What figures can you come up with for large ships with a mass of 1,000 and 5,000?

Well the magnitude of each parameter (i.e. whether it's millions as in 990000000 or tens as in 990) is a matter of personal preference - as long as the ratios remain the same the handling will be the same. But of course the ship using 990 will bounce around a bit when it's hit by a ship with 990000000! lol

For these two masses, my method gives these figures:
Mass = 1000
drag/mass = 1,100
Handling: Medium freighter / gunboat (turn rate = 0.9 radians /sec)
steering_torque = 990000, 990000, 990000
angular_drag = 1100000, 1100000, 1100000
rotation_inertia = 220000, 220000, 220000

Mass = 5000
Handling: Very heavy cruiser / heavy freighter / battleship (turn rate = 0.55 radians/sec)
drag/mass = 1,800,000
steering_torque = 4950000000, 4950000000, 4950000000
angular_drag = 9000000000, 9000000000, 9000000000
rotation_inertia = 1800000000, 1800000000, 1800000000

The drag/mass ratio for each is in line with the original FL ship types (they aren't linear!) - the medium freighter/gunboat is 1,100 units per mass unit and the battleship is 1,800,000 units per mass unit in original FL so I used these.

The turn rate (angular velocity) is torque divided by drag, to change it just multiply the drag by the radians/second that you want for each ship to get the new torque values, leave the drag & inertia as they are.

Let me know how it works out for you.

Roleplay: - the art of self-deceipt!


Edited by - StarTrader on 10/2/2007 5:41:53 AM

Thanks for the feedback.
One question though, On quite a few ships I've noticed where the Z value was
practially double of the X and Y values.
Whereas you have these figures:
Mass = 5000
Handling: Very heavy cruiser / heavy freighter / battleship (turn rate = 0.55 radians/sec)
drag/mass = 1,800,000
steering_torque = 4950000000, 4950000000, 4950000000
angular_drag = 9000000000, 9000000000, 9000000000
rotation_inertia = 1800000000, 1800000000, 1800000000

I've seen figures resembling this:
steering_torque = 4950000000, 4950000000, 4950000000
angular_drag = 9000000000, 9000000000, 18000000000
rotation_inertia = 1800000000, 1800000000, 36000000000

Any idea why they would double the figures on the Z axis?

Yes the roll is doubled for fighters, so that they roll into and out of the turns better.

It's not needed for larger ships, and I use a limit of less than 600 mass to apply the doubling, I've explained that in my post above.

So for your big ships don't use doubling.

The problem is most modders have just copied existing handling figures into their ships, so you see silly numbers in the millions for fighters.

The drag:mass ratios (coefficients) that I use will fix that, see the "coefficient table" in the post.

Let me know how you get on.

That which is solid as a rock in Open Single Player
becomes like a ragdoll in Multiplayer.
***What could be missing from the Multiplayer files
that could be causing this catastrophic ship collision problem?


This is a mystifying problem to me.
A ship with the mass and figures that make it solid
in Open Single Player (and single player).
Take the same ship and figures into a Multiplayer Environment,
suddenly, those figures aren't worth a nickle.
The ships spin very badly on the pitch (X) axis
when ships of equal or smaller mass collide with it.
This is insane. So, this is the reason for my question *** above.


I have confidence in your figures,
but for this particular problem leaves me wondering
what could be missing from the Multiplayer Files or
Server Engine (if any) that could be causing this.
Rational thinking dictates that if it works fine in SP/OSP,
is should also work identically the same in MP.
Does this not make sense?

In other words, we're treating the symptoms,
but we're not finding the cause of the illness
so we can apply the correct "medicine" for it
to cure the problem.

Edited by - Rankor on 10/2/2007 4:17:30 PM

Yes this has been the problem from the start.

It's to do with damping, there are settings in constants.ini but I haven't played with them yet.

Since I proportioned all of my ships' inertias and torques, they now only spin once or twice before stopping after a collision, and they don't shoot off at 1100 m/sec like they used to unless they're hit by a much bigger ship - even then its not at such high speed and they stop fairly quickly. The only annoying problem I have now is when a smaller NPC ship enters a big one that I'm flying, then it still spins like crazy and is uncontrollable until the smaller ship gets out again.

There are several different settings between SP and MP, the first one I noticed was the distance that ships disappear, my resized ships looked fine at up to 6k in SP but disappeared at 2.5k in MP. There are a lot of others, as exampled in the exe hacks info.

If you have a go at the damping settings put up a post with your findings? Thanks.

Roleplay: - the art of self-deceipt!

hi,

i am interested in big ship handling and came up with my own workable figures - besides this i also mapped out the missing physics constants you speak of. Now, i've shared this with Rankor before and his bleating continued ubabated so i don't know, maybe it just won't work for some but for me it works in MP and SP just fine. Here's my work


[PhySysConsts
DEFAULT_ANGULAR_DAMPING = 15, 15, 15
DEFAULT_LINEAR_DAMPING = 10
;///////////////////////////////////////////
MIN_TIME_BETWEEN_COLLISIONS = 0.150000
;///////////////////////////////////////////
MATERIAL_ELASTICITY = 0.150000
MATERIAL_FRICTION = 0.600000
ANOM_LIMITS_MAX_ANGULAR_VELOCITY_PER_PSI = 100

the last one sets max turning speed, eg you cannot exceed this no matter what your ship stats are

here are my rheinland battleship numbers, i believe this is the wonkiest ship and therefore these stats are probably more illustrative

