Space Ship Balancing in Designer

[Bjornshu]

From what I saw of the space ship designer video, balance of thrust and mass will be very important if you want your ship to fly straight. Maybe I missed it, but I couldnt see any tools or indicators for center of mass or thrust such as in KSP. If it is possible I think adding some sort of indicator for center of mass and thrust would be very helpful for designers.

 

[Jackard]

Needlessly tracking stuff like this and bolts is gonna make pvp chug. We've already seen this happen to other games.

Like why even have bolts? Extra tedium and calculations to what benefit?

 

[Geronimo553]

I was surprised to see how off balanced the ship behaved even though the generator was in the middle. How moving it from back to front fixed the imbalance and not cause it to occur in the other direction makes no sense to me. I really hope the balance system is more forgiving than that.

 

[Burnside]

basic aircraft design, placing your center of thrust behind your center of mass results in greater stability- don't ask me why, but the generator creates on the roof a top-heavy design. another solution would've been to shift the thrusters up several 12cm units to bring their y-axis center higher to meet the CoM

 

[M1 Abrams]

Like why even have bolts? Extra tedium and calculations to what benefit?

I like the idea. It'll add skill (and personal flair) to ship building. Optimizing the number and placement of bolts can be fun as well. If you don't want to bolt things, you can just use the Auto-bolt tool and then buy your ship from the station.

placing your center of thrust behind your center of mass results in greater stability- don't ask me why

I don't think that's what's going on in the video, cuz there's no lift in space. In the video, all of the mass was to the rear, so the front maneuver thrusters are much more efficient than the rear ones. There's also a torque because the CoM is higher than the thrust line I think. So the inefficient rear thrusters couldn't counteract that torque, and as a result you see the ship pitching up. At least that's my guess.

In Space Engineers, gyros were strong enough to prevent stuff like this. In this game, you'll probly have to make sure you have maneuver thrusters everywhere away from the CoM.

 

[Geronimo553]

maneuvering thrusters have the most fuel consumption as well since they run at full power all the time. Unsure if the premium flight control unit assists with that. Also in the video she added more maneuvering thrusters to the top of the design so it was still unbalanced.

 

[Burnside]

In SE you didn't have center of mass physics unless you applied the mod for it.

 

[[QS] Combustible]

In Space Engineers, gyros were strong enough to prevent stuff like this

They didn’t even have balance physics in space engineers so the gyro was effectively their excuse.

 

[M1 Abrams]

They didn’t even have balance physics in space engineers so the gyro was effectively their excuse.

Oh yeah. It's been too long since I've played. They did use the CoM in calculating the gyro moments themselves, but yeah they cheated with the thrusters. So I'm more excited that Starbase seems to not cheat.

 

[CalenLoki]

Actually gyro placement doesn't affect its force in SE. But SE does calculate angular momentum, so placing it closer to CoM affects turning speed.
But then it levels yaw/pitch/roll to the slowest value, which is lame af. And hard codded controls makes mouse-controlled yaw and pitch faster than roll...
Yep. SE fucks up a lot of things. On purpose.