Ship speed, max speed and thruster spam

[TGess]

Ok so what are the problems?

- Bigger Ships are often very slow cause we have very weak thrusters and very heavy materials.
- Flight times for utility ships are way too long, it forces you to watch youtube, play something else during the travel
(100km 25-55minutes at current average speed of hauler)
- If you sell your soul to SSC you can make any ship fly 150ms its just very painful and unfun process and no-one would be able to catch anyone.
(that can create other problem: Patrol vessel cant catch up to huge miner.)
- Normally speed differences are huge when you compare fighter to a hauler. It gives hauler very little time to prepare for combat, get in to turrets etc.
(when we get better turrets tho), change pickaxes for weapons, talk to the people or at least spot them

And now how to fix that relatively easily:
- more thruster sizes with higher efficiency. Now we have 5 tons of thrust per 1 ton of thruster. Lets make that also 10 per 1, 25 per 1, 50 per 1 and 100 per 1ton. (numbers are subject to change) note that it would also mean increase fuel and power consumption accordingly and bigger sizes
- This fixes the travel times being too long for any hauler, big ship or even capital ship (no need to watch youtube now)
- I also fixes need to spam components and go trough the pain in the SSC.
It would mean you would need only 4 best thrusters instead of current 80 box thruster for max voxel ship

It does not fix following issues.
- all ships would fly 150 and no-one would ever catch anyone(upraveno)

To address that max speed could be based on weight of the vessel.

- for each 1000 tons of mass ship would lose 1ms of max speed (with the current density)
- Empty max size haulers max speed would be 142ms cause they average at 8000 tons. Loaded its max speed would be 136,4 ms cause it would be 13 600 tons.
- Small ships would be fast and pretty much immune to pirates so new players would be safe as it would be easy to reach max speed with those (now its not easy)
- big mega haulers would have to deal with the option of getting caught eventually and would need smaller ships as escort or turrets
- but it would address the issue of approaches being too fast taking few seconds from render distance to someone shooting your ship.
- people would fly being your ship, it gives you time to either talk or to prepare defenses. (few minutes even) and no need to increase render range
- Haulers would be using fast fire rate turrets on the back while pirates would be using slow fire rate weapons with a bit bigger range cause while AC of turrets can hit ship flying towards it, it cant reach ship flying away from it.
- it prolongs the feel of combat compared to pirates now just flying in and killing you in your cockpit in 20 seconds.

The system as described here would drastically reduce the average of travel times in the universe as well as make pirating way more interesting and not so one sided and turrets way more viable as approach speed would not be 75-100ms but rather 10-30ms

Also for combat ships you would go
- do I want heavy armor to take more hits
- or do I want lighter armor to have higher possible max speed.

 

[BadNation]

Doesn't it make sense that the bigger ships are slower, it makes much more sense than to have every ship going ZZOOMM

 

[TGess]

No it really does not. Big ship, naval or in any cinematorgraphy are usually much faster and much more capable of long range exploration. In SB the smaller you go the further you can fly.

 

[five]

No it really does not. Big ship, naval or in any cinematorgraphy are usually much faster and much more capable of long range exploration. In SB the smaller you go the further you can fly.

Thats the point this isnt naval. Your FLYING. Ever saw a Boeing 747 go as fast as a F-22 Raptor? Dont think so. Also the combat meta right now is medium weight high mobility fighters which wouldnt improve with your proposal. Also if you want to go further with a large ship use your space better and fit more fuel tanks in (same thing here again a boeing wouldnt come close to the range of a F-22 if it had the same amount of fuel). Also if you want to go faster with big ships strap more engines to it, there is a reason that the saturn V needed 5 F-1 engines each putting out 6,67 MN

 

[CalenLoki]

As usual, you're good at identifying problems, but present terrible solutions(IMO)

Making thrusters tiered, where some of them are objectively just better, will make the low-tier just obsolete. Nobody will use anything else than the best ones.
Parts in SB are not tied to ship sizes or classes, so you can't help big ships by creating new part.

Increasing thrust-to-mass ratio is not a solution. It will only make ships (both big and small) accelerate crazy fast.

Small ships would still have the same range as large ones, because all of them would use the same, best thrusters.

