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NQ suggests buffing engines, your thoughts?


ELX987

NQ engines buff suggestions: your take  

97 members have voted

  1. 1. should engines be buffed?

    • yes
      62
    • no
      28
    • im not sure
      7
  2. 2. what updates would greatly effect this change, in your opinion

    • energy management
      52
    • PVP revamp
      14
    • new ship parts (XL cores, XL atmospheric engines, XL fuel tanks, etc)
      31
  3. 3. do you think engines will get buffed, like it or not

    • yes
      26
    • no
      25
    • wait and see
      46


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1 hour ago, Azraeil said:

That is a light M core, a to scale firefly that could take-off and land in 1g came in at 4.7Kt unloaded made of aluminium and silicone

Ah. Making parts of your ship out of breast implant material. 
TBH, you’re very lucky it didn’t go tits up when you tried to land.

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There are many, many problems with the current mass and voxel system.

For example the smallest voxel size in DU is 0.25m3. So that means that thinnest wall you can make is 25cm. Now imagine a RL car or a plane with a 25cm thick aluminum body, and how much that would weigh.

 

For reference: The outer alu skin on a commercial airplane is usually 1-2mm, or 0.001m3 in DU voxels..

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10 hours ago, Azraeil said:

 

Add to this that the boosters are on/off giving extremely limited thrust control and even had the pulse lengths limited in a 0.23 nerf they definitely give the #feelsbadman's right now.

You know how a rocket engine works, right? It is on or off. Massive thrust when on, not so much when off :)

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Hello everyone, I'm going to aim to answer a few of you here. But before doing so I just want to clear up that this was a hypothetical question from me and not something we necessarily have planned.
As such please don't expect any sudden changes, however I have really enjoyed reading this thread and seeing the ongoing constructive discussion.

 

  • Why no XL atmospheric engines?
    • They will likely appear eventually when they are ready, however we don't have an ETA for that at this time.
      Producing assets for these takes time away from other tasks and are they are not currently the highest priority.
  • We need the energy system to reduce this!
    • Similar answer to the above in all honesty, it takes time to produce and we currently have other things prioritized.
  • Fuel, Mass, Rockets and XS Lights
    • Rockets and fuel is intended to not be light weight and moving it into space shouldn't be trivial, there are a number of other factors at play here that are simply from a balancing perspective and play a role in the wider gameplay. (No not the lights ?)

  

On 5/18/2021 at 4:18 PM, Skeletmaster said:

Or to go even father and make a second tier of engines that consist out of multiple individual Elements so that you only need to place the noozle on the outside and can hide the rest of the elements in the inside. (I know alot of work and more long term) This could even be used to make the whole building mechanik more complex and modular with even higher specialisation)

 

But I dont think just buffing the engines is a solution. Building will just become even easier and you no longer need to think about what it needs to do because with way more thruster every Ship can do everything.

This idea has been brought up, and indeed it would require some time to change and likely won't be soon. But is never the less an interesting thought.

 

  

On 5/20/2021 at 12:49 AM, Sabretooth said:

Have the simple option of turning a certain group of engines on/off, is much more important to me.

That way I can like, have 4 engines. Turn on only 2 for normal speed/power, turn on all 4 for more speed power when needed/wanted.

 

And work on simple hovers too! So we can have more 'landbased vehicles'.

This is quite easily doable through a few engines tags and some minor lua changes. :)

 

 

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4 hours ago, NQ-Deckard said:

 

 

  

This is quite easily doable through a few engines tags and some minor lua changes. :)

 

 

Thats the problem I am talking about, the need for lua for this! And im pretty sure you knew that I was talking about this.

We can connect the engines to switches but they dont do a thing, we need to learn lua to put this at work.

Its what you call, quite easy.

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I would also be in favor of a mixture of the Forementioned ideas. Namely introduce a Stress system for constructs And Energy Management. Regarding the engines, alone a more modular system (as example  airintakes, Turbocharger, afterburner using extra boosterfuel, engine Control unit/upgradeable control Software (not Lua just as addin Item top the unit)) that also would diversify industry And might enhance Trade. In Addition it seems sensible to me to reduce weight, especially after ores have been refined.

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14 hours ago, Sabretooth said:

Thats the problem I am talking about, the need for lua for this! And im pretty sure you knew that I was talking about this.

We can connect the engines to switches but they dont do a thing, we need to learn lua to put this at work.

Its what you call, quite easy.

Or you could always ask someone who is more confident with Lua to either create it for you, or show you how to do it. :)

 

We don't expect every player to be a programmer, artist, voxelmancer, industrialist, miner and pilot all at the same time.

There is a community of players out there who all have different strengths, and I'm sure you can find a programmer you could ask or hire to help you implement what you would like. Similarly in the way you could ask or hire a builder to make you an amazing ship or an artist to make you a nice looking SVG logo.

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you can also just fly at half throttle?

Bonus: If you use half military and half maneuver engines of same size, at half throttle it will prioritize the maneuver engines (generally the engines with the least power) meaning you use far less than half fuel at half throttle. No Lua needed.

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17 hours ago, NQ-Deckard said:

Or you could always ask someone who is more confident with Lua to either create it for you, or show you how to do it. :)

 

We don't expect every player to be a programmer, artist, voxelmancer, industrialist, miner and pilot all at the same time.

There is a community of players out there who all have different strengths, and I'm sure you can find a programmer you could ask or hire to help you implement what you would like. Similarly in the way you could ask or hire a builder to make you an amazing ship or an artist to make you a nice looking SVG logo.

