The drag calculation does a block-by-block drag coefficient calculation for every block exposed to the direction of motion. Try putting carbon composite pyramids in front of every block, and you'll find the max speed increases substantially (the set of cut corner blocks that form a 4-block-long taper do the best right now).
Right, as translation and rotation are decoupled, and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Drag should only affect vehicles at high speeds (so limiting their top 40%ish of speed and acceleration based on % of drag), anything else doesn't make sense and is limiting builders. I'm sure this needs to just be fine tuned by the devs, I don't think he should have to modify that HV design as drag shouldn't be impacting it like that. People should be able to build flying bricks that are functional but *a bit* slower than streamlined ones. They shouldn't be so slow as to be unusable, and all designs shouldn't be required to have a couple of "speed pyramids" in the front as that adds nothing to the game and impedes builders. It would just be a block tax for the front of ships, what's the point?
I agree. Drag should be proportional to the square of the velocity (since we're subsonic), and should computed in a holistic fashion rather than block-by-block (as this just leads to flying bricks with spiky fronts). A simpler approach that would likely give better results overall would be to consider the cross-section of the ship and its aspect ratio (length/(widest transverse dimension)); immediately, this would give the intuitive result that thinner longer ships would experience less drag.
You could pre-calculate a ship's length/width ratio in the six different directions during building and probably leave it constant even through combat. It wouldn't be precise if you were traveling in a wide variety of "in-between" angles, but I suspect it would be close enough.
With a bit of trigonometry, you can get the cross-section and aspect ratio of a rectangular prism at any angle. For simplicity and speed, one could even have a lookup table of values for ranges of angles that the velocity vector makes to the ship. Or, even more simply, just weight the cross-section and aspect ratio contributions from each direction by the magnitude of the velocity vector component in that direction.
The question is for me is why in the heck would I want to go through all this? Seriously, it’s a game not a friggen college level experiment. I buy games to have fun not spend hours trying to figure out an obscure system and a boat load of mathematical computations.
What I wrote was what the game should be implementing behind the scenes to give the intuitive result that long thin objects have less drag than short flat objects. I agree that the player should not have to figure out poorly-coded physics.
Yeh, you wouldn't. I wouldn't. Geo wouldn't. Nobody would. Like Geo said, we were talking about internal calculations the game would use to adjudicate play. Mostly I was getting at the matter of real-time computation. It might be a few trigonometry calculations, but if you're trying to perform them 10 times a second for each of a dozen ships and otherwise keep the game responsive to player I/O, then the Devs have to take care. Many things are easy calculations, but you still only get so many of them per second, or whatever portion of a second that is needed for a game to feel responsive to a player.
You would think that the calculations would only be performed when the ship's blocks are changed, and not constantly at all times. It would make sense and help the player understand what is going on to have a Drag % in the ship stats that shows how aerodynamic the design is, just like the efficiency % that is already there. Then that drag % would just be applied to top speed and acceleration.
That's what I was proposing as "close enough", but if you think about it, those 6 calculations are for the 3D 90 degree angles, and an actual heading can be any fractional value of degrees in all of the three axis of travel. So if your goal is true simulation then you would recompute each time a ship's heading changed. EDIT: Sorry, everytime a ship's facing changed. Ships can change facing without changing current speed and direction of travel. You could rotate and present a flat face to the wind.
OKKKK.. Now if you guys explained all of this along with the CPU I doubt many people would've had a negative overreaction. This actually makes perfect sense. Also you can still build your monster warship CVs or cargo ships CVs but now you just have to plan a little more before you build them. I still think the Tier 3 should not need special parts to crafted but This sounds a lot better than how all this was explained a week ago. I feel like in the Q and A we were only given a piece of the puzzle and not the overall picture.
You still have to strip things down and specialize vehicles, even at T4. None of the workshop SVs I've tried so far were within the T4 CPU range, so I'm having to go through each design and strip each down to fit under the CPU cap. With some it's no big deal, with others they just can't function as designed. (Multi-role vehicles have to be greatly toned down if they were actually good at everything. You can still do a multi-role vehicle, it just needs to be T4 for all the goodies and even then it's just gonna be at most decent at everything, but easily bested by something specialized at a particular role.)
Because of this, is it a possibility to add more information to panel-> statistics -> overview window ? Especially values for roll, yaw pitch in both direction +/-?
But... that's kinda the point, no? I mean, why should a jack of all trades ship beat specialised ship if both of the ships are rougly the same size / resource cost?
Yeah, I wasn't complaining, just letting him know lol. So far it hasn't been a huge deal, though a lower CPU tier shield generator would help just so you had a little protection from initial shots so you can try to run away, not for combat or anything.
For the ships I'm running. I haven't had to strip much down at all. Maybe remove some RCS and a extra thruster here or there. Nothing special. I don't even think it stops multi role ships at all. (which I'm totally fine with). I feel like the CPU take away the ability to slap 50 thrusters and 100 of cargo boxes on anything and go to war with it. T he only difference I see now is you have to put more thought into your build. I haven't needed the Tier 4 yet and I have some pretty big CVs. Of course there is the off switch if I ever want to build without any restrictions which I'm thankful for.
What is going on with auto-brake staying on in Orbit, even when you have it turned off. With auto-brake turned off you should continue at forward momentum indefinitely. Even when I turn it off my ship acts like it is being affected by atmosphere and slows down.
All the builds I tried had were SVs with a warp drive, shields, and combat armor. I've had to take all of that out of all of them to get them down to T2 level. They add tons to the CPU. Seems like shields and warp drives for SVs are T3 or T4 only.