Universe is infinite, so flight times will always be dictated by players, and how far they want to build their stations.
You can't reduce flight time, but you can make the flight less boring. But it's more in topic of belt design, environmental hazards, detection mechanics, player-count. Changing speed won't fix it.

TBH I wouldn't use hard limits for balance. It limits engineering choice, because you always know the required ratio, and hardly ever go above or below it. And big ships shouldn't be any slower than small ones when going in a straight line. Their weakness should be being too clumsy to use their speed in difficult flight conditions (higher floatyness, less acceleration)

Approach speed would change only in case of a chase from behind. And it wouldn't help much, as you usually can't see pirates coming until they are in gun range anyway. We need detection mechanics for that, not speed changes.

My solutions:

Yes, bigger thrusters are needed. But their thrust-to-mass should be roughly the same. Their main advantage should be better thrust to surface ratio, less tedious ship design and less FPS drop.
And while we're at it, box thrusters could use some thrust and mass increase, so they differ from triangles in a similar way.

I'd make big ships less affected by space drag, based on their mass. That would make them require less thrust-to-mass for the same top speed, but make them a lot more floaty, hard to control and with lower acceleration. It would also make them much more fuel efficient, thus longer range.
i.e.: [drag=speed^2*sqrt(mass)]

I'd prefer top speed to be much harder to reach, so adding extra thruster (almost) always matters. Make the drag curve even more step as it approaches top speed. Make it speed^2. Or if it already is speed^2, make it speed^3.

 

[cranky corvid]

Thats the point this isnt naval. Your FLYING. Ever saw a Boeing 747 go as fast as a F-22 Raptor? Dont think so. Also the combat meta right now is medium weight high mobility fighters which wouldnt improve with your proposal. Also if you want to go further with a large ship use your space better and fit more fuel tanks in (same thing here again a boeing wouldnt come close to the range of a F-22 if it had the same amount of fuel). Also if you want to go faster with big ships strap more engines to it, there is a reason that the saturn V needed 5 F-1 engines each putting out 6,67 MN

Given that spaceships in space behave drastically different compared to aircraft in an atmosphere in real life, appealing to realism to say that spaceships in our scifi-themed MMO should behave like aircraft is a nonsense argument. Craft that have to escape Earth's atmosphere in order to accomplish their mission are not analogous to ones that only need to navigate space either.

 

[five]

Given that spaceships in space behave drastically different compared to aircraft in an atmosphere in real life, appealing to realism to say that spaceships in our scifi-themed MMO should behave like aircraft is a nonsense argument. Craft that have to escape Earth's atmosphere in order to accomplish their mission are not analogous to ones that only need to navigate space either.

Yo u seen demo video of starbase? There is air resistance. And I get your point but what I was trying to explain was, that since this game is closer to flying than driving a boat it should also kinda work like that. Also I can really only explain shit with planes. Lastly I dont WANT them to behave realisticly like they are in atmosphere, it is just that the movement right now comes closer to a mix of flying in space and flying in atmosphere, which is why I disagree with his idea

 

[kiiyo]

Yo u seen demo video of starbase? There is air resistance. And I get your point but what I was trying to explain was, that since this game is closer to flying than driving a boat it should also kinda work like that. Also I can really only explain shit with planes. Lastly I dont WANT them to behave realisticly like they are in atmosphere, it is just that the movement right now comes closer to a mix of flying in space and flying in atmosphere, which is why I disagree with his idea

I'd compare it to flying in space, if space was filled with invisible and yucky soup. There's no air resistance, the shape of your ship doesn't matter. It just slows down over time, nothing else.

 

[Severeign]

Why hasn't anyone commented about inertia and mass? The reason large ships are slower is because of their mass and the increased energy required to get them moving at the same velocity as a smaller ship with all other variables the same. A massive ship should require a massive amount of energy to move, and to make it accelerate and maneuver at the speed of a smaller and lighter ship should be nearly impossible, especially if things like torque are taken into account. As for big ships being faster in a cinematic sense, I think that largely applies to FTL and long distance travel. For subluminal speeds, smaller ships (Should) have advantage both in maneuverability and acceleration, though not in top speed.

