Try a regular switch set to ON. But, actually, I think I know what the problem is: the state of the door is getting reset due to the SV going through it (i.e. the door closes automatically after an SV passes through it). I'm not sure this can be worked around until the automatic behavior of doors is made optional.
I love the fuel economy for CV thrusters and RCS. I just finished building a ship with a ton of RCS and thrust, it's crazy fast, and crazy maneuverable, and it eats fuel fast that it's unfeasible to use it except in emergency situations. I had to create maneuverability groups, "basic", "urgent", "emergency", and "ludicrous" so that I could manage fuel consumption based on situation/demanded performance. I do wish that ludicrous performance would also injure passengers, everytime a CV makes a flip turn I expect the occupants to liquify, and it's a little jarring that nobody minds, but I think the fuel economy its self (especially the 10 minutes of in-atmo time for the CV) is awesome
I believe a great improvement would be to allow for constructing on more than one axis of symmetry. Unless there is currently a way to select more than one axis?
I don't like that all Tier II items have to be made from a kit that can only be found or purchased. That's artificial, gamey, and feels fake and disruptive. This is especially true with damage and repair. I can understand needing to find or purchase the original blueprint, but once you have that, you should HAVE it. No more need for finding and purchasing! After the initial research and initial find or purchase, the player should be able to make the items at will! What's the point of having a tech tree and building system if only the AI can make certain items? This is a major flaw! Players should be able to make all items that are available in the game, even if they have to jump a hurdle to get the first item.
Anything over about 30 m/s^2 (3 G's) should definitely be hurting the ship's occupants. And it should take quite a bit of effort to make a ship capable of such accelerations. Anyway, I've long been of the opinion that the ratio of thrust-to-input-power for thrusters is actually at least a factor of 10 too high. My 4kt CV has 4 L Thrusters to serve as landing engines, and it has ~200 m/s^2 upward while getting about 12 minutes in atmosphere (with 22800 fuel capacity); if thrusters consumed 10x the input power or produced 10x less thrust (reduced thrust would be my preference), CVs would have much more reasonable performance. It's utterly ridiculous and really goes against the spirit of the game.
Given the fact that coasters regularly achieve accelerations of 4 or 5, sometimes up to 6G this seems a bit conservative to me. And while the acceleration according to reality should be limited, the gameplay hinders that to quite an extend: The problem is, that we dont have aerodynamics in the game (and i dont want to have it to be true). That means, that you even in atmosphere have to rely on the thrust of your engines, without the help of uplift. So, basically, you have to achieve about 1.5G to at least lift off (There are planets with high gravity around!). To ensure, that you easily can get 1.5G on the one hand, but on the other cannot go above, say ... 4G? without major effort could be fiddly if you dont want to use artificial hard limits.
Most CVs aren't going to derive much, if any, lift if/when aerodynamics are implemented (and I do hope they are; it would be another thing to discourage improperly designed CVs from landing on planets with atmospheres). But you're right that 3g is too conservative in reality; it just feels appropriate given the current max speed. Perhaps 4g or 5g would be better. If all CV thrusters had 10x less thrust, it wouldn't be that hard to get most CVs to 2g thrust for taking off from a planet, but it would make endurance a central concern. A 10 kt CV would require 10 L Thrusters in that case, which would consume 80 MW (not even 1 T2 generator), and require 14 T3 fuel tanks for 1 hour of flight at full power (total system mass: ~4 kt). My point is, right now there are no tradeoffs to be made when designing a high-performance CV; it can be as massive as you want, and you can still make it hit 10g without much trouble at all. Consider a 1 Mt CV: 120 XL thrusters give it 96 m/s^2 and require 8 T2 generators and 600 T3 fuel tanks for 1 hour of full power (169 kt system mass). Reduce thrust by a factor of 10, and suddenly 1200 XL thrusters are needed, along with 80 T2 generators, and just the mass of the thrusters and generators add up to about 730 kt. I think a 10x reduction in thrust would be a great (and very very easy) way to implement a soft limit on acceleration, by forcing players to pick only two of: payload mass, acceleration, and endurance.
