Oolite Bulletins

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

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.

To stuff 35 TC inside a Cobra Mk 3, it won't all be piled around the centre of the ship - the cargo bay will be short but wide (go more or less wingtip to wingtip). So given the same reaction wheels or thrusters, since much of the cargo mass is on the edges of a wide flat ship like that, roll rate is adversely affected.

An Anaconda, being a long pointy thing, will instead have a narrow but long cargo bay meaning the loading effects will be most noticable in the pitch axis.

on the other hand: on a wide ship, the thrusters (or space-time-benders or
whatever) can be located further away from the center. so a wide ship with
the same mass and roll power would roll better than a narrow one, since the
mass of a ship tend to be concentated in the center an not evenly distributed
over the width of the ship (they hav bellies and wings or are at least flat
rather than being cubes or spheres). on ships that 'look fat', the extremities
are relatively closer to the center than on ships that are flat, long, wide, ...,
and would turn less easily assuming same relative thrust/mass.

On a wider ship the thrusters have more leverage - but so does the cargo.

Ahruman wrote:

On a wider ship the thrusters have more leverage - but so does the cargo.

Unless the ship consist of subentities, whose subentities act as engine units while the main hull acts as storage (i.e. bulk). A very big ship could therefore be quite manouvreable, because its centre of mass was centred around its centre of pivot, while its engines lay some distance from the centre of mass. The only real question that remains is "How does the crew cope with this manouverability, if they are similarly displaced from that centre of pivot? Wherein lies an answer based on semi-authoritative-sounding bullshiting.

[quote:Winston]To stuff 35 TC inside a Cobra Mk 3, it won't all be piled around the centre of the ship [/quote]

Weeel... if you bring up that point, an anaconda would have to be half the size of a coriolis in order to handle those 750 TC.

how would that 750 tonnes extra weight affect the maneuvrability of the 150tonne frame?
I tend to think it would render it totally uncontrollable.