Shaping the Ships

[Sunfire]

Hello!
I always marvel at your fantasy in creating new ships. But there's a problem: most designs do look great, but I don't see any purpose beyond style.

and thats kind of the point really... i posted some time ago on a different thread that all ships should be spheres for basically the exact same reasons.

however... i would appreciate only one faction, or one line of ships based on spheres (luddites perhaps? they want everything to be simple... or some faction that admires engineering perfection with no creativity... the ultimate form follows function faction) imagine a huge sphere capship defended by a bunch of fighter spheres and supported by medium sized sphere support ships... it would be pretty cool if only one faction had them...

It would REALLY SUCK if all ships in the game were like that...

the boredum of that universe would make me want to find the nearest airlock...

and id think that highborn ships would be purely opposite of aforementioned faction... they want to use all that money to create one thing... envy... all sorts of technological bells and whistles and seductive curvy lines with no purpose for them whatsoever...

lets have ships with STYLE! (but lets also have a line of ships as an homage to what would make the most sense) a vast universe needs as much diversity as possible...

[Oblivion]

Mechanist.

High technology to the point of organic convergence, i think.

Sorry with the solar sail. I thought you meant the small things that I also call solar sails, lol.

The concept of vast wings on a ship for it to glide on is new to me, . But they would function as energy gatherers to, anyway. A nifty way for a probe to go system hopping. But then, itd take one massive sail to harvest energy, much more to be actually pushed by the solar wind. daunting.

I read a short story by Zelazny(?) about just ships a bit like that, which instead extend a halo of particle gatherers (forgot what exactly - may be just hydrogen or could be one of those subatomics) which filters the space it passes for energy, focusing it on the ship itself. Even with that, the ship's halo reached hundreds of kilometers. It too was retracted into a smaller radius by the time it reached light speeds - by virtue of the fact that the number of particles caught has increased by the speed by which it traverses areas - hence large surface areas become less important, the faster the ship is.

[rigelan]

By the way, for a solar sail:

If the particles that hit the solar sail bounce off and are NOT absorbed, then you gain more momentum (speed).

If you grab and hold all the particles that hit your solar sails (if they were photosensitive / photovoltaic), then your speed (Disregarding relativity) should only be half of what it could have been.

It would be more effective speedwise to have them not absorbed by the sail.

[klauss]

The sails are used as sails (in literature) for intrasystem travel. The sails as used for interstellar travel are used as hydrogen collectors.

About the moment being used during collisions... sorry, yes, they're not. It only seems that way, since everything is set up towards that end, but aparently collisions don't do that. I mean... there's that function ::ApplyLocalTorque, but it's not used during collisions. I bet they were used once and there was some problem with it which forced a rollback. I think Unit::reactToCollision should use ::ApplyTorque rather than ::ApplyForce. They're mostly equivalent, but torque also makes units spin according to impact point excentricity (and the moment of inertia).