Ships acceleration is wrong.

[evertvorster]

This has been bothering me for a while now.

Ships acceleration is off by quite a lot.

Ships speed is measured in knots.
I measured this by flying to Atlantis at the top speed of the initial Llama, which is displayed as 120. It took 16 seconds to travel 1000m. This equates to 62m/s, which is exactly equal to 120knots.

The "Gravities" in "Flight Charateristics" means standard Earth Gravity (9.8m/s squared)
For comparison, a Top Fuel dragster generates about 5 gravities, and the max gravities of the Apollo missions were 4g, and fighter pilots experience up to 9g in sharp turns. So, the g values listed in the flight characteristics makes sense. This is the future after all, and we expect the ships to be performant. In other games of the era, like Privateer, the ships speed increases at about the same rate.

The gravities listed are only valid when the ship is empty.
This would of course scale downwards as the ships mass is increased with cargo, etc.
ie: If you have exactly the same mass in cargo as what the ship is, now the acceleration is halved. But for the sake of simplicity of the calculations later, lets talk about empty ships.

From this follows that if I engage full thrust in an empty beginning Llama, which has a 6.9 gravity forward and 6.12 gravity aft acceleration, I should reach top speed in 0.9 seconds, and stop in 1.05s when cutting thrust.

Likewise, the orthogonal acceleration is 1.6g
From top speed, using only the orthogonal thrusters, the ship would only take 4s to come to a standstill.
(When you have your ship turned 90 degrees to your direction of motion, and have cut thrust.)

Right now, when hitting the accelerator this ship, it takes around 22 seconds to get to top speed.

The math of the game engine is clearly very wrong when it comes to the acceleration of the ship.

This is impacting the play-ability of the game, as when you engage travel mode by hitting "Y" it takes a very very long time to get up to speed, and is causing you to hang around deep gravity wells for a very long time.
I suspect that this might also be the reason the autopilot is misbehaving, because it expects an acceleration that it is not getting.

[BenjamenMeyer]

Ships speed is measured in knots.
I measured this by flying to Atlantis at the top speed of the initial Llama, which is displayed as 120. It took 16 seconds to travel 1000m. This equates to 62m/s, which is exactly equal to 120knots.

yes, we really should be reporting speed in meters per second (scaled accordingly, km/s etc).

Knots don't make sense in space travel.

[BenjamenMeyer]

The "Gravities" in "Flight Charateristics" means standard Earth Gravity (9.8m/s squared)
For comparison, a Top Fuel dragster generates about 5 gravities, and the max gravities of the Apollo missions were 4g, and fighter pilots experience up to 9g in sharp turns. So, the g values listed in the flight characteristics makes sense. This is the future after all, and we expect the ships to be performant. In other games of the era, like Privateer, the ships speed increases at about the same rate.

That makes sense. The Human body is meant for a 1G environment - typically referred to as Earth Standard (or some variation of that term) is a lot of sci-fi stuff. We can adopt a similar terminology.

9G on the human body tends to cause people to black out. Well trained fighter pilots in "G suites" (applies pressure to keep blood from building up in the legs) can only maintain 9G for a couple seconds before blacking out.

[evertvorster]

Yeah, but then in Star Trek you have gravity compensators when they speed up and slow down.

My point here is that the ships in VS should handle a lot like aircraft, and the gravities listed for the Llama at least is in the same ballpark as fighter aircraft.

120knots is around the max speed of a helicopter, but keep in mind that this is maneuvering speed, and you also have traveling speed available in your starships in VS.

[BenjamenMeyer]

Star Trek and others use gravity compensators kind of like they use the Deflector for inertial dampeners to minimize harm to humans from accel/decel.

[BenjamenMeyer]

The gravities listed are only valid when the ship is empty.

Okay now this is going to be an interesting discussion. I only clipped the title but the remainder is really good to think about.

We should calibrate a ship by itself - no cargo, no bodies; but with all upgrades. There should be something without any upgrades and then we adjust with each upgrade added so it's a dynamic value throughout the game.

[evertvorster]

Well, lets not change too many things at once.
The values in the odometer are ones that we are all comfortable with, as well as the distances covered.
Ships speed are measured in knots, as well as some aircraft like helicopters, so it is not an entirely unknown measure of speed.

To change that measurement unit we will have either wildly different numbers displayed if we move at the same speed, or very different game mechanics if we speed up or slow down the ships to make the numbers look similar.

My main gripe here is that acceleration is not equal to what the game data would suggest.

I had a look at the units.csv, and it does not actually list the acceleration in gravities, it has some other large number, so I am assuming that the gravities number is calculated from the ship's mass and thrust available.

We could also just use that thrust value because it actually makes the math a lot easier, because acceleration is just a function of mass and thrust.
As the ship's mass is changing through the game, the amount of acceleration achieved can also change.

I have not done any investigation on this, but that measurement in gravities in the ship info screen has to come from somewhere.

From my very early gaming in Vega Strike in the early 2000's, I do remember the ships speeding up and slowing down much faster than they are doing now.

As a first step, I would like to bring the game acceleration back to what the original design was.
How is acceleration calculated now? Are we using the values actually in the game files?

[BenjamenMeyer]

The values in the odometer are ones that we are all comfortable with, as well as the distances covered.
Ships speed are measured in knots, as well as some aircraft like helicopters, so it is not an entirely unknown measure of speed.

This should be a matter of what we display. Keep in mind NASA uses kilometers/second, not knots. Space doesn't use what airlines use for speed.

But agreed on your various points.

[evertvorster]

Yes, I agree that NASA does use a different measure of speed.

Knots are roughly double meters per second. In my example you can see this. 62 m/s ~ 120knots. Incidentally, Knots are roughly half of km/h, so 120kt is roughly 240km/h. In the end it is just a display.

VS simulates distances very accurately as one of its core design goals, and is what attracted me to the project in the first place.

The current speed range is fairly slow for space ships. This is because at this speed range you can maneuver your ship, and things move at a speed relative to each other that are in the range of what a human can deal with when piloting their ship. So, we should not mess with the speed ranges of the ships, no matter what we measure it in.

This is why you have "Travel" mode where you don't care about careful maneuvering, and just want to get somewhere else fast.
In the game this disengages the "Maneuver" mode and removes the speed limit that your computer imposes to keep the ship maneuverable.

This is also why you have an overdrive (Afterburner). This effectively overdrives all of your thrusters, (which should use more fuel, incidentally), and allows your ship to be maneuverable at slightly higher speeds, which is why when you hit the overdrive button you have a higher speed limit in Maneuver mode.
It was never intended to be a way of getting somewhere else fast, or escaping from a fight, because you can just disengage Maneuver mode, tap set full speed, pick a direction and accelerate away until you can safely engage SPEC.
The overdrive was intended for when you wanted to stick around and fight, and needed an unfair advantage in maneuverability over your opponents.

Unfortunately, with the slow acceleration that we are experiencing now, both combat and maneuvering is like working in molasses, and actually getting somewhere else is tedious.

I believe the values for acceleration was carefully calibrated in the initial phases of the game, and what we have now is a significant departure from that, impacting the general feel of the game significantly.

It has been a while since I really played Vega Strike, and I do remember that acceleration has been an issue for quite a while. But it bothered me enough now that I am playing the game again for me to investigate what it should be, and measure what we have now.