I misunderstood what you were saying before. I actually think the thrust output is totally reasonable, but I do think that the power requirements should be much higher when you said thrust/power was to high, I assumed you were talking about requiring more power, which I think would be really interesting, but as it stands I think reducing thrust would actually make vehicles less fun to pilot And you know, I think you should bleed out the ears when you go too fast
I agree with your goal, but i would prefer another way to achieve it. Lowering the thrust of a thruster means, that i need more of them. This is desired by you in order to consume more fuel. But you run into a design problem: You wont be able to design small ships, because you need so many thrusters. Additionally, you would lower the thrust/mass ratio of a thruster dramatically, and that means: the payload per thruster for a given acc goes down, dramatically. To illustrate the latter, some numbers: Lets say you want to achieve a acc of 1.5G in all directions. Thats not much, anyway. With L Thrusters you get a thrust in each direction of 200MN, while you need one for each direction, in sum 1050kt. While 200MN can accelerate about 13.3kt with 1.5G, that leaves just over 12kt for each sixpack of L-thrusters. If the thrust of them was only a tenth, they would acc only 1333t with 1.5G, so you have not even 300kg payload for 6 L-thrusters! No way this works out. But instead of lowering the thrust one could raise the energy consumption. You dont need more thrusters, just more fuel. To further accentuate this, there could be a nonlinear dependency: Each thruster needs the 1.x-fold of energy of that before. This way the stacking of thrusters (and the max acc) would come to a halt very fast. Just adding the 1080 additional XL-Thrusters would push the mass of this ship to whopping 649Mt. The acceleration of that beast would be about 0.15m/s^2. Energy consumption is not of any more concern in this example. And that this has to be done for each direction makes it worse by factor 6. This wont work. And we have the prove of that already: the devs tried this on the HV-Thrusters, with catastrophical outcome.
Hold on, I think your mass numbers are off by 3 orders of magnitude; the L Thruster has a mass of 175 tons (not 175 kt), right? If thrust were reduced by a factor of 10, your 13.3 kt ship would need 10 L thrusters in each direction to have 1.5g acceleration in every direction, for a total of 60 L Thrusters with a mass of 10.5 kt, leaving just under 3 kt for the T2 large generator, some fuel tanks, and the payload. All right, so perhaps a factor of 10 might be too much (for my initial calculations, I was only considering the main drive thrusters, not maneuvering or braking thrusters, as I generally intend my CVs to flip-and-burn for deceleration); perhaps reduce the thrust by a factor of 3 and increase the power consumption by a factor of 10, then? CV thrusters have substantially more egregiously unbalanced stats, though; I would only want to see power input increases for HV thrusters.
Yeah, perhaps a factor of 10 reduction in thrust is too much (how does 3 sound?); but I'm definitely on board with a massive increase in power consumption. Yep, it'd be great if prolonged exposure to high accelerations caused issues with your vision and/or health.[/QUOTE]
Ahh fu... once again: ... working ... in my example i confused something, sorry. The one 'k' was wrong: 200MN, 13300t with 15m/s^2. 6 thrusters, 1050t -> 12250t payload. And the "kg" should read "t": one tenth thrust, 10fold thrusters, 10500t -> 280t payload for six thrusters. (and you were wrong, too: by just one magnitude instead of my three ) your example: here is was really off by far. its not 648Mt but 648 kt; the resulting ship has a acceleration of 58 m/s^2. Sounds not too bad, but it just one direction! If you do that in all six directions, you end up with a ship of just under 5Mt and a mean acceleration of 20m/s^2. And apart of all the numbers: i do strongly dislike the idea to cover my ships in thrusters. Again, i dont argue against your idea to limit ship size by energy consumption. But not this way. Stick with raising the fuel demand /per thruster/ and leave the amount of thrusters alone. They are too many already. There was a time, thrust to weight ratio was so low, a HV could not climb a hill anymore. They reverted this, partially, for good reason.
Yeah, I do see your point about not wanting a ship to be a cube of thrusters. It sounds like the best way forward would be to increase power consumption by a factor of 10 and see what changes that provokes in ship design. And I'd say that we could use an XXL thruster to help keep device counts down (4x4x8, mass 2.5 kt, thrust 3 GN, input power 110 MW (or 1.1 GW with the proposed power consumption increase)). Ah, I see; definitely not a good thing.
Is there any good reason why warp tanks are limited to One per vessel? It really wrecks my symmetry to not be able to put 2 on.
45 Degree angle Spot Light: The new texture is 1000x better than the one you used yesterday! Thank you for the prop, very useful! Also thank you for varying the degree the light shines, doubles the utility of the prop!
I would like to see the addition of larger hanger doors, such that I can place one in the ceiling/floor of my BA/CV for vertical takeoff and landing. Perhaps one that opens from center in both directions, roughly twice the size of the current largest? For larger SVs. Other than that, I'm quite pleased with how things are shaping up with the game!
You can already put 2 hangar doors "base to base" to make it "double size" and thus they open from the center. So for the largest one it means 14 x 14 (double 14x7) or 10 x 18 (double 10x9). You could also use the 5x5 shutter doors in the same manner, and since they don't have "sides" you can also put many side-by-side, making 10 by (multiples of 5) doors. Only problem with this config is to have them all opening at the same time...
