https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-1hUK684APTZS1HSlRqSE5xVzg/edit?usp=sharing

Here's an initial crude Mockup of a kind of Cruiser in Blender

[attachment=2047:Fighter.png][attachment=2048:Fighter2.png]

I'm giving it overpowered retro thrust compared to the main drive because that's what I've found most useful in combat In fact I used to frequently mount my guns facing backwards to take advantage of the greater thrust in that direction. Another reason I think Weaponized Exhaust / Weapon Recoil should be included eventually... it's actually useful!

In the meantime... just playing around with basic layout and shape...

 

What I'd like to see is a ship that can move sideways faster than it can move forward, these aren't atmospheric fighters, after all

 

Then sideways becomes forward and backwards, because it wouldn't make much sense to not use the more powerful thrusters for traveling, now would it?

You are, however, raising a very interesting point I haven't really thought about so far: Forward in a spaceship is only defined by the direction of most powerful thrust. But what direction of that thrust relative to the gun is the most effective in a dogfight? That is a pretty out-of-the-box thinking question. I like it. It would require some analysis and testing to come to a conclusion, I think.

There's one general problem I can foretell in advance, of course: Having the main thrust sideways to the gun either leads to an asymetric behavior if the Main and Retros (which in combat would become left and right or up and down) are not equally powerful. This setup would require extreme skill to handle. Having an assymetric behavior in forward/backward acceleration is much more intuitive than having asymetric sideways aceleration.

If you equal the thrusters out to have the same power, you will either have sub-par main acceleration to an opponent of equal mass, or you will need to reserve a lot more mass for the thrusters (requiring two thrusters equally powerful as the opponents one main) and sacrifice loadout.

All in all, It would be a major excercise to learn to actually exploit the advantages... but it might be interesting, though potentially futile.

Long range flight, especially long enough to warrant time compression, is more about the Delta-V than the acceleration. As long as the specific impulse is good then the main drive can be relatively feeble and that's the same no matter which engine or what it's output is on ships in Pioneer. In my "real life" version of my designs the main drive is a very high specific impulse rocket with relatively low thrust while the retro and lateral thrusters are much less efficient but higher output.

 

In my "real life" version of my designs the main drive is a very high specific impulse rocket with relatively low thrust

 

In the "real life" versions of my spacecrafts I'm used to acceleration in the 0.005 G range, so I know pretty well what you're talking about. 😉

But as far as I know ISP for thrusters in Pioneer is uniform... or has that changed? In that case, it would indeed make a lot of sense if the main thruster were not the one with the most thrust, but the highest ISP. Though given Pioneers ridiculous techlevel, I guess a shiftable drive would not be too much to ask for...

I've suggested it in a way, and I've got the source code to dig through to figure out a solution...

Multiple types of Reaction Mass... hydrogen for standard transit drive (aim for 0.25G to land / take off from airless worlds), water for high thrust applications (extreme orbital burns, tactical encounters, atmospheric flight, high G landing / take off), and maybe even something stronger (Carbon? Metals? Radioactives?) for weaponizing the exhaust and providing extremely powerful acceleration (think Orion Drive or Interplanetary Particle Cannon...) but that seems like something civilized folk would frown on...

I can tweak ships and modify scripts a bit but I'm not even sure where to start with the source code 😀

 

Multiple types of Reaction Mass...

 

Well, that would have to be quite a mother of all engines...

 

and maybe even something stronger (Carbon? Metals? Radioactives?) for weaponizing the exhaust

 

If the performance is anywhere near the current ships, you've already weaponized the exhaust to the level modern WMDs can only dream of reaching... 😆

OK, I'm looking at the Lua file for the Kanara, I figure I'll tweak that to get a feel for the various thruster strengths and exhaust velocities and how they work for combat.

One minor question... what are the units? I see

    forward_thrust = 65e5,

    reverse_thrust = 12e5,

    up_thrust = 18e5,

    down_thrust = 18e5,

... and so on...

Is it Newtons?

I can make tweaks without knowing... but I'd rather have a clear idea of what the numbers are before I mix things up too much 🙂

e5 mean five zero ^^ 

65e5 = 6500000 

or you can make  650e4 it's the same ^^

Is it Newtons?

