Scuba,
take a Moth
load it with Chaos swarms
start at 0ms/
set full throttle and time it to 50/ms (To keep the top end curve effect down) Ends up being about 60 seconds.
Stop
Lock Turbo, and time that. (20 seconds)

SMM

I think you want to restrict base speed by ship frame, or have a frame rating that effects the top speed of all engines placed into it. Otherwise we would only need one model of any ship, and just get to play around with the engine for most of the variance.

This could add in however an additional parameter or two. For the primary engine, there could be models that actually do draw basic power, and change ship top speeds by a fixed percentage.

Another aspect to think about, is rotational speeds or turn. Those figures are not apparent on any model of ship currently, but there is no reason I can see that those could also not be part of the basic engine paramaters.

I do wonder however why the decision was made to have all batteries weigh the same. Some of this could have been done at that level.

I am going to change what I said above about locking speed to the ship model type. On my way to work I got to thinking about it, and one other game that really impressed me with engine configuration and control was the Need for Speed series.

I don't know if any of you have played need for speed, but that game had a great model of custom configuration for cars, and an easy to understand way to display and manage how individual performance worked out. I think something like that for our engines (if we ever got them) would be really effective. Seeing the triangle from SMM sparked this line of thinking for me.

So engines start off with a very basic design. Weight to trust and power consumption for turbos. You buy an engine of a certain weight and produces a standard N thrust.

Now with that engine you can configure different components of how that trust is handled. For example, in need for speed, depending on the type of race you were in, you were more interested in top speed vs. acceleration. So a way to configure that existed in the transmission. In our case it could be represented like so.



Additional configuration could be done along the line of the way the power is delivered. For example, say your combat style involves a lot of strafe with very little backing up or reliance on forward thrust. You have an engine that is rated for 200 N. You reconfigure your engines to offer slightly better lateral and vertical thrust at the expense of your horizontal. As you can see from the example, it would be possible to exceed the default 200 N for one or two directions, but at a significant cost to your third. Obviously this cost would have to be higher than 1/1, or be 1/1 but affect more than one other position. (E.G. +1N for X over 200 = -1N for Y and Z)



A third configuration option could be at what velocity the engines operate at ideal. In this way you could determine when your ship delivers the most power, so as the insure the optimal configuration for your fighting style. By mixing these up with the turbo and standard engines you could set up so that turbo is most effective at the higher speeds, while your main engines are more for the lower speeds. Turbo could be configured to run at very low power once in the top range of speed, so as to conserve energy as well as optimize early thrust.





There are limitless possibilities with a gradient system like this. Provided that the weight to N ratio is not unbalanced, the system should be fair, effective, and fun.

Different engines could be designed to favor certain styles. Engines that favor certain configurations by having a different exchange ratio for certain aspects. Say for example sprint engines that allow for much more larger X directional thrust conversion, but cap out on Y and Z below the engines basic rating.

Standard configuration would be even across the board on all aspects. Players would have to "tweak" things for their engine and preferences. Newbs could ignore this until they were ready to get into it.

I'm all for this, and the internal structure space. It would indeed add a lot of variance, and could allow for adding extra capacitor room, or a secondary generator, and extra stuff to further customize the ship and to allow variable cargo space through cargo holds being installed into the empty space (could have a maximum electrical somethingorather for the superconductors inside the ship to eliminate a ship with a 130/s recharge rate :P)
I would think that these customifications would not be modifiable after the ship's assembled (when you can start adding addons).
The engines and such have been my pet peeve. I always find myself wanting a different variation on my thrust on whatever ship I'm using.
My two cents. Although, maybe a little off-topic and involving two few many ands.

This would probably tie in really well with the crafting system.

I would just like to add that this suggestion (I like it very much, don't get me wrong) would require extensive testing on the production server, since it has lots of potential for abuse, to find out where the game should set the boundaries for the changeable values.

"I would just like to add that this suggestion (I like it very much, don't get me wrong) would require extensive testing on the production server, since it has lots of potential for abuse, to find out where the game should set the boundaries for the changeable values."

