Something I didn't get into in my original post is multipurpose thrusters. At this point, most thrusters in SC are multipurpose. What that means is that they can provide a variety of functions. Typically you'll have a thruster, such as an upper Hornet thruster, that can function as both a maneuvering thruster and an attitude control thruster. In fact, the front upper Hornet thrusters can function as maneuvering, attitude control and retro. For this type of thruster, it can use 100% of its capacity for maneuvering, but maybe only 50% for attitude control/rotation, based on thruster efficiency. The thrusters have always had designations for thruster modes of main, retro, maneuver and orientation (what I call attitude control). Every thruster in the game today can function as one or more of these types. I'm adding support for strafe thrusters as well so we can provide more control over strafe characteristics of ships independent of other thrust actions like maneuvering which is otherwise very similar. As it is, ships all tend to behave basically the same in strafe control modes. We'd like some ships to be superior at strafe, and some inferior.
Once we get the power triangle balanced, the give-and-take between thrusters and other systems will be significant. If you want to fly with all maneuvering thrusters and forego mains (assuming that's even an option within the game), the trade-off is likely going to be less firepower or shield power, etc. There will be consequences. Ships are designed this way for a reason.
It will be challenging to properly balance ships with thruster specialization, but without the ability to isolate thrust actions and tune them independently, it would be impossible to achieve the unique control behaviors we're after with so many different ships.
Just to illustrate the challenges of treating all thrusters the same, let's look at the Hornet. Suppose you want the Hornet to stop in half the time it takes to reach maximum forward speed. The Hornet uses the four front thrusters for retro. This defines the thrust capacity for these thrusters. Let's say they're all the same, so 4xManeuver=1/2*Main where Maneuver is the thrust of each maneuvering thruster and Main is the thrust of the main thruster. So each maneuvering thruster has 1/8th as much thrust as the main. Now look at side thrust for arresting a turn. Two thrusters come into play for a pure yawing turn. So you have 1/4th as much thrust in the turn as you have for forward acceleration, which means you'll arrest a 90 degree turn in 4x the amount of time it takes to accelerate to full speed. Say you reach max speed in 2.5 seconds (and I consider that too fast), it'll take you 10 seconds to stop sliding in a 90 degree turn. That's generally considered too much slide. And in addition to that, you're going to have massive rotational acceleration because those powerful maneuvering thrusters are also what turns the ship (this depends to some degree on distance to center of mass, of course). It would be impossible for a ship to have any sense of rotational inertia unless we also want it to slide all over space.
The problem here is that thrusters can serve multiple roles, and if we treat them all the same, then we have no way to independently tune various control behaviors. We'd like to be able to say that a ship is highly maneuverable but has more inertia in a turn, can accelerate forward quickly, but takes longer to come to a stop, etc. If all of these actions are interdependent, you can't adjust one without changing the others. What we'd end up with is a bunch of ships that look different but basically perform the same.
JP
-----------------
Oh, and real quick, there is always the backup torque generated by the gyros (as mentioned in a post above). This is more a capitulation to gameplay than a realistic system, I'm afraid. It's just simply necessary to have some attitude and rotational control even if you've lost all of your thrusters. Otherwise you'd just spin out of control. And when a ship starts losing thrusters, it has a small amount of torque to fall back on to provide attitude control and stability. Without it, ship control would degrade much more quickly as you take damage. But the gyro torque is relatively small. If you're rotating under nothing but gyro torque, you'll know it. Even a Hornet feels like a capital ship. It takes forever to spin up to top rotational speed, and just as long to spin back down.
So, yes, gyros are the last fallback for control. If all else fails, you'll have that. Unless you completely lose power (but the power supply for gyros is not yet implemented).
JP
)
![[VR] Merkir](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
