Solar tracking a ship with gyros ignores camera orientation

Hello, samrocketman!

Thank you for writing to us.

Could you kindly share further information concerning this issue?

Did you experience this issue in a modded world/server (has active MODs)? If so, could you kindly create a new vanilla world (without MODs) and paste the blueprint of the affected ship there to check if the issue persists?

If the issue still occurs in the vanilla world, please send us a screen recording/video showing the issue, along with the blueprint of the ship.

• You can access your blueprints files by typing %appdata% into your Windows search bar and you will be redirected to the hidden Roaming folder. After that just follow: \Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Blueprints. Select the correct folder where your blueprint is saved (local or cloud), zip the file, and attach it here.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

I have identified the root cause of the bug and suggest a fix.

https://discord.com/channels/125011928711036928/360712338741002242/1197242057060786277

Also, the gyroscopes wiggle a lot. It would be nice to be able to tweak the angle in which the gyroscopes stop moving so that they do not wiggle back and forth when sun tracking via ship gyroscopes.

Hi QA Keen SWH,

I am playing single player offline with no mods. I just started playing the game for the first time last week although I've owned the game for several years; so I am learning in the vanilla game with no mods in survival.

I can attach my ship for you to try out in space. It has a projector on it. If you destroy the cameras and rebuild them the first camera that gets build will change orientation of the solar tracking regardless. There's a couple of things of note:

• The Custom Turret Controller doesn't adhere to the camera setting although a camera needs to be set (any camera will do it will not change orientation).
• In the case of this ship there's cameras on 4 sides: 1 front behind glass, 3 bottom (2 landing gear and front nose), and 1 camera on top
• You can destroy and rebuild the cameras with the projector on to try it out

Some bugs:

• The camera facing away from the sun dictates the tracking.
• The Custom Turret Controller appears to use some internal ID of a camera and not any value the player can customize. I imagine it is some ID that dictates the build order because the first built camera is the one that is permanently used for setting regardless of how you change cameras in the custom turret controller.

I'll post another reply with my ship attached

In my attachment I've included three parts.

1. My save game: Taurus
2. My primary ship with solar tracking: the Ore Friend Ship; the solar gyros on in the Mining bay in the rear painted all yellow.
3. (not really relevant but) the mining ship I use to dock in the rear.

The Ore Friend Ship has a project in which you can set the blueprint to easily add and remove cameras. In order to learn about solar tracking I temporarily built this test harness I could dock my ship to and played with the cameras. At first I thought it was about how the ship was built but I learned it had to do with the cameras, their build order, and the strange orientation they must be in order for solar tracking to work at all (dark side of the ship camera tracks the sun).

These are all original builds by me in the vanilla base game while learning Space Engineers (some design inspiration of the miner was taken from splitsie atmospheric mining ship tutorial series but I converted it for space).

Screenshot of my test harness: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/360712338741002242/1197242056851079188/image.png?ex=65ba8d8e&is=65a8188e&hm=40a1c93114164c3ca51fd7c93821153a012df3e9330a3a8fdf832c9e2500bb36&

Also, I forgot to mention: on the Ore Friend Ship the rotor, gyro and custom turret controller settings are tuned very low to account for gyration jitter. Search the build list for "Solar Tracker" and you'll find all of the relevant parts. You can turn up the power of the Gyros and increase the turning rate.

If you want to see the effects more quickly:

• Turn the Rotor torque to max
• Increase Gyro power to 100%
• Increase the elevation and azimuth multiplier to 30
  

Game build: 1.203.628 b1 default (Steam)