BlackWyvern

Reviewing the changes just now, I cannot understate this enough. THESE CHANGES COMPLETELY OVERHAUL THE FIGHT MECHANICS That said. This is not a bad thing. The new thruster power, along with the directional thusters are a huge boon, but you may want to remap your flight controls, as you're going to be using your strafe and pitch controls A LOT more now. Flying feels much more.. Intuitive to a space game. On the same note, those asteroids you don't like crashing into because you're going too fast? They say hi. They want to give you a hug, maybe invite you over for a candlelight dinner, and then completely plow your face in; and there's no safe word. Flying into asteroid and debris fields are going to feel a lot like driving into a school zone. You're going to be going slow, and you're going to be making a lot of fine adjustments to not hit every single one of them. That's what space is. You can't blaze in to a station going 50 mph or you're gonna end up looking like the special effects department for Gravity. Slow the heck down, and don't be stupid with your ctrl cam, always recenter and properly orientate it before letting go. Overall, quite happy with this.

No. Would create no end of headaches for build design and control and likely kill the game. This isn't KSP where you're literally doing rocket science. Go play that if you want that level of engineering realism. Koonschi has already stated that this game is about playing it, not sitting around for hours trying to build a ship that wont spontaneously combust the first time you turn on the coffee maker. Doesn't work like that anyway. If your thruster's vector is relatively close to, in line with, or intersecting your center of mass, it will only provide thrust along that vector and not flip your s- (IRL). So if you could build a thruster that worked from both ends like the ones we have on here, you could make a boat with only three thrusters (One forwards/back, one side/side, one up/down all pointing at the COM) that functions perfectly well, assuming you then used gyroscopic rotation and stabilization. The only way you could cause an imbalance enough to flip/spin a ship is if you were to have a single thruster out at an extreme edge of a ship with a vector pointing in some arbitrary direction away from the COM without a counterbalancing force. Which, hilariously, I should inform you would be a problem in almost quite literally every ship that could ever be designed by the ship procedural engine and would either necessitate the entire rebuilding of the engine with an infinitely more complex generation algorithm, or removal of the procedural system entirely.

