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Veld

Alpha Tester
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Posts posted by Veld

  1. If this isn't in game already:

     

    Small, compact bike seats that are placed in line with the cross section of a construct; a block that covers the form of a person seated as they would on a motorcycle. I wouldn't just add a cushion and call it a job well done, as then the players legs could potentially clip through any other parts.

     

    czhHIL3.png

    The outline in red is what chunk the part encompasses

     

    Mostly just for looks. But it could open up avenues to make lighter and more streamlined vehicles.

     

    I see some potential form issues due to the shape of the legs. It may be hard to sculpt the form of the vehicle around it.

  2. This should clear up most things. From this devblog:

     

    "It’s important to note that some engines are capable of generating force, while others are capable of generating torque, but not necessarily both at the same time. This is done to make your life simpler, as it’s much more difficult to control a ship that has thrusters generating force and torque at the same time (in most of our early testing, this was considered as too problematic by most people). We might introduce a way for players to reactivate the force+torque capability of all engines for added complexity, if you so choose. Let us know what you think about this! The bottom line is that if you have engines that are capable of generating only force (like atmo or space engines) and you tag them with a “torque” tag, this will do nothing."

  3. 34 minutes ago, vylqun said:

    and that only applies because the red cross is a service which saves live no matter from which nationality

    It's true that firing at the red cross is a rather extreme example of scumbaggery. But acts of aggression to pretty much any organisation or nation that openly declares themselves as neutral is still technically scumbaggery.

     

    The question is can you get away with it or not: risk or reward. Pretty much everyone (apart from themselves) thought the communist Chinese were dodgy af. Thing is they had enough power to get away with annexing Tibet and they knew everyone hated them already. But still as a powerful nation they had to have the justification of Tibet being 'muh territory'.

     

    America couldn't get away with something like that because they're too 'muh freedom'. They need subtle justifications to attack people like pearl harbor, those damn commies, 911 or those damn middle eastern dictators.

     

    Same can be said for DU. Your org has its own 'muh <insert reason to screw each other over here>'. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows.

  4. On 22/05/2018 at 3:28 PM, The Red Wake said:

    Also, without engines applying torque, you wouldn’t be able to turn.

    They have RCS thrusters for that.

     

    On 22/05/2018 at 3:28 PM, The Red Wake said:

    I think they showed in one of the building videos that they’d show centre of thrust and mass, so you should find balancing relatively easy (though it shouldn’t be too easy, I think)

    and they said that the Default Lua would have the engines balanced, so as long as you made sure you had your centre of thrust roughly in line with your centre of mass, your ship can adjust the individual engine thrust to get net 0 torque on your ship.

    Very interesting. Can I get a source?

  5. To be honest the only reason people don't just fire on red cross ships is it's 'not cool'. It just makes your country look bad.

     

    If someone did make a red cross type org then the same would apply. Anyone who has an inkling of consideration for their reputation wouldn't shoot it or pretend to be it. It's a war crime. Only the scummiest of scum would try something like that.

     

    And if scummy scum want to impersonate neutral fleets then so be it. It's a good strategy, albeit dirty. Plus it's a challenge for players to use their reasoning skills.

     

    I don't think anything needs to be added here. Just get everyone together and say: "hey guys I'm making neutral org X don't shoot me plox we have voxels as shown in image Y on our hull "

  6. 1 hour ago, dualism said:

     

    I realise we've been talking about 'ship radar', but that is more a convenient term rather than physically accurate, surely? At space distances, isn't the fastest thing we know about light? That means that at even something as close as a Sun/Earth distance, a 'radar' is only going to tell you that something was 93 million miles away 16 minutes ago. I expect that most space travel will be at faster than light speeds, so virtually all radar type information is going to be useless, partly because ships won't even be getting their own return signals for a start.

    Light and microwaves (radar) are essentially the same thing. Just different wavelengths. They travel at the same speed.

     

    Considering alioth is a lot smaller than the real earth I think NQ are scaling stuff down a lot which indicates sub light speed will be viable for solar systems. But perhaps not interstellar space. Who knows. The one system is big enough as it is.

     

    The general consensus in scifi is that FTL travel entails the ship going through some weird warpy stuff where no one can touch it. Which makes sense realistically. The conventional laws of physics as we know them can't apply in that situation.

  7. 2 minutes ago, LittleJoe said:

    No, not really. Just like LUA. If you want to go the extra mile and learn something to improve your skills, go ahead, but don't be limited be making everything within the skills of everybody. There's no unfair advantage granted to those who learn a simple in-game CAD system...

    If you've ever used solidworks you'll know what I'm talking about. I honestly spent my first few hours stumbling through the UI and restarting the program over and over. Same with blender. What you're thinking of is if the CAD system were separate from the basic voxel system - which is how I think it should be done. What I don't want is some god awful UI and counter intuitive system being thrown in people's faces. And with LUA scripts you're given default scripts already. It's pretty different.