Oh most certainly. Properly designed, it could be scaled up slowly, so that the variance limits started at (+/- 10N) (+/- 5 ms) etc. And then if that seemed fine, increase the range until it would obviously break at the next level.

One thing to note, is that eventually, regardless of the ranges, you would loose more than you gained by any changes to your configuration. Especially if the cost for "pushing the limit" scaled.

For example, if you had a 200N output engine, and wanted to push your X axis to 201, it could cost you .6 both Y and Z axis (Cost 1.2). Your next step to 202 could cost .7 (Total 1.4). By the time you get to 210 N its costing you 1.5N YZ or a total of 3.2N per 1N gain for X. At that point it would have cost you a total of 12.1 N of each Y and Z for 10N X, or a total of 24.2YZ.

At 215 it would have been 21.6N each, 43.2 total.

Eventually it just stops being worth it to push it any further, regardless what the limits are. Also important to note, is if you pulled back one axis to much, Flight Assist would start to less and less useful, and turning could become a real pain for docking etc.

Better engines could have a slower scale on the conversion. E.G changes progress up at .05 from .6 to .65 instead of at .1 from .6 to .7. Thats where you would most likely find the unbalancing tolerances.

Crafting link: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11406

As for the crafting yea wow. If the configuration limits for the engine were "set" when a player purchased the engine, and it was considered crafting to make the engine with those specifications, that would be interesting.

That or all engines are locked to their configuration at purchase, and players have to decide when they buy them what those configurations would be. That could lead however to inventory issues for players who are trying to get an engine "just right".

An easy way to tweak engines would be to swap Thrust for Max Speed. What I have in mind is that swapping 5% of your max speed would return 10% more thrust. (10% instead of 5%, because adding max speed thereby increases acceleration on top of it, so it'd need to be double.) The turbo max speed and thrust would operate seperately from the plain maneuvering engine. You'd mostly only be able to go up to 100m/s at the price of accelerating really really slow, or you could have an extremely zippy ship at 10m/s. Otherwise, I'd say it'd more or less pretty balanced.

QUOTE:
Thrust...Turbo...Drain...Size...Weight

140 N - 150 m/s - 46/s - 06 m - 1200 kg

180 N - 220 m/s - 55/s - 10 m - 2600 kg

220 N - 210 m/s - 50/s - 10 m - 3400 kg

300 N - 200 m/s - 50/s - 12 m - 5100 kg

380 N - 200 m/s - 50/s - 18 m - 7200 kg

440 N - 200 m/s - 55/s - 18 m - 8400 kg

550 N - 220 m/s - 50/s - 26 m - 12000 kg
ENDQUOTE

Something tells me that in the future, engines with that amount of thrust will be significantly lighter, it would be the rest of the ship that really puts down the weight with all its XiRite powas.
I like Exampli's idea better, swap thrust for max speed. Maybe you could add power usage in there too, so Hortan could make a Prius moth that has infiniturbo with a free bat. GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!
Hmm, infiniturbo with a free bat... possibilities...

It would be radical to tweak the angles of acceleration as opposed strictly modifying the powers. I'll extrapolate; currently your ship moves left/right, up/down, forward back. If you could mess with those angles, you could like, put the up/down, and forward/back axes close together to comprise a stronger forward/back (and slight up/down) plane, while still having lateral movement.

This could also extend to maximum speeds, which would get really wacked since turning obviously would have an effect on your current velocity. Imagine a sphere that represents the set of all vectors for possible speeds. Tweaking with the 3 axes which coincide with this sphere would then make it more of an ellipsoid. Perhaps this could be tied to a ship's shape, therefor mass distribution?

I think that two items ranges and a number of ports for engines are needed, a ship need maneuvering trusters and rear trusters, assuming that rear one are powerful, and maneuvering are six-axis.
there should be one slot reserved for maneuvering trusters that you can upgrade, and maybe several slots for boosters, you fit two, you have twice G acceleration, but it eats twice faster the battery and add some mass. And if you want to keep those nonsense speed limits... Anyway Fitting two boosters should not modify max speed, just divide the time to reach that max speed.

