Impact of thrusters limiting ship design

[Altissimus]

This will probably be controversial.

 

It seems that building in this game is a choice between the aesthetically pleasing and the efficient.

 

Attempts to reproduce Star Destroyers, Voyagers, Fer de Lances etc result in nice-looking ships with very low pitch/yaw/brake/thrust ratios.  The cube with the strap-on thrusters-plus-wings design, however, performs far better in pretty much all areas.

 

I would like to see a re-design of thruster dynamics that encourages wider builds.

 

(This doesn't have to be curtailed by "laws of physics" arguments - for example, the "gyro" could easily apply a field that allowed pitch/yaw thrusters to be more effective, or "inertial dampers" could decrease, as well as increase mass (depending on acceleration/deceleration).)

 

Thoughts?

[Ohm is Futile]

Huh? You can cover thrusters if you want, doesn't affect functionality. So no, no point in reworking thrusters, just put tiny slices on the outer hull where you want them aesthetically speaking, and hide the more functional ones. Also, you can improve movement on a specific axis using gyros. It really shouldn't be that hard, regardless of the shape. (well, not totally irrelevant to the shape, but unless you have something extreme, it shouldn't be a problem)

[Altissimus]

Huh? You can cover thrusters if you want, doesn't affect functionality. So no, no point in reworking thrusters, just put tiny slices on the outer hull where you want them aesthetically speaking, and hide the more functional ones. Also, you can improve movement on a specific axis using gyros. It really shouldn't be that hard, regardless of the shape. (well, not totally irrelevant to the shape, but unless you have something extreme, it shouldn't be a problem)

 

Yeah, sorry, it's more complicated than that.

 

A (let's say) 3x3x3-volume thruster (multi-directional or directional) has significantly more effect 10 squares away from the centre of mass than one square away. Thus if you build it close to the COM to allow for aesthetics (covered or not) it is less practical.

 

Something designed to resemble a V22 Osprey is therefore always going to be more effective, manoeuvrable and ugly than something designed to resemble a Fer De Lance.

 

You need WAY MORE thrusters if you build them within aesthetic shapes, which adds way more mass and causes a heap of other problems, affecting thrust, breaking etc.

 

However, I may be doing it wrong...how do you improve movement on a specific axis using gyros? Though these only affected roll?

[snacker]

 

However, I may be doing it wrong...how do you improve movement on a specific axis using gyros? Though these only affected roll?

 

If you rotate a gyro block it changes the axis it affects.

 

Personally speaking I think a lot of the design/aesthetics issues people have are based upon a faulty premise for which bad sci-fi and graphic artists in the film industry are to blame. The so called aesthetically pleasing designs mostly seem to be loosely based upon creatures or a vehicle aesthetics "language" that evolved on a planet with a atmosphere (earth) and corresponding air-resistance or drag as a issue. This is art not design.

 

In good design form follows function, with there being no atmosphere in space, no air resistance, and with ships being too large to practically land on planets or be built on planets there is no need to take account of the factors that drove the evolution of creatures on a planet like earth, or drove the design of vehicles on a planet like earth.

 

Your concept of aesthetically pleasing is a product of your environment, perhaps you could consider thinking outside the box (or in the cube hah), and breaking free of the artificial limits this is setting on you.

[DerpSuper++]

You govern the axis that gyros affect by rotating them, like any other block. There's an indicator that will show you which axis the gyro is currently affecting when you're placing them in the editor. Also, as far as I know, the output of gyros scales with material whilst thrusters do not, therefore it would be logical to build your thrusters out of the lightest material you have available, that being Titanium first, then Trinium when available. As a side note, one stat that isn't yet displayed is how much thrust you have horizontally, vertically, and backwards, something that thrusters are also responsible for.

 

Aside from that, I don't really feel that it's really limiting ship design, it just requires you to think more strategically about your component placements... And, well, think more in general.

 

Example ---> http://imgur.com/a/LAh8q

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the larger ship above and others of similar size, I'd consider even 0.5 rad/s to be quite high, otherwise, I personally think you wouldn't "feel" the weight of the ship and it would feel awkward to pilot. Also, rotating too fast in a massive ship can have some undesirable effects, breaking parts off or slapping things away among some of them, especially when navigating through tight spaces.