It's me again. This time with math and empirical data. So I made a 20x20x20 cube of titanium generator on the stable branch. I slapped 20 10x10x0.05 thrusters on each side. We can see a brake thrust of 55m/s. We SHOULD be able to assume that this same power and velocity will apply to all the faces of this cube. We can already see an issue here though. If thrusters are supposed to give equal thrust across their vectors.. Why is pitch abysmal? I then merged the thrusters into 10x10x1 blocks. You can see our rotations are down from 2 to 0.14 and brake force down to 3.3. Again, pitch is boned. So then I took the same approach on the Beta. I made a cube, and slapped a thruster array on each side. Our thrust is down to 15ms, and our rotation is sitting on 0.48. I guess at this point, pitch can be called a wash. I then merged the thrusters together as per last time. Our thrust is down to 12, which is a significant increase from merged stable, and rotation to 0.52 Lets look at the numbers empirically. THRUST ARRAY STABLE -> BETA || % CHANGE Brake 55.3 -> 15 || -72.87% Yaw 2 -> 0.48 || -76% Pitch 0.02 -> 0.01 || -50% Roll 2 -> 0.48 || -76% SOLID THRUSTER STABLE -> BETA || % CHANGE Brake 3.3 -> 12.2 || +369% Yaw 0.14 -> 0.52 || +371% Pitch 0.02 -> 0.08 || +400% (But still broken) Roll 0.14 -> 0.52 || +371% ARRAY TO SOLID MERGING - STABLE ARRAY -> MERGED || % CHANGE Brake 55.3 -> 3.3 || -94.03% Yaw 2 -> 0.14 || -93% Pitch 0.02 -> 0.02 || No Change Roll 2 -> 0.14 || -93% ARRAY TO SOLID MERGING - BETA ARRAY -> MERGED || % CHANGE Brake 15 -> 12.2 || -18.6% Yaw 0.48 -> 0.52 || +7.69% Pitch 0.01 -> 0.08 || +800% (But still again broken) Roll 0.48 -> 0.52 || +7.69% So what do we have here.. 1. The changes from Stable to Beta hits thrust arrays with a baseball bat, shot from an air cannon at five feet. 2. Merging thrust arrays on Stable hits them with a locomotive going full tilt on a straight piece of track. 3. The changes from Stable to Beta give what appears to be a 400% BUFF to solid thrusters. 4. Merging thrust arrays on Beta doesn't seem to do a whole lot, either way. 5. Pitch is completely FUBAR. What should we take from this: 1. STABLE - Thrust arrays give disproportionate amounts of rotational force when they shouldn't. 2. STABLE - Merging thrusters is absolutely not recommended for any reason. 3. BETA - Fixes the disproportionate rotational force, which is nice. 4. BETA - Gives a HUGE buff to solid thrusters, far beyond that which was initially suggested. 5. BETA - Even with this huge buff, thruster arrays lose 77.9% of their vectoring power on all faces when merged and compared to Stable. 6. BOTH - Pitch is broken. It needs help. Maybe a snickers bar. In closing: Anyone using thrust arrays is completely hosed, with the 77% loss in power coming PERFECTLY in line with all other reports.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates this post. Being said, while I completely agree that thruster arrays were unrealistic, I feel obligated to put in my two cents, as I really would like to see this game go places. The thruster changes do indeed make sense for larger ships (A capital ship shouldn't be able to spin like a frisbee because they have 100+ sheets of thruster arrays) but it's a huge nerf for smaller ships. I agree with the subtleties of Newtonian physics, but in my personal experience, your engine simply does not work this way at current. Turning your ship around and thrusting does not brake your momentum, instead it rotates your vector of momentum and you end up moving at nearly the same speed you were going forwards, now backwards. (Get upto about 1km/s, turn around and thrust the other way. Your ship will slide around to the left [usually] and you will end up going the reverse direction at 7-900m/s) I have not once successfully braked a ship via spin-and-thrust. As it stands for me, thrusters are the ONLY viable way to come to a stop. That means having strong braking power, or high resistance along other axis. From a personal standpoint, anything too large to fit through a warp gate is impractical at best. And anything that can't dodge or get out of weapons range of enemies is completely useless. I digress however, I am a fighter pilot at heart. Manufactured turrets do not respect the range stat at all (completely different issue), so even if a railgun says it has a 7.4km range on it, it might only be able to hit something within 4.1. This means that for the vast majority of weapons (The only exception I've come across being range affix cannons) you will inevitably have to get within weapons range of your enemy. There's no 'sit back and snipe' unless you get extraordinarily lucky with drops, or find that one station that can craft with range affixes currently. Due to very large ships being nearly impossible to move, unless you are designed to be a space-whale and shield tank everything (matters a lot more in higher difficulties), you have to be able to get out of that range quickly, and/or dodge incoming weapons fire. This means building a small to medium sized craft that is highly maneuverable and frontloading it with 10-14 high powered alpha-strike turrets for hit and run maneuvers. If a currently maneuverable small-mid sized ship becomes significantly less so, you have two options. 1. Either the design has to be completely scrapped and redone sacrificing other stats now because to get back to the same level of agility would weigh the ship down significantly.. 2. You're pigeonholed into building a mammoth damage sponge. Neither of those are very appealing prospects. In a game about freeform spaceship building, eventually funneling everyone into the same singular design base is a very, very poor choice. We should be able to have nimble little destroyers and corvettes and still have utility late game. We can throw 12+ turrets onto something like that easily and still hold 60-100k shields, enough for hit and run alpha strikes. Good rails can already three-four shot anything in the Xanion/Orgonite range. I'm not trying to say these behemoth supercapitals with 20-30 turrets on them don't have a place as well. If people want to go big, more power to them. That's what ctrlview and autoturrets are for, cuz they certainly aren't going to be rotating to coordinate their firing arcs any time soon. I guess what I'm trying to say in a TL;DR is that, while a change to thruster arrays is needed, a flat 70-90% power reduction is not the way to go about it. And while I don't have any particularly -good- ideas on how to change them for the better something needs to be done to pull ships back into balance. [bad ideas: ►Lets make thrusters have a minimum size to start. ►I would GLADLY pay increased power upkeep for stronger thrusters, or even being able to select their power/efficiency ratio. ►Hell, lets even throw in power drain while in use [not passive braking] for even moar thrust similar to spacebaring. If it's not on fire, spewing out ungodly amounts of unburnt petrol, and sitting on the brink of overheating and structural failure, it isn't doing its job. (Minmatar for life.)] Here's the before and after on my actual main ship (+/- minor stats due to different mods in different test galaxies for version handling), not some big WIP junker thing like I posted before. It can barely strafe anymore, and while it can still turn, it's not going to be evading any cannon volleys any time soon. I like the idea of the radar thing, but I think a button to rotate retrograde would work too.