Mass is important, when you add weapons and engines, i think the added mass should have more impact on turning speed and max speed than it have in the game as it is today.

in terms of dev time i hope this is not so big since the slots for weapons are already there, it is just some copy/paste... and several hours debugging...

3 Engine Types

Sector jumps should use a variable amount of energy, based on the type of ship you're flying. More massive ships would require more stored energy than less massive ships. For instance, massive trade ships might need to equip batteries similar to our current heavy or medium cells. Cap ships would need special ultra-storage cells to make such jumps (the weapon systems should be powered by other batteries).

There should be 3 different types of engines: warp drives for wormholes, charge engines for sector jumps, and flight engines for maneuvering. The warp drives would come standard with the ship. However, your charge engines and flight engines should be customizable and restricted through license levels.

For instance, Fred has a light centaur (mk3)? and licenses 4/7/4/5/9. He wants to use the centaur to trade chaos swarms. There would only be a few 'commerce-grade' engines available to him, based upon his level 5 trading license. Since his ship will be slow from all the cargo, he wants to have good flight engines to help maneuver and also powerful enough charge engines to boost his massive ship between sectors. (Any old warp engine will do.)

Since this isn't true newtonian physics, I just want to be able to pull off cool maneuvers in my fighter, no matter how broken it makes the universe seem.

I like my idea about the obscured ship max speeds. I like it a lot, and the way I brain it, you'd always ever be traveling at a percentage of your max. So, while turning wouldn't change trajectory per se, it would alter speed proportionally. Proportions are the fairest way to deal with things, yes? Further, if accelerations were dealt with by the same proportions, there'd never be a way to cheat the system, so to speak. You couldn't, say, accelerate very swiftly across your toned down lateral axis, and then turn your ship to achieve a quicker acceleration than simply accelerating in that direction in the first place. And it's all so neat, since acceleration is, of course, measured out proportionally to maximum speed.

Granted this would dramatically change the way combat is done, I dare say it'd make things a little more interesting, and best of all unpredictable; you never know how your opponent's ship will be balanced. Unless it was based on mass distribution, in which case you would, but even that would make engagements more unique. The Vulture, of course, would fly much differently. The Prom would be capable of greater advances, but not so much strafing action. And the Valk, great flying potato that it is, would hardly change at all.

What's the point, Mynnayage? Flight speed is limited; is it that you want it to become essentially unlimited?

The point is twofold; firstly it'd be cool if you and your opponents had customization over the way your ship handles. Secondly is far more important. I can't stand combat in this game ever since I figured out that you accelerate faster if you move diagonally. Shouldn't a ship's performance be the same, no matter which direction it travels in? If not, shouldn't it be circular, if not oval in nature? Why is it that my ship operates as if it had 6 fixed, separate jets, instead of one which could alter it's direction? Did whoever came up with the flight model intentionally design it so that the key to avoiding hits is pressing lots of keys simultaneously?

The sooner this brokenness is fixed, the better. I feel that it contributes to the majority of awkwardness nebbies feel when learning the controls. I personally remembered the first time I made the realization that hive bots couldn't hit me if I strafed vertically, horizontally, and accelerated at the same time. Can't you?

On the other hand, ship facing would essentially becoming meaningless if you accelerated at the same rate in every direction. Thus, the suggestion about ship facing mattering, but still being round, i.e. ellipsoids. If you didn't catch the obscure way I phrased it, the way that would work is you'd have different max speeds depending on your ship's trajectory in comparison to the direction it's facing; so if you were drifting and turned your ship, that could slow you down or speed you up. That's pretty wacky though; if it was just circular that'd be enough.

Oh yeah, and the 5% max speed for 10% thrust is still a wicked idea. I mean come, the worst that could happen is a Valk that zips about 75% faster, dodging around in a little 15m/s sphere. And for that, they'd be vulnerable as heck against rockets. It's not like a ship that flew around 100m/s, but accelerated like a Rag would make the game unplayable for laggers like Martin or whatever either.