Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

General
82

I don’t doubt either your claim, the TV programme’s, or wikipedia’s that VIFFing exists as a dogfighting tactic. At the stall speed of most combat jets, air is only slightly softer than a brick wall, so if you suddenly aren’t opposing the force of drag you’ll slow down very quickly indeed, and having vertical thrusters would allow a Harrier to, temporarily at least, reach velocities too low to be matched by almost any other aircraft.

I just doubt they’d eff up an otherwise ingeniously simple design just to get another ~14% thrust (assuming I did my math correctly, I very well might not have) for a rarely used and highly risky tactic, when that same 14% thrust could be provided by nosing up less than 8º (increasing the angle of attack on the wings and pointing the vertical thrusters slightly forward).

That can be arranged.

In my experience, less than 5% of the time spent making a program is actually spent on coding, so if you’ll take care of the remaining 95% - well, I’ve been meaning to do a decent-sized project in C++ or a similar language for a while now. This qualifies.

I should have a lot of spare time coming up starting around the middle of next month, if you want to get started on the GDD.

83

You call them out for being indi. Star citizen isn’t suddenly NOT indi just for having money.

84

If you define indie as not being owned by a large publisher then yes they’re indie. However being indie is usually attributed to having a small, underfunded team that doesn’t produce AAA games and if you subscribe to that definition they have far outgrown the label. Also, SC is clearly going to be a AAA game.

85

While Star Citizen might be an independent game, as in not owned by an established studio or publishing firm, it’s certainly not indie anymore.

It’s too well funded with too many people working on it, with an emphasis on triple-A levels of gleam, polish, and production.

Infinity, No Man’s Sky, or Rodina would be a better example of an indie space game.

86

Whenever someone says “Indie” I think of that woman getting anxious about her man in the George Lucas movies. I don’t like the word. It’s mostly meaningless to me.

87

…Indicable…Indie-cable? Indie=meaningless. Cable is short for sending a message by cable e.g. cable=message

Therefore Indicable = a meaningless message?

i haz wurdz!!!

Just joking man :wink: Though hopefully all the “Indies” will come through and give it some meaning for you.

88

Well, apparently adults keep learning a new word every day, on average, until they reach middle-age.

89

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
I guess you must’ve missed it the first time I posted it:[/quote]
And for the second time, I wanted to see multiple barrels on one gun, not multiple guns on one platform. Because if we went with multiple guns on one platform, we call that a ship.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
And as we all know, spinning really fast will make you shine more.[/quote]
I hope it was obvious that my point was that cooling will still occur in space from radiation and the advantage for a spinning rotary design for probably the 600th time now, has nothing to do with cooling. Please go back and reread my posts.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
It works for non-rotating setups, too, and they have the added advantage that there might be several loading mechanisms so that those wouldn’t overheat either.[/quote]
First of all, multiple loading mechanisms will increase the weight of the overall craft. Why do that when you can have only one loading mechanism. And, as far as I know, loading mechanisms won’t overheat before the barrel does, so it’s a moot point.

And again, I asked for multiple barrels on one gun that isn’t rotary. Not multiple guns on one platform. As far as I know about the ZPU, the only thing they share might be ammunition storage. But each gun has it’s own trigger mechanism, loading mechanism, and barrel, which are the only three things you need to have a gun. IE, that’s 4 guns, not one gun with 4 barrels. If you want to argue whether we need more guns on one platform, then we can start talking about how many weapon mounts we can fit on a Hornet, which is fine, but a completely different subject.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
See those multiple metal bands[/quote]
I think the metal bands don’t weigh as much as having 6 entire guns.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
So the only way you’d need 6 fixed thrusters is if you had one on each side of a cube-like geometric shape.[/quote]
I assumed we wanted our ship to have attitude control, not just translation control.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
Option 1 is impossible for providing 2 degrees of freedom with a single moving component.[/quote]
Actually it’s not impossible. Just use a spherical motor. Or if you like the oldschool stuff, then use 2 moving components like a normal gun turret. Although each of these solutions aren’t even accurate to the Hornet in particular, because the Hornet seems to use a smart material to control thrust vectors, unless there are servos inside the thruster that can’t be seen.