Yeah, removed the post when I saw that the display was incorrect, embarrassing I missed that. Was kind of hoping to get it before you got to it. Lol. Oh well. All the same though, I still feel that either the new formula is a bit under powered. Thruster arrays were almost a staple of building, and while I get it was unrealistic, most recent builds rely upon the mechanic, so this new formula is a pretty big slap to the face. It lines up with the ~75% power decrease the others are reporting when comparing most stats to Stable. Stable - Without Merging || Stable - With Merging || Beta - Without Merging || Beta - With Merging

I know it's a few days late, but I'm going to have to chime in, and just say, bluntly, that's dumb. If you have trouble with shields, it comes down to two things and nothing more. 1. Clearly, your firepower is lacking. Craft some exceptional turrets, cannons and railguns specifically. 2. Shields do not recharge while under fire. That's all there is to it. Even if an enemy had 300k health, instead of 150k shield and 150k health, it would take exactly as long to kill said enemy with the same firepower. If you can't kill a shield in time to not die, you can't kill armour in the same time. The only difference is you have to focus your targets with shields or they'll recharge. As for anti-shield weapons, they're called Plasma Turrets (which sadly are actually inherently pretty weak) or there are stations that can craft turrets with % to pierce shields, or +% to shield modifiers. I have a small frigate with 12 crafted Triple Railguns with 600 damage, 10% chance to pierce shields, and 50% bonus damage to hull. 2-3 shots are enough to kill any pirate, Xolitan, or anything else I really point myself at, even in the Xanion/Ogonite zones. I can literally shoot the shield generators off of stations while their shields are still online, and do 2-300k damage per shot due to projectile piercing. Granted, this costs a fair bit, and you'll spend time collecting all the materials, but it is definitely worth it. However, even with all those, I still have to have a 13th turret with faster fire rate to keep the shield cooldown on stations in check while the rails cool down, otherwise they'll start recharging at 1-3% per second. (Which when they have 14 million shield is a lot.) As for the faction fights lasting forever, that's based on difficulty. On easy, enemies only do 20% of their equipped firepower damage. Throwing 1-300 damage rocks and potatoes at each other will definitely take a while to actually do anything to 100k+ shields. But coming out and saying that the entire game dynamics needs to be redesigned just because YOU don't like using shields is ridiculous. Hull is inherently weak. You can help increase its survivability with field generators, but it still comes down to the fact that if you want to play in the higher level areas, you are going to have to use shields. As it is, shields have a high base cost, both in raw materials, but power requirements, crew requirements, and are usually pretty heavy. And the hassle that in order to maintain those shields, you have to have powerful enough generators, which require their own costs and upkeeps. And then because they're some of the most fragile blocks in the game, you have to fortify them or else the first stray cannon shell that comes across with shields offline, or a shield breaking railgun will obliterate your shield systems in a single hit. Armour tanking is not a mechanic in this game, and lets face it, realistically either. Every game, movie, or whatnot that depicts combat in space without shields is scientifically inaccurate. Railgun projectiles accelerated to even 3% the speed of light hit armour with the force of a multi-kiloton nuclear detonation. Unless you have some impossibly resilient armour material, either that bolt is going in one side and out the other, or you just got blown in half.

Thusters work from surface area, not volume. They also don't need line of sight to space or anything. So for the most effective braking power, you should have several thin, but wide thusters stacked on top of each other with the flat side facing forward and back.