Trade-offs

[winston]

One thing I do miss about FFE and FE2 was everything had a tradeoff. Equip your ship as a fighter, and you had to trade off cargo space. Try and haul cargo and you had to sacrifice fuel. Now I'm not saying do the same to Oolite, but perhaps making some things have tradeoffs would be worthwhile.

For example, load the ship full of cargo and it won't handle like it does empty. The larger proportion that the weight of the cargo is to the weight of the ship, the bigger effect. Perhaps make some pieces of equipment have adverse effects on handling. That sort of thing. I think it would be good to see a few more tradeoffs so it's not just a matter of more stuff tacked onto your ship is better.

[JensAyton]

That’s one way Escape Velocity woops Elite’s arse: equipment space restrictions mean you have to make trade-off decisions, big weapons need big ships etc. (You can convert cargo space to equipment space and vice versa, but the process is lossy.)

[Rxke]

That's a problem I see happening with the OXP's... Every ships seems more powerful, faster, well-equipped... it's tempting, but eventually, when you start out fresh, you're outgunned by a lot of ships...

Supersleek, uberagile ships, with gazillion energybanks and lasers...

[Flying_Circus]

I need a refresher on the timer-cut-in I mentioned the other day. You can basically specify how long into the actual game play (using the game's clock) a certain type of ship starts appearing. We could add this type of thing to any ship we uploaded. Some of mine are certainly guilty in that respect (although I always try to base mine on a subset of features slightly below an established favourite - even if that is often the Wolf or Behemoth!)

[Murgh]

That's a problem I see happening with the OXP's... Every ships seems more powerful, faster, well-equipped... it's tempting, but eventually, when you start out fresh, you're outgunned by a lot of ships...

Supersleek, uberagile ships, with gazillion energybanks and lasers...

that will stop when Winston says uncle.

[TGHC]

load the ship full of cargo and it won't handle like it does empty. The larger proportion that the weight of the cargo is to the weight of the ship, the bigger effect. Perhaps make some pieces of equipment have adverse effects on handling.

Only in a gravitational field, in space you are weightless.

[winston]

load the ship full of cargo and it won't handle like it does empty. The larger proportion that the weight of the cargo is to the weight of the ship, the bigger effect. Perhaps make some pieces of equipment have adverse effects on handling.

Only in a gravitational field, in space you are weightless.

Weighless, not *massless*! Put more stuff in a ship and it'll have more inertia whether it's close to another massive body with gravitational pull or not. Momentum = mass * velocity. Kinetic energy = 0.5 * mass * velocity ^ 2. And so on. Even assuming the Oolite ships have some not-yet-invented method of propulsion, you can't escape the more stuff you pile into your ship, the harder it will be to start, stop, rotate, pitch etc.

[Arexack_Heretic]

yes. Inertial dampeners are startrek not elite.

[TedJ]

Weighless, not *massless*! Put more stuff in a ship and it'll have more inertia whether it's close to another massive body with gravitational pull or not. Momentum = mass * velocity. Kinetic energy = 0.5 * mass * velocity ^ 2. And so on. Even assuming the Oolite ships have some not-yet-invented method of propulsion, you can't escape the more stuff you pile into your ship, the harder it will be to start, stop, rotate, pitch etc.

I agree. Assuming that a ships listed specs are for it's dry weight, then adding cargo should have an adverse effect on pitch, roll and thrust (not top speed of course, no atmosphere).

IIRC, the Naga has better roll and pitch characteristics than some of the fighters in the core game... weird unless we assume it's empty.

[Arexack_Heretic]

I'm assuming that the cargohold are configured/loaded in such a way, that the center of gravity will always be as close to to centre of the ship as possible. So loading of cargo would only increase its inertia, not stability.
I am thinking that judging from what I just read in the wiki, the strange non-newtonian physics of the engines causes the topspeed, not the mass.
So topspeed is in essence equal to enginepower and thrust reflects the inertia/acceleration of the ship.

I don't quite know how to calculate, but 0 speed and 100 thrust is a massive object, and 100speed and 50 thrust is a superagile and quite fast thing.
I think we'd need to reinvent the physics, and introduce mass to the ship properties, if you go messing with cargoweight.

I don't like where this is going, too FE2/FFE.

[winston]

You only have to look at some of the ships to see the mass won't all be near the centre. Big long pointy ships like the Boa would probably fare best in roll because they are big long and pointy - however, because they are long, fully loaded with cargo, you should notice the effect on pitch rate. But a wide flat ship like a Cobra should have a very noticable roll rate impediment when fully loaded, but less effect in pitch. It will *always* affect the rate at which speed can be changed.

Note this is most certainly *not* going FE2/FFE like because these games didn't factor the ship's loading into the calculation (the FE2/FFE ships would perform the same way regardless of how they were loaded).

So unlike FFE/FE2, loading would make a difference to combat and add something you must consider when hauling cargo. Or even piracy - will terrorizing that Anaconda into spilling its cargo into your fuel scoop mean that your subsequent encounter with Police will force you to dump it just so you can beat the Police off?

[neilplus]

Maybe ship manufacturers are required by law to declare their ship's worse case performance parameters in their specs? If the ship's less heavily loaded, the fly by wire system holds it down to the worst case level in order to maintain a consistent piloting experience.

Cue illegal flight controller hacks, available at all good rock hermits

[Arexack_Heretic]

ok, granted. I tend to put the centre of mass on ships like the boa more to the rear also.
Why would a C3's roll be affected? The centre of gravity is still in the middle and the force applied from wingtip mounted thrusters will be far more effective. (leverage/newtons laws)
...inertia to roll would increase as more mass is distributed further away from ship's-roll axis.

A few points though;
-I feel the intertial dampening effect of the flightmodel explains why cargo-loading is not a factor.
-This could easilly mess up gameplay totally, with freighters that maneuvre like moons iso glaciers.

But it might be fun to play around with afterall.

[JensAyton]

AH: the complete answer to your question involves explaining how to calculate inertia tensors. I hope that’s answer enough for you. ;-)

[Ramirez]

I agree there need to be reasonable trade-offs. In FE2/FFE of course you had the size of the equipment to consider, so unless you were cheating you couldn't expect to cram multiple shields and heavy lasers into a small fighter.

I see in the notes for the 6.1 test release that the pitch and roll variation has been modified to be a bit more representative, but I don't know what that's based on (I haven't downloaded it yet). It wouldn't be difficult take the dimensions of each ship and use those to calculate some maximum performance figures. These could be used as guidlelines for OXP makers so that ships are well balanced in-game, helping to avoid the arms race that looks to be happening. Further refinements can then be made within these limits so as to get some interesting variation.

Some of the larger ships do seem rather too manoeuverable, so much so that when I eventually bought a Hamadryad, instead of entering the contract cargo market as I intended, I saved up for some shields and turned it into a very effective pirate gunship.