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
Option 2 is impossible for very high pressure differentials; this is why astronauts have to pre-breathe pure oxygen before going on EVA missions, it lets them maintain a suit pressure of about 20% atmospheric pressure making them merely hard to move in rather than concrete-like personal prisons.[/quote]
Just no. You’re describing material malleability in a closed system and trying to use that to describe thrust vectoring which is fluid dynamics. If one were to close the nozzles on the back of a normal F-16, as they normally do every flight during operation, you do increase the stress on the nozzles, but the primary thing that happens is that you change how the pressure leaves the plane. We already use thrust vectoring in aircraft that alters the vector of the created jet after exiting the combustion stage.The F-22 does this for pitching. The F-18 HARV and F-16 VISTA also have pitch and yaw vectoring.

http://www.fighter-planes.com/info/harrier.htm
http://news.in.msn.com/gallery/Photoviewer.aspx?ucsort=3&cp-documentid=5496308&page=15
somebody trying to simulate harrier flight: http://www.thunder-works.com/faq.htm

[quote=“Runiat, post:77, topic:136”]
Saturday said:
Really? “no way”? Did you like the Wing Commander games/Starlancer or Freelancer?

No.[/quote]

What space games have you liked?

90

I hope my video response didn’t come across as discounting the idea. I really would love to see this.

91

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

92

I wanna stuff them in!

93

How, refreshing. A troll that doesn’t even pretend to read posts or consider their contents. Rude, though.

That’s a nice fantasy world you live in. I’ll leave you to it.

95

On the subject of rotary thrust nozzles for jet aircraft.

The Harrier (and pretty much all of it’s derivatives) only has 180 degree thrust vectoring along a single axis other than the gimbaling of it’s main engine exhaust. It uses fixed thrust outlets at each of its wingtips for fine manoeuvre control.

The only reason these things have thrust vectoring to the degree they do is that jet engines are incredibly heavy, and fitting separate jet engines to face downward for taking off and landing vertically would add way too much weight.

Rocket engines are incredibly lightweight by comparison to jets. They’re also a lot more powerful, can be scaled down to much smaller scale a lot easier, and can throttle up and down in a fraction of the time. The only downside to rockets is the fuel usage (and volatility).

Having fewer gimbaling engines rather than a whole bunch of fixed engines means you kill your ship’s manoeuvrability. You go from instant 0-100% throttle in any direction to having to wait for the engines to turn to face the right direction before firing. It doesn’t matter if you’re fitting a slightly more powerful engine (although I doubt that, seeing as it needs to be fixed onto a rotating mounting point) if it doesn’t start firing until after you’ve been shot.

(Of course, I seriously doubt the developers will apply forces directly from what the thrusters appear to be cable of doing anyway, especially seeing as they’re not going to bother doing the reverse, and will just cheat and use a fixed-forces system for all the ship effecting physics. Can’t blame them too much, the rotary thrusters would cripple your flight after all.)

96

[quote=“Naiba, post:95, topic:136”]
You go from instant 0-100% throttle in any direction to having to wait for the engines to turn to face the right direction before firing.[/quote]
Just to be clear, each thruster on a small ship in Star Citizen is not it’s own engine. They likely are feeding from the main engine, much like a harrier does and much like a modern day spacecraft does in regards to RCS fuel.

So what we’re talking about is the time it takes to move the nozzle to the correct position. If you look at the Hornet in flight from the DFM Pax stuff, it seems to take fractions of a second. In a fixed thruster system, there is also still a delay. The delay is how long it takes to open the regulator valve. As Runiat pointed out before, this could be a magnetic field system which would make it almost instant. At this point, we’re talking about the difference between like .01 seconds for fixed and .05 seconds delay for flex. That kind of difference is small. And I think at that point, other factors become more important, like system weight, component volume/surface area, or maximum thrust capacity, which a flex thruster system can maintain a constant output in all vectors unlike a fixed thruster system.

[quote=“Naiba, post:95, topic:136”]
Of course, I seriously doubt the developers will apply forces directly from what the thrusters appear to be cable of doing anyway, especially seeing as they’re not going to bother doing the reverse, and will just cheat and use a fixed-forces system for all the ship effecting physics.[/quote]
I’m not sure what you mean but to break down how the physics in SC works, everything is simulated in real time, right down to the G forces on the pilot. The engine calculates how much mass your ship has, where that center of mass is, and what kind of thrust can be output by each thruster, which is dependent on the type of thruster it is, and that thruster’s position on the ship. A thruster on a wingtip will give you more attitude control than a thruster closer to the body for example. If you get a wing shot off, the engine calculates how that shifts your center of mass and changes the amount of mass your ship now has. It calculates the new vectors for the thrusters to apply the maximum effectiveness in a given direction (when you have IFCS on). If you get one of your thrusters destroyed, the system then calculates new possible vectors for the remaining thrusters to give you as close to full control as it can. More likely than not, you’ll be in a situation with a combination of these outcomes, and the system will need to reconcile a new center of mass, a new amount of mass, and a different thruster combination.