 

Yesy thank you for your anser and what you say is true.

But as a suggestion in this topic, that was my input. Instead of too many scripts running, which can have an impact on performance, a much more of a simple solution.

That is, if it worx the way I suggested: Just an on/off switch to work on engines.

 

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On 6/4/2021 at 8:31 PM, Gottchar said:

you can also just fly at half throttle?

Bonus: If you use half military and half maneuver engines of same size, at half throttle it will prioritize the maneuver engines (generally the engines with the least power) meaning you use far less than half fuel at half throttle. No Lua needed.

Exactly, that is why if you mix a bunch of XS engines with S engines the system will divide required thrust between all engines...  thus the XS engines will ramp up to full but the S engines will still be on <20% thrust...

And since XS engines are less efficient in terms of impulse per litre (Ns/l) than S engines of the same type, the ship ends up using more fuel at low speed than it would if it switched off the XS engines and just used the S engines. No Lua needed to reduce your performance... ?

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5 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

Exactly, that is why if you mix a bunch of XS engines with S engines the system will divide required thrust between all engines...  thus the XS engines will ramp up to full but the S engines will still be on <20% thrust...

And since XS engines are less efficient in terms of impulse per litre (Ns/l) than S engines of the same type, the ship ends up using more fuel at low speed than it would if it switched off the XS engines and just used the S engines. No Lua needed to reduce your performance... ?

Aye, sorry, I rarely mix sizes. You are right on that one, whyever the fuel consumption per Nm is different for different sizes.

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To bounce back and make a constructive return to NQ-Deckard.
I think the priority is not to an XL engine implementation.
 

An adjustment will have to be made, certainly slipping the engine power up a notch.
An XS in front of S, S becoming M, M becoming L, L becoming XL ect ...
 

But such a modification would have to be accompanied by a limitation.
Core XS => Engine size S max
Core S => Engine size M max
Core M => Engine size L max
Core L => Engine size XL max
 

As well as assigning a weapon / radar point pole for each core in order to balance and have control over the amount of engine on a construct.
 

Of course, this is just an example of an idea for NQ to find its best option.
 

Currently:
- I like
make the vessels as I want
 

- I do not like :
being forced to put dozens of engines to be competitive compared to other players ...

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I would take a different approach.
A capital ship powered with rockets/atmo engines shouldn't be able to easily land on a planet Espceialy if they only use normal atmo engines. We do actually have better engine types: AGG's. The AGG's used to be really useful when we've been able to operate them at higher speed. and honestly they are the most expensive engine tech in this game currently, but became basically useless with the slow ascend/descend speed they now have.
If they are that expensive and high tier, why not make them useful?
Why have an altitude limit on them of 1000m which leads to all the AGG towers everybody hates?
My proposal: keep AGG's expensive but make them useful again! Remove the 1000m altitude limit and allow them to be used with higher ascend/descend speed.
If you want to "nerf" them, maybe put in a mass limit at which they can be operated  or make them even more expensive.

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On 6/3/2021 at 9:34 PM, Cheith said:

You know how a rocket engine works, right? It is on or off. Massive thrust when on, not so much when off :)

you know that not all rockets are on/off right, you do have liquid fuel rockets that actually have thrust control and even vectoring today

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Cheith is probably thinking about solid fuel rockets.  
 

anyone who’s watched a SpaceX launch knows that that they power down for Max Q. And we’ve seen their boosters land themselves by vectoring.  

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And since this is a sci-fi game and we have space engines, it would not be inconceivable that rocket engines had some kind of nozzle to vary the output. This is actually already possible but not practical in RL.

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17 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

And since this is a sci-fi game and we have space engines, it would not be inconceivable that rocket engines had some kind of nozzle to vary the output. This is actually already possible but not practical in RL.

What’s not practical in real life?

Varying rocket thrust?

Vectoring?

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Variable thrust is kinda hard for rockets, so vectoring is the preferred method as far as I know.

But the point was that in DU it would not be a unreasonable to have variable trust on rockets, so that people might consider using rockets at all.

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On 6/17/2021 at 5:22 PM, CptLoRes said:

Variable thrust is kinda hard for rockets, so vectoring is the preferred method as far as I know.

But the point was that in DU it would not be a unreasonable to have variable trust on rockets, so that people might consider using rockets at all.

I wrote in a post above:
Have you ever watched a SpaceX launch? Every single rocket powers down as they hit MaxQ.... They literally say it in the narration "reducing engine thrust as we reach Max Q"

And after that someone announces "Max Q reached"

And the narrator continues, "Ship increasing power..." etc. after the ship has overcome the moment of maximum dynamic stress...
Yeah it's possibly hard, but its done today on a regular basis.

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  • 2 months later...

Xl Atmo and large wings by themselves would shake up the whole build game. The imbalance of large atmo engines against having the XL space engines puts us in a weird spot.

 

Needing walls of atmos and wings for larger ships also doesn't make sense when there are large and xl variants of other ship modules. Just not those two. After adding the xl atmo and the variants of it with the large wing you could then balance or add variants of brakes wings and adjustors then balance. 

 

Just feels like we are missing items before we go talking about buffing or nerfing things. Especially when those two items count as engines and cause a large portion of the lag created on ships. Lowering the number by adding those items or buffing existing engines  and wings would help either way.

 

Just don't make XL atmo look llike medium atmos please, those things are the ugly duckling of this game I.M.O.

 

 

 

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