Just wanted to share an experience with RCS after the latest update. I have a Capital ship I built over a couple of months and was dreading sifting through it to bring it up to date. It was using 67 Million CPU and wouldn't get off the ground, even with the CPU limitations turned off. One of my grumbles with the space flight is that the ships would turn like a matchstick and it lacked any realism, coming back I was told 'just remove all the RCS they don't do anything anyway'. Wrong. I had 50 x T2 RCS ( was never an issue before ) now the Weight and CPU was key. I've reduced this to 6. 4 x T2 and 2 x T1. It moves beautifully. In space there is slight drag which gives the feeling of weight yet can turn 90 degrees with one sweep of the mouse. After swapping out one XXL thruster for a L nd 4 x Medium on both sides I'm now well within my T4 CPU at 9,800,000. Really pleased with the result and after my initial grumbles with the changes can really see the logic behind it. So for anybody that has a ship which is millions over CPU. RCS / Thrusters - that's your path to victory.
The CPU cost for RCS is way to high for what it provides. Thrusters give torque+thrust. Why pay 5x the CPU cost for half the stats? You need to distance your thrusters away from the center of each axis to get maximum torque. A bunch of thrusters dead center of the ship won't provide torque. I'd remove those last 6 RCS and spend them on more thrusters so you can get better acceleration. It's an inefficient use of CPU to use even a single RCS. If you're not getting the torque you think you should have, it's probably because you don't know how to optimally place thrusters. There's some thought that needs to go into it now, you can't just place them anywhere like you could before.
Here's my findings: In my regular vehicles, the addition of a single RCS improves the turning and handling significantly enough that I don't want to run them without, especially HV's. In small SV's I can often get away with thruster-only maneuvering. In CV's I find 2 RCS to give the correct "feel" for maneuvering. In terms of cost, I find a single RCS to be reasonable enough, and my small HV's and SV's rarely use all of my CPU. A few more utilitarian models reach T2 CPU. The T2 RCS, on the other hand, is so grossly overpriced I don't bother to unlock them until I have nothing else to spend tech points on, and even then I don't build any. To the OP: 50 RCS2's??? My largest CV, the Citidel-class, which exceeds the spawn limits of any server I've seen, and spans the full build-length limit on X, Y, and Z, required 4 T2 RCS for maneuverability. Tested with 5 and was getting about 180 degree turns on any axis with about 5 degrees of mouse movement, which rendered it uncontrollable.
indigo that's probably because your thrusters were so far from the "center of mass" that the torque they generated was insane. RCS only solve the issue of thruster placement, to SOME degree. if you've put the thrusters in a smart place...you don't need them. but sometimes you can't control thruster placement without ruining the "look" of the ship...so use an RCS.
In some cases, I will say that is definitely the case, especially where my Citidel-class CV is concerned - it's about a minute and a half motorcycle ride from engine to engine there. I do generally try to place thrusters in their most ideal locations, but as you've noted, that can impact the design look, but even on smaller CV's, SV's and HV's I find adding even one T1 RCS to make a notable difference. My drop-pod SV's can get away with no RCS's, as they're meant to be, well, dropped from obit, land on the surface, and be dismantled for components, though it is possible to get them back into orbit and re-dock with the ship that dropped them, though it's a very slow and painful flight.
