Engines as unidirectional thrusters

[Rabiator]

The existing thrusters are all well and nice for controlling the orientation of your ship, but sometimes you might want a more energetic push. I therefore suggest that engines can be mounted in any direction the player likes, and bound to a "manual thruster group" analog to a weapons group. They will then work as an unidirectional thruster. An engine that points rearwards automatically becomes part of the normal engines.

The flip side could be that there is no automation to this. If your re-purposed engines' thrust does not go through the center of mass of your ship, they will make it spin.  If you kick your ship into a spin with your pseudo-thrusters, there will be no automatic counter-thrust to stop the spin. If you also have normal thrusters, those will eventually stop your ship spinning, but slower if you reduced their size in favor of your "manual thruster group".

In practice, I wanted something like that for braking. Then I found that right now, an engine can only point backwards. Annoyance occured.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Rabiator

[cy414]

given the vast discrepancies in block mass, this would make designing ships a lot more challenging, and likely break the npc ships.

but a lot of people just want their ships to look cool and put all the engines completely inside their ship, with only superficial thruster "plates" exposed

as an "option" i would like the extra physics to be a thing when designing ships, since its something to work around and would force more creative solutions than "armour brick". but then, i would like for engines and thrusters lose thrust proportionally to how covered they are in that direction.(excluding holograms and other engine/thruster blocks stacked on them.)