander design, so that it resists the gravity with its most powerful thrusters. Or it's main thrusters could be inside pods that rotate straight down like real world VTOL aircraft such as the Osprey and Harrier or the Firefly transport from the series of the same name.
Any ship the reaches the surface in once piece will have the benefit of "ground effect" which caused by moving air pushing high pressure against the ground. This would give additional lift to the underpowered lateral thrusters, and especially more lift for the stronger bottom thrusters to set the ship into an upright position for blast off while midair. This would allow even non tail landers to park on a planet if they have enough thrust on any thruster direction to land and take off.
klauss wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:It would help to have a freely rotatable 3rd person perspective outside your capital ship that would allow you too look in any direction using the mouse. And then be able to lock weapons onto whatever target you were currently looking directly at and manually fire at least the big ship-to-ship guns in that direction with the left and right mouse clicks. I am actually coding such a system in python for another space sim.


Funny... I was thinking just that.
Again I'll mention, the new proposed controls would do this. [-hold-Mouse3] to turn the external camera. Press Y to target you ship in the target reticle Press [L] to lock missiles on target and left and right mouse click to fire main guns if in firing angle. To have all turret batteries attack locked target automatically press [Ctrl+B]. To control all turrets at once manually press [Alt+B] Control all turret batteries all together manually. When done press to deactivate all turrets.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

Okay so to summarize we are agreed on some guidelines and rules for linear acceleration balancing:

1) Ships smaller than ~200 meters (every purchasable ship besides Ox and Clydesdale) have max linear accelerations between 1 and 10 Gs.
2) Ships larger than ~200 meters have max linear accelerations between 0.1 and 1 Gs.
2) Ships designed for combat are only slightly faster than unladen cargo vessels of comparable size and quality.

The next matter is angular accelerations. As agreed this is (far) too high as well. The question is do we have guidelines for this or should it go to play-testing next?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Hicks »

for angular acceleration, try assuming 10% of the thrust can be used to turn, applied at the end of a ship, and calculate the I for the ship, something simple like that and see what you get
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Hicks wrote:for angular acceleration, try assuming 10% of the thrust can be used to turn, applied at the end of a ship, and calculate the I for the ship, something simple like that and see what you get
Also assume fighters are inherently faster at turning than cargo ships - mostly due to structural issues (they're designed to turn fast where cargo ships are design to carry cargo).
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Hicks »

I is based on length, which is why most fighter craft are small. So the smaller the ship the faster it should turn, assuming the amount of thrust is reasonable
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Also assume fighters are inherently faster at turning than cargo ships - mostly due to structural issues (they're designed to turn fast where cargo ships are design to carry cargo).
Interesting, so there would be a larger gap between cargo and combat ships in angular accelerations versus linear accelerations.

This might be out of the scope of an acceleration re-balancing, but a related issue is which ships should have turrets. With slower turning it would make sense and be kind of fun to have shuttles and assault fighters mount their lighter guns on turrets (their heavier weapons would still be forward-fixed).
Hicks wrote:I is based on length, which is why most fighter craft are small. So the smaller the ship the faster it should turn, assuming the amount of thrust is reasonable
I'm fairly sure that the existing balance does this, so by scaling everything down at a similar rate some of it will be preserved.

But with smaller ships, their proportions seem to be more creative, so length is an even less significant measure of size than with the heavy ships (which tend to be more or less long and thin, with Rlaan being the exception). Some fighters and shuttles are darts (length), some are flying wings (width), some are all height and some are flying cubes or spheres.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Hicks »

should we create a new thread in the "Data" subforum about the ship rebalancing?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

This all seems good and I had made to two trackers. One for Reblanceing ships using units.csv, and one to Add a governor to limit accelerations to survivable! adding a governor. So if someone is working on it they can show their progress on the feature request tracker now.

I like where this discussion has gone and what people have agreed on in general. I just hope the person who edits the file recognizes that they don't have to go so far to lower thrust and and cargo space so that every single cargo ship can't thrust faster than the about 10 g discussed. That would be too arbitrary because rockets, if not thrusters, can exceed that now days and technology would be expected to advance continuously so a more permanent limit would be more realistic. A governor added later would be a good realistic way to limit acceleration for high end cargo vessels with extreme thrust. Inertial mitigation featuring various performance trade off could then be added to allow continued upgrades and interest for top end ships.
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