Also since I'm new here, why is there air resistance? I thought this game took place entirely out of the atmosphere?

 

[CalenLoki]

Mass, forces and inertia are present in game.

Drag, commonly called spase jelly, is there for several reasons:
1. Performance. When objects stop moving, they become much lighter to process
2. Economy balance. It makes ships burn fuel to keep going forward, thus directly translate range to cost.
3. Ship diversity. With drag each ship has different top speed, rather than all going always max.
4. Noob friendly. Easier to manoeuvre ship when it drifts less. Imagine playing SE without access to inertial dampeners.

 

[Feature109]

If you cap the speed to 150, what would keep someone from thinking outside the box?
Ship A has enough thrusters in direction x to achieve 150ms.
Ship B has enough thrusters in direction x and y to achieve 150ms in two directions, achieving 212.1ms on the hypotenuse.
If you want to jump out of the box, think in the third dimension.
Ship C has enough thrusters in direction x, y, and z to achieve 150ms in three directions, achieving 259.8ms in a third dimension hypotenuse.

 

[Cavilier210]

That is a lot of extra useless weight honestly.

 

[CalenLoki]

If you cap the speed to 150, what would keep someone from thinking outside the box?
Ship A has enough thrusters in direction x to achieve 150ms.
Ship B has enough thrusters in direction x and y to achieve 150ms in two directions, achieving 212.1ms on the hypotenuse.
If you want to jump out of the box, think in the third dimension.
Ship C has enough thrusters in direction x, y, and z to achieve 150ms in three directions, achieving 259.8ms in a third dimension hypotenuse.

Ships are capped on speed vector length, not X,y,z separately. So using angled thrusters won't let you go over the limit.

 

[Sir Nerdbird]

The max speed will probably be changed at some point, but there isn't much of an incentive to hit max speed at the moment given how inefficient it is to get there.

 

[Verbatos]

If you cap the speed to 150, what would keep someone from thinking outside the box?
Ship A has enough thrusters in direction x to achieve 150ms.
Ship B has enough thrusters in direction x and y to achieve 150ms in two directions, achieving 212.1ms on the hypotenuse.
If you want to jump out of the box, think in the third dimension.
Ship C has enough thrusters in direction x, y, and z to achieve 150ms in three directions, achieving 259.8ms in a third dimension hypotenuse.

What @CalenLoki said, but I also want to add that angled thrusters can be useful for increasing turning speed, although they cannot increase forward thrust.

 

[Feature109]

I never said angled thrusters, that was CalenLoki's comment. You could say a 90 degrees angle is an angle but I would not call that angled. Imagine a ship moving 150ms forward, if you can add speed in any of the up, down, left or right angles and maintain 150ms forward you are moving faster than 150ms on the hypotenuse. You are not exceeding 150ms in any one direction. It all depends on how the programmers created their formulas in the game. I am not in the alpha test so I can not test this bug/exploit, if it even exists or not.

 

[Verbatos]

I never said angled thrusters, that was CalenLoki's comment. You could say a 90 degrees angle is an angle but I would not call that angled. Imagine a ship moving 150ms forward, if you can add speed in any of the up, down, left or right angles and maintain 150ms forward you are moving faster than 150ms on the hypotenuse. You are not exceeding 150ms in any one direction. It all depends on how the programmers created their formulas in the game. I am not in the alpha test so I can not test this bug/exploit, if it even exists or not.

Could you give us an mspaint version of what you are imagining? This is how I imagine what you are saying, in short, it doesn't work, if it did, my ship would be a hellova lot faster, since it has a similar thruster configuration.

btw we call these angled thrusters

 

[Cavilier210]

Max speed in any direction is 150. Doesn't matter your angle.

 

[TGess]

The max speed will probably be changed at some point, but there isn't much of an incentive to hit max speed at the moment given how inefficient it is to get there.

its actually more efficient than going slow

 

[Feature109]

@Verbatos you have my thoughts correct, but if you had a speedometer telling you you are moving in the x direction at a rate of 150ms and also reading 150ms in the y direction you are most certainly moving at 212.1ms in the xy direction. That is simple geometry. The big question is how the game is coded.