[Altissimus]

You govern the axis that gyros affect by rotating them, like any other block. There's an indicator that will show you which axis the gyro is currently affecting when you're placing them in the editor. Also, as far as I know, the output of gyros scales with material whilst thrusters do not, therefore it would be logical to build your thrusters out of the lightest material you have available, that being Titanium first, then Trinium when available. As a side note, one stat that isn't yet displayed is how much thrust you have horizontally, vertically, and backwards, something that thrusters are also responsible for.

 

Aside from that, I don't really feel that it's really limiting ship design, it just requires you to think more strategically about your component placements... And, well, think more in general.

 

Example ---> http://imgur.com/a/LAh8q

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the larger ship above and others of similar size, I'd consider even 0.5 rad/s to be quite high, otherwise, I personally think you wouldn't "feel" the weight of the ship and it would feel awkward to pilot. Also, rotating too fast in a massive ship can have some undesirable effects, breaking parts off or slapping things away among some of them, especially when navigating through tight spaces.

 

 

From Patch Notes 19th March:

 

"Gyro Arrays will only affect the rotational speed of your ship. Their placement is not as important as with thrusters, since they apply torque directly to your ship. On the other hand, you don't have lever mechanics (like with thrusters) that will allow you to get better stats depending on the distance to the center of mass of the ship. They also scale with material strength, so you might want to upgrade them along the way to the center of the galaxy."

[DerpSuper++]

 

From Patch Notes 19th March:

 

"Gyro Arrays will only affect the rotational speed of your ship. Their placement is not as important as with thrusters, since they apply torque directly to your ship. On the other hand, you don't have lever mechanics (like with thrusters) that will allow you to get better stats depending on the distance to the center of mass of the ship. They also scale with material strength, so you might want to upgrade them along the way to the center of the galaxy."

 

Exactly what I was trying to say, gyros will affect the rotational speed of your ship, but only on one axis. The axis that it affects will be shown when you highlight the gyro, blue for roll, red for pitch, green for yaw, as such:

 

 

 

 

Also, I don't know if you're trying to tell me that thrusters scale with materials by posting that quote, but I'll just assume as much, so you might want to re-read that quote above. Even if you didn't meant to do that, at least others might still find this information useful. Plus, the in-game tool tip does not mention that thrusters scale with material, whilst they do for gyros. To add to my point, the materials from heaviest to lightest are: Iron, Ogonite, Avorion, Naonite, Titanium, Xanion, Trinium.

 

SOURCES:

1.

2. http://avorion.gamepedia.com/Materials

 

Otherwise, here is a series of images depicting directional thrusters in ascending effectiveness, based on the exact same size of directional thruster applying braking thrust (which equates to backwards thrust) to a constant mass, with Iron being the worst and Trinium being the best material for thrusters.

 

Iron (437.4 m/s^2)

 

 

Ogonite (488.7 m/s^2)

 

 

Avorion (593 m/s^2)

 

 

Naonite (638.5 m/s^2)

 

 

Titanium (691.4 m/s^2)

 

 

Xanion (754 m/s^2)

 

 

Trinium (920.6 m/s^2)

 

 

 

Furthermore, thrusters are still affected by surface area, but only in the distribution of their thrust with more thrust being directed to the face with more surface area whilst volume dictates their total combined output of all faces. This isn't something that I will bother to show visually as you can test it out yourself.

 

Also, it would be good practice to ensure you place heavier blocks closer to your COM. Heavier blocks being your generator, IFG, shield, CPU core, and hyperspace blocks. Thrusters and gyros being the lighter blocks, with gyros being significantly lighter than thrusters. Crew quarters are apparently lighter than hull blocks whilst providing the same HP gains but at the cost of ~10x the power consumption. Battery blocks weigh the same as hull blocks but are significantly weaker.

 

Aaaand, that's about it.

 

P.S.

I honestly do not know what are you trying to imply by posting up that development update quote, so I just went with the nuclear option and explained everything, from my experience testing and ship building. Also, I have no idea how long you've played so I tried to be thorough. Anyway, hope this helped in some way whether you like it or not because I certainly don't like helping.

[Altissimus]

Amazing, thanks.

 

Posted previous (and this) from my phone with limited time, so sorry for vague implications. You' e definitely answered my questions.