They don’t animate the reverse thrust, but it’s in the physics system.

97

RCS thrusters on modern day spacecraft are all independent thrusters as far as I know.
*Not sure about the blurg/tech of SC, are the thrusters powered by electricity, fuel or both?

[quote=“Saturday, post:96, topic:136”]
everything is simulated in real time,[/quote]
Physics being simulated, based on the thruster locations and ranges of motion, doesn’t mean they have to link up with what the thrusters are doing. Having a real-time physics-based flight model is one thing, having that flight model be directly tied in with the animations is another, and considering the developers are just cutting out half the thruster firings because they don’t like how the real world looks, I seriously doubt they’ll care for anything but making the aesthetics of it look good to them personally. They’re just not going for that level of fidelity or visual realism.

That’s why I’m pretty confident they’ll be using multiple forces along multiple fixed axis from each gimbaling thruster in the physics calculations to make things simpler for them. I’d be willing to bet money on it. Of course, you’ll never know, the only difference it makes is the engine-turning lag, which, once again, I think they’ll cheat out of bothering with for gameplay reasons in the end. Point was, gimbaling engines with that degree of freedom, nozzles or otherwise, are kinda silly from pretty much any practical standpoint.

98

*Just to clear up some thoughts on aesthetics and personal taste from earlier; this is my absolute favourite small/medium-sized spaceship design that’s shown up in media, by quite a wide margin:

How rotary engines should be done. All big and in-your-face about it. :smile:
Pity it was in an average-poor movie and got such little screen time.

99

[quote=“Naiba, post:97, topic:136”]
are the thrusters powered by electricity, fuel or both?[/quote]
I assume that the non-fixed thrusters move via electricity applied in some way. As far as the propulsion emitting from them, I don’t have a good idea of what the fiction of the physics are. I do know that engines do require a fuel of some kind that needs to be replaced regularly and there will be different kinds of engines utilizing different methods of generating power and propulsion.

[quote=“Naiba, post:97, topic:136”]
RCS thrusters on modern day spacecraft are all independent thrusters as far as I know.[/quote]
If by independent thrusters you mean that each thruster has it’s own fuel storage container, and they’re not linked, then that’s not accurate. That would be a huge waste of space, and what happens if you’re only primarily using one bank? Then you run out of fuel for that one bank and lose a fraction of your control.

This is from Apollo:

[quote=“Naiba, post:97, topic:136”]
Physics being simulated, based on the thruster locations and ranges of motion, doesn’t mean they have to link up with what the thrusters are doing. Having a real-time physics-based flight model is one thing, having that flight model be directly tied in with the animations is another, and considering the developers are just cutting out half the thruster firings because they don’t like how the real world looks, I seriously doubt they’ll care for anything but making the aesthetics of it look good to them personally.[/quote]
I’m not completely following where you’re going. If you’re saying that the animations of the Star Citizen thrusters don’t reflect real physics because of the absence of the animation depicting the need to counter-fire midway through an attitude change, then you are correct. They will not be doing that. I presume this is due to the speed of combat maneuvers. It is too fast for the player to really register that the maneuvering thrusters fired one time to initiate a roll or what have you and then a second separate time to stop the roll. And so it makes it look off. If you try to make a really quick roll in Kerbal Space Program with RCS on or try to get out of one, it looks a bit ridiculous. It’s fine at slow speeds, because it gives your brain time to register what’s happening, but at fast speeds, it just looks like everything is firing at once.

[quote=“Naiba, post:97, topic:136”]
That’s why I’m pretty confident they’ll be using multiple forces along multiple fixed axis from each gimbaling thruster in the physics calculations to make things simpler for them.[/quote]
So this is a coding solution. How do you simulate a flex thruster as far as what’s happening in the math? You’re saying that instead of calculating the vector straight up, they will write code that first assumes it’s a 3 thruster bank, and then adding in some extra math or artificially increasing the output of those 3 thrusters to account for diagonal vectors? That’s what a simulation is. It’s really none of my business past system performance how they choose to use code and engine to simulate things or how roundabout they do it as long as it doesn’t effect the gameplay at all.