Yes, newtons.

OK, so I evened everything out to 18e5 newtons, except for reverse thrusters and the RCS which I set to 24e5.

My first fight I loaded up completely with tactical gear, including a 2MW rapid fire cannon and cooler. I got blasted, I was just too damn heavy to move 😀

I wised up and ditched some of the other gear, kept the shield and only took a dual 1MW cannon. This time it was a good fight and I just barely came out on top! I think he had the same cannon, but no shields, because he was generally able to outpace me. I was able to dodge most of his shots and could only hit occasionally. If I didn't have shields he probably would have won, but it was close.

I feel like using the engines at full power should come at a price of some kind. Poor fuel efficiency, increased heat, exponentially rising odds of catastrophic engine failure...

Still, this is a tiny Starfighter, the Kanara.

Setting up tactically and strategically beneficial trajectories with the minimum use of propellant and energy is what Space Flight, and by extension Space Combat, is all about! 🙂

 The frenchy has missunderstood the question again 

Je suis Canadien...

Ha d'accord  ^^ , mais ca ne change rien au fait que je suis une buse en anglais 🙂

I souped up the naval missile... it's not useless anymore 😉

I just doubled it's main engine output... 8e5 newtons I think...

Interesting, does it actually hit it's target now?

It might make sense to de-nerf the other missiles since the difference isn't meant to be speed but that rockets don't turn, smart missiles do but can be ECM'd and Naval missiles are ECM shielded.

Feel free to modify them or suggest new ones and behaviours!

We did some tests in paragon aswell using 15e5 for main/back and 1e5 for steer, and they go fast and hit their targets. However we used AIFlyTo() without the 15km restriction in these tests instead of the AIKamikaaze() (which seemed to do some wierd intercept cource), however it was just for tests, nothing was merged in (yet)

I did find that to get proper accuracy (the missiles would usually hit on the second pass even if they missed at first, I tweaked the angular thrust a bit, too) I needed to fire the missiles a bit ahead of the target, just like with cannon fire. Where is the AI code? I doubt I'll understand much but you never know, I might see something 🙂

How about a proper launcher? I could see scaling the missile thrust values back down if you could give an initial kick to them on launch. Instead of just dropping out and starting to accelerate, it would make sense to give it some initial velocity. I actually stopped using missiles for a while a few versions ago because I kept ramming the missiles right after launch unless I consciously remembered to stop moving around so much right when I launched... not a problem if they always go out at 1 kps... 😀

AIKamikaze is known to be broken. It's one of the last pieces of the autopilot waiting on a rewrite. It a healthy source of floating point errors for a start 😛

Ah floating point errors, they grow up so fast... *bdum-tsssh* thanks I'm here... er, a lot 😀

I'm not so interested in what FE2/FFE did, if I fire a missile I expect it to hit it's target unless there's a reason for it not too.

I like the idea of a kind of defensive missile, something that's more about keeping your enemy off balance than directly killing him. Like a minefield...

It would be nice if there was a way to recover unexploded missiles after combat, the fast missiles usually hit or just disappear into the distance but I can easily catch up with a slow one.

I also still like the idea of a Very Dangerous Array...

http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/Very_Dangerous_Array

😀

That's incorrect though, missiles do need to go faster than ship (or planes in real life) and they only need to turn slightly.

It's not because they need to go far, it's because they need to accelerate very quickly, cover the distance between the ship(/plane) launching them, and then explode near/at their target.

They don't got faster to cover more distance, they accelerate faster so that their target can't evade them.

It might be that Frontier had useless missiles only good for keeping ships away, I know that I manage to hit & destroy some ships with missiles so not that useless, but Pioneer can have fast missiles.

High Thrust Missiles for close range and High Delta-V Torpedoes for long range...

Without AI work I don't think it's worth getting too detailed with the experimentation. I'm still looking through scripts and source... where IS the AI code?

Look under AIKamikaze() in ship-ai-cmd.cpp.

Hah, yeah... way more math than I know what to do with, still interesting to check out...

Looks like Missile AI doesn't take target lead into account like the AI gunners do, I noticed that much more with the faster missiles.

Is there any thought about moving the AI to lua at some point?