 

Been playing about 4 days :)

[Altissimus]

While you're at it, could you elaborate a little on he use of directional vs multi-directional thrusters please?

 

Can quote something vague if that will help provide the necessary motivation :)

[DerpSuper++]

I think koonschi mentioned about this somewhere. Omni-directional (regular) thrusters have their thrust divided among their faces, whilst directional thrusters have all their output focused on one axis of your choosing.

 

If I were to try to give an example from what I understood, let's assume a uniformly shaped thruster block with 12 units of output, with each face bearing a surface area of 1 unit. An omni-directional thruster would have those 12 units of thrust divided amongst those 6 faces, resulting in 2 units of output in all directions.

 

In the case of a directional thruster, thrust is only directed along one axis, meaning only 2 faces on opposing ends will be able to produce thrust, either up/down, left/right, or front/back, thus its 12 units of thrust would only be divided among said 2 faces, resulting in 6 units of thrust from either of those 2 faces.

 

Deciding between one or the other all depends on your design and placement, sometimes it's more effective to use an omni-directional thruster, sometimes it's better to use a directional one, it takes a lot of trial and error on each individual ship.

 

I could be wrong about some parts of the thrusters though, but it roughly works on that concept.

[snacker]

 

Otherwise, here is a series of images depicting directional thrusters in ascending effectiveness, based on the exact same size of directional thruster applying braking thrust (which equates to backwards thrust) to a constant mass, with Iron being the worst and Trinium being the best material for thrusters.

 

Iron (437.4 m/s^2)

 

 

Ogonite (488.7 m/s^2)

 

 

Avorion (593 m/s^2)

 

 

Naonite (638.5 m/s^2)

 

 

Titanium (691.4 m/s^2)

 

 

Xanion (754 m/s^2)

 

 

Trinium (920.6 m/s^2)

 

 

 

Furthermore, thrusters are still affected by surface area, but only in the distribution of their thrust with more thrust being directed to the face with more surface area whilst volume dictates their total combined output of all faces. This isn't something that I will bother to show visually as you can test it out yourself.

 

I found your post(s) very informative as I am still trying to optimise my own designs but I wanted to point out what I think is a flaw in your testing of the scaling of materials for thrusters. The mass of the thruster you are adding in the images is much larger than the mass of the ship as a whole, this distorts the test because the mass of the material used in making the thruster has a disproportionate effect on the total mass of the resulting vehicle.

 

I just tested this myself with directional thrusters and a large block of armour as my base to test on. Then the material used had no effect on the effectiveness of the thruster when its mass was small relative to the block(s) I was placing it on but as soon as I scaled up the thruster in size (and therefore mass) relative to the armour block the thrusters appeared to be more effective when made from lighter materials, but obviously only because their mass was contributing less to the overall weight of the resulting craft.

 

In conclusion the takeaway from this is that while thrusters do not scale in effectiveness with material their relative combined mass in relationship to the overall mass of ones design might make it more effective to make ones thrusters of the lightest material possible.

[Fox]

...

I just tested this myself with directional thrusters and a large block of armour as my base to test on. Then the material used had no effect on the effectiveness of the thruster when its mass was small relative to the block(s) I was placing it on but as soon as I scaled up the thruster in size (and therefore mass) relative to the armour block the thrusters appeared to be more effective when made from lighter materials, but obviously only because their mass was contributing less to the overall weight of the resulting craft.

...

- "I was told size doesnt matter?"

-  "She lied!"

But in this case it shouldnt matter at all? Since the Trinium (lightest material, not highest tier) gave best test results, I mean, might it be that when testing against an big block of armor, no matter what material you use, the size (and thus volumen, and thus the poweroutput) of the thruster was too small to effect the ship as whole?

 

Like, if you can push a little block easier with Trinium Thrusters, you should be able to push a big block easier with Trinium Thrusters aswell, no? Just the effect wont be so noticeable compared... or me on a wrong track here?

 

EDIT: On a sidenote i'd like to remind that your choice of omnithrusters/directionalthrusters/gyros might also be affected by how much you want to go for side-strafing capabilitys besides Yaw/Pitch/Roll, which sadly isnt included into the stats screen... no gain from gyros here

[DerpSuper++]

I found your post(s) very informative as I am still trying to optimise my own designs but I wanted to point out what I think is a flaw in your testing of the scaling of materials for thrusters. The mass of the thruster you are adding in the images is much larger than the mass of the ship as a whole, this distorts the test because the mass of the material used in making the thruster has a disproportionate effect on the total mass of the resulting vehicle.