{Shi}
linear_drag = 0
mass = 35000
hold_size = 750
nanobot_limit = 0
shield_battery_limit = 15
max_bank_angle = 5
;///////////////////////////////////////////
steering_torque = 420000000000, 420000000000, 420000000000
angular_drag = 5000000000000, 5000000000000, 5000000000000
rotation_inertia = 45000000000, 45000000000, 45000000000
nudge_force = 30000000
strafe_force = 1500000

{Engine}
nickname = rh_battleship_engine
volume = 0.000000
mass = 10.000000
max_force = 4000000
linear_drag = 35000
power_usage = -2600
reverse_fraction = 0.200000

honestly i don't know how it works(i stole my basic proportions from arghs XML toolkit gunboats), and I'm not much interested in working out math formulas for perfect handling - I can -see- whether a ship turns too fast/slow, and accelerates fast/slow etc, all of which can be tweaked to spec at ease - stability is what matters with these big ships, and to get it you need proportional mass. what does a WWII aircraft carrier weigh? now compare that to a WWII fighter, and you get the correct proportion of mass for FL ships. so why, why, why, would a fighter mass even so much as 1/20th of a battleship? likewise, forces must be scaled correctly - the 1000 horsepower of your fighter vs the half million+ horsepower of the BS. not to say that's all of it, the whole thing seemed to be very tangled up, but i think getting force and mass to reflect realistic values produces the best results.

Startrader,
You noticed that fighters (basically small ships) "pass through" the larger ships, and when they do that..is when all hell breaks loose.
Could some form of phantom physics have been enabled to cause this?
Or could it be some missing information in the MP mode that is normally found
in SP/OSP mode?
I noticed in SP/OSP that they cannot penetrate the shield sphere or the ship itself. Even when they collided with the large ship, they simply bounced off
leaving the large ship in its stable state.
(This also included the large transports that collided with it)
However, as you pointed out, when equally large ships collided with it,
there was a noticeable movement from the collision,
but not nearly as "out of control" as it is in MP.

In MP...
I've also noticed that when they collide with a portion of the shield sphere
at/or near the end (front and back) that this also tends to cause the catostrophic spin out.

Cold_Void, I appreciate your figures. No need to be insulting.
I'm just being the "squeaky wheel" at the moment.
However, what I'm looking for is those differences between MP & SP/OSP that seems to be at the root of this problem. So in effect, once those differences are addressed and set identically with each other...we can "cure" the problem instead of treat the symptoms.

If I understand you correctly, the proportional setups you have used has
given you the best results.
Did this make the ships handle identically in SP/OSP and MP modes?
Did this eliminate the spin out problem with ship collisions or just effectively reduce it?

Although this may be unrelated, it might give a clue.
You have no doubt noticed that collisions with stations (solar objects) with masses normally around only 1000 will ignore being hit by ships and remain fixed in space. So, then we have large ships with mass much higher being effectively rendered useless as a flyable ship. Besides some missing values for stations, what's the difference between them and large ships?
We already know you can't have a flyable station(ary) object.
(You remember requests how some modders wanted a flyable/dockable station
and we already know the game engine does not support this....although
we have seen one instance where this <span style="text-decoration: underline">seems</span> to have been done)



Edited by - Rankor on 10/3/2007 8:59:05 AM

Rankor, you can't rebuild the engine to include physics calculations that weren't allowed for in MP - end of the road there. Is that an oversimplification? you betchya, but it fits - there are no numerical values that could be deduced and fixed to match in MP/SP that would fix the problem you're focused on. 'ay gyaranty it' as the burlington coat factory guy says.

yes, my stats work rock steady in SP and in MP they allow for very slow spin-out when hit by an NPC or player. for a player bouncing off of it, it *will* feel unmovable, because their ship will bounce *more* than the capship, which is the correct and expected reaction.

P.S. the last time i posted this experience you said something like 'hmm, well does it work?' well why do you think i posted it? you think i just post bogus crap and talk out my rear? instead of asking if they work, why not take 5 minutes to plug in my numbers and SEE for yourself, since you won't believe me?

The elasticity parameter should be referring to the elasticity of the collision - if it's near to 1 then this means that almost all the collision force is absorbed in the collision, and the ships will stick together, if it's near to 0 then the ships will repell each other more strongly and therefore bounce apart more, like glass marbles?

We need to use Cold_Void's figures to see the effect.

The important thing I think is that the same formulae must be applied to all ships in the same mod for proportional effect, because if we don't do that then the ships will not behave proportionally in reactions too.

I'm still trying to sort out my path files and infocards for my mod because its over 2 months late in release, so unfortunately I can't deviate enough to test out the collisions myself at the moment. But as I think you have seen from my earlier posts, I try to get to where I understand one subject fairly well when I do get my teeth into it, and although this is now less of a priority at this time, it's still bugging me.

Thanks for your good input guys, don't get het-up with each other, it's our common interest to get to the bottom of this and other "why?"s. I mean, if we weren't members of this "club" what else would we do with our time?

I have my moments of extreme frustration too! lol


Roleplay: - the art of self-deceipt!

Edited by - StarTrader on 10/3/2007 2:45:36 PM