  8. 19 hours ago, Nanoman said:

    Maybe it helps if you maximize the video on your monitor (phone might be too small). When you look at the ship flying by remote control, you can actually see the gyro location (on top of the core unit near the rear end) moving relative to the true center of rotation when it rotates. Also rotation around the gyro location would look very different, unnatural and unbalanced. Try to picture it and see how that would be different from how it flies in the video. Yaw is the most obvious one, pitch as well, roll not so much in this case. I'm not sure what more I can say. To me it seems quite obvious.

     

    Watched it fullscreen and I still don't see the anything. If it rotated at the gyro the only test to see if it was rotating there would be to observe that part staying still. Given how much it's jiggling about and how little it actually rotates there isn't much to say. I'm honestly 50/50 on this. 

  9. @NanoDot

    I see you're point

     

    It does indeed make sense for the gyroscope to define the orientation of the ship. But I am going to tell you with a perfectly straight face it is uncertain whether the gyroscope is the centre of rotation or not. Not saying it is. Not saying it isn't. It's not even right at the tail end as the thrusters hang over the edge. Not about to make a poll on this or complain about NDA either. However, I am inclined to side with you on this judgement as he does not mention the gyroscope is the centre of rotation which would be a crucial point to make.

     

    I have updated the post with what has been said.

  10. 4 hours ago, Nanoman said:

    The gyro just defines a reference plane, it does not define any kind of absolute position or axis of rotation. 

    Could you elaborate on 'reference plane'?

    4 hours ago, Nanoman said:

    What determines the axes of rotation is either the weight distribution or the size of the construct, I'm not sure. But you can clearly see from the video that the ship does not rotate around the gyro, which is placed at the tail end of the ship.

    Don't know what you mean by clear as there is no clear reference point apart from the clouds on the horizon. But, yes, if you see exactly at this time just after he says "it flies pretty well..." the tail end raises a little relative to the cloud behind it as it pitches down. But even that is a bold estimation though as it disregards the drift of the vessel towards the horizon. I am puzzled as to how you came about this conclusion without using NDA prior knowledge.

    4 hours ago, Nanoman said:

    So the location of the gyro makes no difference, only its orientation, and that's exactly what JC ("the guy in the video") says: "You can put it anywhere you want, but be careful not to orient it on the side like that or something, you have to really put it flat, in the front direction."

    He just says you can place it anywhere you want. I don't see how that implies it does not define a centre of rotation.

     

    If you are right I honestly don't know what the point of the point of the gyro is then. To define direction? Why not use the direction of the seat? It just doesn't make sense to me.

     

    Edit: actually thinking about it what you say makes sense. The gyro could just be used to define the orientation of the ship for the engineer report. If a ship has multiple seats, then which one decides the orientation? If it did define the centre of rotation, he would have probably said so as it is pretty crucial information. But going by the way the ship is moving in the video is still pretty unclear evidence as to the gyroscope not being the centre of rotation. I will update the post with this info regardless.

  11. 3: Investigating torque and moment of inertia

    What we know from pre-alpha footage

    • Much of what is said on torque can be found in this video
    • You can use RCS-like parts to torque your ship
    • Another part that is needed is a ‘gyroscope’
    • The angular acceleration in rpm/s is shown in the engineering report

    wSDij4R.png

    Deducing the nature of torque

    It is implied RCS parts are separate in what mechanics apply to them. The guy in the video states: “they do not generate thrust; they generate torque”. In real life an RCS thruster is essentially just a thruster that uses alternate propellant. The only torqueing capability stems from its placement. However, in-game, what he says implies that the main thrusters only push the ship forwards and do not generate a torqueing force if the centre of thrust does not act through the centre of mass. The RCS is what does the torqueing. This is probably because if you’re ship was slightly asymmetrical your RCS would have to compensate a lot - especially for larger ships. This would be very punishing and constraining for designers; although this is just speculation.

     

    A lot can be speculated about the gyroscope but not much said. It is implied the gyroscope acts as an orientation reference for the engineer report. This makes sense as the guy in the video states: “it tells the game where the front of the ship is” and “you don’t want to place it on the side”. You need to have a designated part to define the orientation of the ship as parts can be angled or there can be more than one of them.

     

    It makes sense to have a designated centre of rotation as in an asymmetrical ship the centre of rotation would be way out and punishing for designers. It also makes sense because if fuel has mass then the pivot would change over time. If transferred, it can be exploited. But it's still unclear going by the footage and it is not actually stated that it is - which would be a pretty crucial point if it was.

