Propulsion? |
Does anyone think that the propulsion model should be changed for space ships (possibly stay the same for troops). Since a ships top speed shouldn't be dependant on the number of engines. The engines should be able to provide an amount of thrust or basically the more engines will result in increased acceleration to a specified top speed.
I don't know how caption kwok's mod changes the engines, but would what I suggest even be possible?
Re: Propulsion?
I think what largedarryl wants is not QNP, though, but true Newtonian propulsion where the *acceleration* depends on the number of engines, and the top speed is some constant. Unfortunately I don't think that's possible - the way the game's coded is that the acceleration is constant (for each hull) and the engines affect speed... just the opposite 
~~~
The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious 
Re: Propulsion?
Well theoretically (newtonian) there should be no limit on the top speed of a ship, but I understand that one should be present.
I am also wondering if the balance mod affects the acceleration during tactical/strategic combat simulations. Since this is where I am most concerned with the acceleration vs top speed relationship.
@ekolis, I do know that the default game is the opposite that I would expect, but I had noticed in captian kwok's balance mod he mentioned the change to engines vs ship size tweak, but I never played SE3 to know how the changes were done.
Thanks for the prompt response.
Re: Propulsion?
Unfortunately the acceleration rate is not a formula field and is therefore constant for a hull size, regardless of the number of engines present. If it was made into a formula field, then it would be easy to add a formula to base acceleration on the number of engines present.
The reference to SE:III style propulsion is that each class of ship requires roughly the same percentage of space for engines on the design. In stock SE:IV and SE:V, this is not the case.
-----
Re: Propulsion?
Would it be possible to implement that percentage-per-hull method for engines in SEV?
"Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and will always long to return." ~Leonardo DaVinci
Re: Propulsion?
yes and no, QNP is possable under the current layout, but it's a pain in the ass. you either have to add loads and loads of engines for the larger ship sizes, or have a bunch of different size engines, which fills up the component window.
we're currently working on aaron to give us a working "get_ship_size" for the components.txt this will allow us to change the size and supply usage of an engine depending on the size of the hull.
I LOVE proper QNP where there's no top limit on the engens a ship can have. it adds strategy, yo have to figure if you want fast short ranged ships, or slower long range ones. or you can add a bunch of transports to your fast fleet which are filled with supplys. supply usage becomes more critial in a proper QNP system when you've got faster ships.
-----
an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.
Re: Propulsion?
That would be an excellent application to this game. Since no ship would have a top speed, but you would be able to put as many engines as you want to get the acceleration you want. I think that would be a little difficult to port over to the system view (number of hexes to move). I do think that you guys have the right ideas, but just not the tools to do it yet.
This would make the strategic combat better, IMHO. Since lighter ships would ideally be what they are suppossed to be and may still have a use when larger ships are researched.
I don't mean to be an idiot, but I haven't been around this forum for a while what are you refering to with QNP? I'm not an idiot, but all I can think of is Quantaum Propulsion, and I don't think thats right.
Re: Propulsion?
Quasi-Newtonian Propulsion. Newtonian propulsion is what you want, where Force = Mass * Acceleration; Quasi-Newtonian propulsion is the approximation that Balance Mod uses, where Force ~= Mass * Velocity. (I say ~= instead of = because for instance a level 3 frigate at 300kT has the same engines-per-move ratio as a level 1 frigate at 250kT, even though it is 20% larger! I suppose you could say that the level 3 frigate just has more *usable* tonnage and less overhead, though...)
~~~
The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: Propulsion?
Thanks for the explanation. I can see how that method is a little better, but as you said x ~= y*z so its still not exact. Of course if you would actually implement newtonian propulsion you would need to make an upper limit, but that would be easier to just set an arbitrary top speed. Mainly because for ingame, the theoretical top speed would be extremely difficult to calculate.
I suppose you could make a fairly high top speed, then using an extremely large tactical battle area would actually be useful.
As se5a said, if aragon gives a "get_ship_size" function to you modders, an accurate engine model could be developed.
I don't know how the ground combat speed would be calculated. This would either need to be kept the same or an even more complex formula would need to be used i.e. force = (mass * accel) - (physical size * atmosphere modifier * gravity) - (mass * gravity). Since the higher gravity planets would theoretically have higher pressures (except no atmoshpere which would have a atmosphere modifier of 0) and then you would need enough force to overcome gravity (as my assumption is that troops hover above the ground). So this would become a more difficult model to code. I think that an easier way of simulating the ground movement would be a % of used space needs to be allocated to engines.
Re: Propulsion?
That's more or less the system in the Balance Mod. Each engine provides a number of movement points, ie thrust, while each ship has a different number of movement points required to gain 1 actual movement.
For example:
Ion Engines deliver 100 movement points per engine, and so 5 engines provide 500 total movement points. A Frigate requires 40 movement points to travel 1 hex, so it has a movement of 12 per turn (as movement is always rounded down).
There is a max engine cap for each hull, so it's not quite a free QNP system where you can add as many engines to a design as you want.
-----
Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod