ship weight

Zen shared this feedback ago

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thrusters being affected in space by weight of a ship when mining making ship slow and hard to accelerate and move in space I agree in gravity there should be restrictions but that restriction should not be if the ship is not in gravity

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Marco Leise ●

From your text I infer that you want the mass of ore including ice to be proportional to the natural gravity in that location, is that correct? If not please explain what changes to the game you have in mind, so we have an understanding of what we are voting on. Thx.

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Zen ●

yes so no gravity in space so thrusters shouldn't be affected by the weight of the ship

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Marco Leise ●

I think we're talking past each other. Thrusters are not affected by weight. In physics, weight is the force an object excerts downwards under gravity due to its mass. At ground level on Space Engineers' earth, gravity is 9.81 newtons (N) per kilogram. A ship of mass 1000 kg weighs 9810 N on earth. In space, ships are weightless by definition.

Atmospheric and ion thrusters are affected by the density of the atmosphere, but none are affected by the mass of the ship. For example the small large grid hydrogen thruster always excerts a constant force of 1080000 N. The loss of acceleration you witness stems from the fact that - as Doomed Person points out below - acceleration equals force devided by mass (a = F÷m). As you mine ores, the thruster force remains constant, but the mass increases and hence acceleration goes down (inversely proportional to ship mass).

So again, when you write "Thrusters shouldn't be affected by the weight/mass of the ship." that's already the case and it's not clear what precisely you want changed or if you simply had a misunderstanding of the underlying physics and thought there's something wrong with them.

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Doomed Person ●

Objects don't just disappear when you put them in boxes, and F = ma never stopped being a thing. Creating an exception for convenience is only used in the most extreme cases. Jump drives exist because it would be wildly impractical to go between planets otherwise. Gravity generators exist so that jetpacks aren't an absolute necessity off-planet. Ridiculously slow regeneration would simply be a frustrating mechanic compared to a medbay. Real-life ion thrusters take negligible reaction mass anyway, and a basic power-only thruster is virtually mandatory in this kind of game.

This kind of basic change in Space Engineers physics would take significant work to implement and bugfix with the number of other mechanics that are built off it. Learn to change thruster output, or build a larger carrying ship that is proportionally affected less by the mass of the cargo. There are many solutions to this which require small to moderate ship design changes instead of adding a nonsensical physics trainwreck.

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