    Deducing the nature of moment of inertia

    I’m not going to explain moment of inertia too in depth. But, in the real world, when you apply torque to an object each individual particle of mass has its own angular acceleration. The moment of inertia is a constant that describes the mass distribution of the object. It can be mathematically deduced for simple shapes and groups of simple shapes but it is very hard – if not impossible - to do so for anything more complex. So to predict the angular acceleration (which DU does) a calculation must be made. The question is: how.

     

    Games like kerbal space program calculate the moment of inertia using a point mass system: all the parts of the ship are simply modelled as one infinitely small particle with a specific mass. This is a very simple way of dealing with things. Here is a model roughly describing what is going on in the video if this is the case:

     

    2rZfhg1.png

    The model is simplified to 5 separate shapes: The hull, cockpit, fuel canister and thrusters. The pitch, yaw and roll axes are in green, blue and red respectively.

     

    3WlXqKJ.png

    The cockpit is used for demonstrating how a point mass system for parts works to give the angular acceleration in the 3 axes. The orange dot is the location of the point mass, m. Each torqueing force, F, is coloured corresponding to the axes. The white line represents the perpendicular distance to the pivot, r (dependent on which axes.

    The angular acceleration in each plane for the cockpit only is: UOcoctn.png (where α=angular acceleration and mr^2=moment of inertia for a point mass system)

     

    To find the net angular acceleration for the whole ship you simply do: kUSdaw9.png for every part.

     

    Alternatively, you can model the parts as simple shapes for a more realistic system. But this is rather unnecessary as custom built voxel structures, which make up a most of the ship, cannot be modelled as predefined shapes and have to be point masses.

    About fuel depletion

    Not much to deduce here. Only discuss. We simply do not know if it exists. If the fuel depletion and distribution on a vessel affects its mass then there are a 2 ways that can work:

    1. The point mass stays in place and it’s magnitude decreases
    2. The point mass shifts up and down the container according to a scripted formula to simulate drainage

    Conclusion

    • A point mass system is the most likely method of calculating the moment of inertia
    • If you know the force generated by the RCS, you can design your own torqueing system. To convert angular acceleration from rpm/s to rad/s multiply by 2pi/60
    • Main engines probably do not generate torqueing forces. Just push where they point.
  12. 5 hours ago, unown006 said:

    How about massive warships and aircraft carriers?

    Same as any other ship but bigger. The Devs have made a flying aircraft carrier. To be honest. Naval combat only really exists in the real world because you can only make planes so tough. Thinking about it that way, I don't think it will be added.

  13. 7 minutes ago, Lethys said:

    Lua can't assign RDMS, have to find the quote from nyzaltar

    That's that then. That leaves ID and prosecution. However I am starting to realise that prosecution is unnecessary as a mechanic.

     

    If someone disobeys the rules. You can offer them the opportunity to pay compensation or be ostracised. Essentially ostracisation is incarceration from the arbiters perspective. Just in the latter the suffering of the individual is guaranteed.

     

    So just ID. Clocking in to the job, passing a checkpoint, making a contract. Basic stuff like that.

  14. 1 hour ago, CoreVamore said:

    No No No and NO!

     

    You are once again suggesting one DU based org that has more power and influence, not just in numbers, but in game mechanics, above all other orgs.... just NO!

    I'm 50/50 on this.

     

    I have explained that orgs in DU are anything they want to be. They only describe a system by which a group of individuals operate. A government is an org. We do not need a separate org type with different mechanics to take on the role of a government.

     

    Implementing tools for enabling a government in the sphere of your own org is a good idea. Like ID, prosecution and surveillance. Giving those tools to one government that has predetermined authority is a very very bad idea.

     

    Government in real life does not have absolute power. It can be challenged with equivalent force. Any system can be challenged if you have the firepower. Creating a system that cannot be challenged is against sandbox and against realism and most of all player freedom.

     

    On the subject of tools given to everyone. I see no reason not to. The players join and choose to comply by the rules and are given an ID (if they use the IDs). Whenever they die or are hurt a script can be set up to store and calculate over the data. Whenever they speak or perform a certain action a script  can calculate over that data. Like

     RIGs from dead space but more totalitarian. Or perhaps not. Perhaps your org values the freedom of its players or perhaps that just what it says to them. The sky is the limit.

     

    Whatis a little wishy washy is video surveillance. I don't think it would be technically feasible to store anything other than text in an in-game database. These databases would need a storage limit of course to stop lag. But then the issue arises of players making collosal 'i have no mouth but I must scream' super databases with multiple calculations being made. Now that would cause a lot of lag. Of course you could solve this by limiting the types of data you can acquire to infrequent forms

     

    Edit: forgot about prosecution. Agree on no to incarceration. Only forms of punishment that are feasible are corporal and financial.

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