 

I just tested this myself with directional thrusters and a large block of armour as my base to test on. Then the material used had no effect on the effectiveness of the thruster when its mass was small relative to the block(s) I was placing it on but as soon as I scaled up the thruster in size (and therefore mass) relative to the armour block the thrusters appeared to be more effective when made from lighter materials, but obviously only because their mass was contributing less to the overall weight of the resulting craft.

 

In conclusion the takeaway from this is that while thrusters do not scale in effectiveness with material their relative combined mass in relationship to the overall mass of ones design might make it more effective to make ones thrusters of the lightest material possible.

 

Ahh, yes. Though the point of that comparison was just to show that the amount of thrust applied doesn't scale with material, but admittedly I may have presented it in a potentially misleading manner. The point about the "Thrusters, lighter = better" thing still stands though.

 

However, you're right on that relativity bit on thrusters, since if we were to assume the game uses F=ma, therefore a=F/m, and that thrusters, more accurately, apply a force to the ship, then by right you'd need bigger thrusters. If you use tiny thrusters, then the impact would be so small that it becomes negligible. Pretty much one of the major things stopping the much bigger ships from becoming overly maneuverable. Not completely impossible, but it would require a large portion of the ship to be composed of thrusters and/or gyros and consequently the supporting power systems, which would, I assume, probably result in being extremely taxing on the whole aesthetic freedom bit.

 

Then there's also that other bit on how they apply thrust in other non-forward directions to allow for strafing, climbing/descending, and reversing. I'm not sure how often this handling characteristic gets overlooked, but even I sometimes forget about it when building ships. The problem with that is there's currently no easy way to determine that other than getting out of build mode and flying your ship sideways, etc. Then there's also the whole "thrust will be distributed based on surface area" thing on regular thrusters that makes this just that bit more complicated. There might be a mod out there that makes finding this out easier, but I'm just too damn lazy to dig around. For me, I just go with "If it feels good, then it's all good."

 

Also, as a side note, on the topic of thrusters vs. gyros, if you go with the approach of having all your heavy components focused at the COM and that a particular ship design renders it to be long, I've noticed that (and, well, I guess, logically) thrusters placed further away from the COM can potentially have a bigger impact than gyros, but at the same time, other components placed away from the COM would bring the opposite effect, since thrusters would work just like a lever system whilst gyros simply apply a fixed amount of torque directly onto an axis because science.

[snacker]

- "I was told size doesnt matter?"

-  "She lied!"

But in this case it shouldnt matter at all? Since the Trinium (lightest material, not highest tier) gave best test results

 

But my point was that the test results were very misleading even though that was obviously not the intention. Someone could look at those results and mistakenly think that in a "real world" application they could see a 20% or more improvement in brake thrust or strafe speed by changing the thrusters to use trinium over xanion, for example.

 

To better illustrate the point I partly redid the test but by building a simulation of a real craft, I say simulation because I only added the necessary blocks without any thought for ascetics. I simulated two craft out of trinium with perfect or near perfect stats, one a ultralight highly manoeuvrable 5 slot ship and another slightly more realistic 7 slot ship with higher mass to account for some use of armour. I designed both to have perfect yaw/pitch/roll and 100m/s brake thrust and thrust on all axis in the case of the 5 slot ship and perfect yaw/pitch roll and 80m/s brake thrust and thrust on all axis in the case of the 7 slot ship. I think these exceed what most people achieve in a real world design and therefore still exaggerate the impact that thrusters have on the design of ones ship.

 

The ultralight has 200m/s thrust, 108 m/s brake thrust, 10 sector jump reach and close to twice the power that it needs as well as ample crew room, it has a volume of 0.9 mill and weighs only 13.9 kt.

 

The 7 slot ship has 68m/s thrust (I ran out of engineers), 88m/s brake thrust, 17 sectors jump reach and 40% spare power as well as 122K shields, it has a volume of 5.1 mill and a mass of 91 kt. So it has a bit over 5 times the volume but 6.5 times the mass of the ultralight ship.