[quote=“Naiba, post:97, topic:136”]
Point was, gimbaling engines with that degree of freedom, nozzles or otherwise, are kinda silly from pretty much any practical standpoint.[/quote]
If you’re going to say that, then you need to tell me how you plan on reconciling reduced thrust in diagonal vectors. You can’t just assert something without evidence. You’re going to have to sacrifice something. You either need to add more power to each individual thruster, use more fuel, there is going to be a downside in there somewhere unless you demonstrate otherwise.

[quote=“Naiba, post:98, topic:136”]
Just to clear up some thoughts on aesthetics and personal taste from earlier[/quote]
I never saw it in the movie. But, I like it. It looks like a mining ship or an armored personnel carrier. Not really a space superiority craft XD. It also looks like it belongs on a desert planet.

[quote=“Naiba, post:98, topic:136”]
How rotary engines should be done. All big and in-your-face about it.[/quote]
I do like large nacelles for vtol-like craft.

There are quite a few of them in Next Great Starship.

100

No, I do not. I mean each thruster is it’s own engine. It sounded like you were suggesting that there was only one rocket-engine and the rocket exhaust was somehow ducted over into the thrusters.

There is no reduced thrust on diagonal vectors, It may use twice the fuel for diagonal vectors by needing multiple thrusters firing at once, but these are short-burn combat manoeuvres, not prolonged flight, it wouldn’t make a noticeable dent in the fuel reserves of the ship.

As for the stuff about physics and animations, I want to clarify this.

The whole reason I think rotary manoeuvre thrusters are a dumb idea is that it would take time to turn them to face the correct way before firing. This leads to the developers choosing ONE of the following 3 choices:

1: Blatantly cheat and ignore the animation time, giving full power to the turn the instant the player does anything with the controls. (You won’t get the right visual feedback from what the physics are doing so it’ll feel weird even if you don’t realise why consciously.)

2: Have the thruster turning be instantaneous. (It’ll just look weird.)

3: Make all the ships with rotary manoeuvre thrusters lag. (The gameplay will suck.)

Option 3 is the reason I think rotating manoeuvring thrusters would be a stupid idea for a combat ship IRL. Option 1 the developers don’t seem to care about as proven with their choose to leave out the counter-burns (I don’t care what you say about it not looking weird, it’ll feel weird when you’re playing the game. Still, option 2 is what they’ll probably go for. They have messed up ideas on what they think looks good in so many other instances.

(Would also like to point out: I’ve never had issues with counter-firing RCS thrusters in KSP, even zipping about around space stations with small tug-ships pulling off crazy manoeuvres for the hell of it.)

Also, crewed turrets… eww.

101

Now what I would like to see is the equivalent of a phased array laser for thrusters : a directional thruster that doesn’t use moving parts.
Well, theoretically, a phased array laser could be used as a directional thruster (photon drive). But when you can scorch cities from high orbit with your directional thrusters, space fighters may not be relevant however you try to spin it.

102

[quote=“Naiba, post:100, topic:136”]
No, I do not. I mean each thruster is it’s own engine. It sounded like you were suggesting that there was only one rocket-engine and the rocket exhaust was somehow ducted over into the thrusters.[/quote]
ah okay. In the SC universe, the maneuvering thrust, I assume, does come from the primary engine. Otherwise for modern space craft, they don’t. The Harrier does as you said in a limited capacity.

[quote=“Naiba, post:100, topic:136”]
There is no reduced thrust on diagonal vectors[/quote]
Go Google how to add vectored forces. A 5 unit fixed thruster firing perpendicular to a 5 unit fixed thruster doesn’t yield 10 units of diagonal force.

[quote=“Naiba, post:100, topic:136”]
The whole reason I think rotary manoeuvre thrusters are a dumb idea is that it would take time to turn them to face the correct way before firing.[/quote]
I addressed this directly probably 3 times now.

The above quote of myself addresses option 3. Number 2 is demonstrably not the case because if you watch the last DFM reveal at PAX East, the thrusters do take time to move into position. But the 4th option you didn’t list here is that the time it takes for a thruster to move into position is not instantaneous but insignificant to the combat because the time to move into position is so small which addresses option 1, because what’s the difference from a player perspective between imperception and not actually happening? Nothing in terms of a simulation.

[quote=“Naiba, post:100, topic:136”]
Also, crewed turrets… eww.[/quote]
You watched A New Hope and never wished you could be Luke or Han shooting down tie fighters in the Millennium Falcon?

[quote=“ThornEel, post:101, topic:136”]
a directional thruster that doesn’t use moving parts.[/quote]
This could be sci-fi possible. You could use force fields to direct the thrust.