 

The original test implied using trinium over xanion for the thrusters would achieve 22% more thrust, but in my testing even on the ultralight the mass increase was only 1 tonne or 7.8%, brake thrust decreased by about the same amount but the ship with xanion thrusters used almost 1.2% less power than with the trinium thrusters.

 

For the 7 slot ship the difference was obviously even less, brake thrust was reduced by about 5% because using xanion as thruster material only increased the mass by a similar percentage. Due to the increase in energy consumption of the much heavier ship the power savings were approximately half that of the ultralight ship.

 

5% better thrust is of course still significant but this is 4x worse than the original test implied and In the case of the 7 slot ship simulation, given that most people most likely don't design perfect ships with perfect yaw/pitch/roll and high brake thrust, and a lot of ships are going to be bigger/heavier than the 7 slot ship then in the "real" world people just aren't going to see the drastic improvements the original tests suggested.

 

Comparison of thruster material: http://imgur.com/a/rBAod

[snacker]

Ahh, yes. Though the point of that comparison was just to show that the amount of thrust applied doesn't scale with material, but admittedly I may have presented it in a potentially misleading manner. The point about the "Thrusters, lighter = better" thing still stands though.

 

However, you're right on that relativity bit on thrusters, since if we were to assume the game uses F=ma, therefore a=F/m, and that thrusters, more accurately, apply a force to the ship, then by right you'd need bigger thrusters. If you use tiny thrusters, then the impact would be so small that it becomes negligible. Pretty much one of the major things stopping the much bigger ships from becoming overly maneuverable. Not completely impossible, but it would require a large portion of the ship to be composed of thrusters and/or gyros and consequently the supporting power systems, which would, I assume, probably result in being extremely taxing on the whole aesthetic freedom bit.

 

Then there's also that other bit on how they apply thrust in other non-forward directions to allow for strafing, climbing/descending, and reversing. I'm not sure how often this handling characteristic gets overlooked, but even I sometimes forget about it when building ships. The problem with that is there's currently no easy way to determine that other than getting out of build mode and flying your ship sideways, etc. Then there's also the whole "thrust will be distributed based on surface area" thing on regular thrusters that makes this just that bit more complicated. There might be a mod out there that makes finding this out easier, but I'm just too damn lazy to dig around. For me, I just go with "If it feels good, then it's all good."

 

I realise you didn't intend to mislead in any way but at first glance when I saw those raw numbers it looked like it implied great improvements in thrust by changing the material used and since I always assume other people have to be as stupid as I am so I thought I would clarify things.

 

As to your other point I have only just started to redesign my fleet to take into account strafing because I noticed the numbers didn't tell the whole story. I am scared to say that I don't find the challenge aesthetically limiting to someone like you, who designs beautiful craft, because I take a very different approach to the issue. I like modern design and a key concept among designers is that form follows function, I see the aesthetics in simplicity and paring down the unnecessary until all that is left is there for a reason.

 

So I take my inspiration from industrial design and architectural movements like that of the Brutalists. A trained crew is a valuable commodity, space is a harsh environment for my soft squishy minions so my structural material of choice is the 2 by 2 by X beam of armour that I use as a skeleton for my ships. I also believe in "realism" in design, so all my thruster faces have to be exposed. My latest warship is loosely inspired by the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, nicknamed the Warthog, a close combat fighter that is basically a big gun with a engine strapped onto it wrapped in armour.

 

Designed in the 1970's it is still in service despite the many attempts to replace it with more modern and aesthetically pleasing multi-role aircraft.  So I placed all the internals and some giant gyro's at centre mass, wrapped that in layers of thrusters facing in all directions running the whole length of the ship, filled the gaps with armour and plated the whole thing in a 1 block thick layer of armour with the sides and a extra layer on the front being sacrificial and outside of the range of the IFG in case of crashes. I then spent far to much time merging the armour blocks to maximise the mass of each piece so as to have as few weak points as possible. The resulting 8 slot ship uses only 185 blocks which is all the more shocking considering there are 20 thrusters on each side, 24 running top to bottom and 20 front to back all with their faces exposed but recessed 1 block or more in the armour. This gives me 77 m/s thrust in all directions and 2.95 yaw, 2.18 pitch for a 0,27 mt ship.

 

I imagine many people would hate it but it its design and the resulting simplicity gives me immense satisfaction.