Piston / Rotor wobble - just trying to figure out how it works :P

[Solid Snack]

I've been messing around and spent a few weeks building a ship on Multiplayer - trying to learn the limitations of the game and what I can actually get away with. I've messed around with a 9 piston "arm" system (2 extended and 7 retracted connected by a 'U' at the end to achieve length) held in place by landing gear when not in use (for mining), and that has been working great. Pistons are all on "share inertia".

I've then had a go making a mouse-controlled turret using rotors and gyros for the same ship, after a few attempts and watching a bunch of people explain what I need to do to balance the thing in atmosphere and the like. Rotors are not on "share inertia" since that prevents it from turning.

Now here is when the problems started. The turret on the rotors wobbles like a twenty year old washing machine drying off a bunch of bricks. This seems to transfer to the piston arm, as I have noticed it wobble several times more now when in us - at the same frequency as the turret below. Flying the ship in first person is almost unbearable as the noise from the wobbling turret echos throughout the entirety of the ship deafening even the sound of two refineries and assemblers working simultaneously. And goes without saying, trying to use the turret would give a seizure to a turtle.

Now I've loaded up a single player creative game to try and see if I can fix it, and there is no issues with either the pistons or the turret whatsoever when I spawn the ship from blueprint. I've also spawned a bunch of other ships using different turret systems (scripts), originally thinking that may be the solution to my problems - but now I'm hesitant to try and re-build it on the multiplayer server if the issue is multiplayer related. Oh and I have also tried playing with adding landing gear to "lock" the turret in place like I have with the pistons, disabling / enabling gyros, sharing inertia, maxing / minimizing / altering tension of both brakes and torque and rotor displacement (basically all the options for the rotors).

So the question - or I guess a few questions are:
1) What is actually causing the rotor / piston wobble thing? Is it a multiplayer server thing or a multiplayer server setting thing or a gyro vs script thing or the way I built it or is it just something that cannot be avoided?
2) Did I screw up the build order of each of the system that would otherwise have worked fine, and thus I am not experiencing this issue when I spawn a ready blueprint in single player?
3) If it is a multiplayer server issue - can anything be done, or is there a way to get a working mouse-controlled turret on a multiplayer server? Would it matter if I use large or small piston heads, as my current set-up uses a large rotor (ship) > small piston head > conveyor > small rotor > small piston head. My next step was trying large rotor > large piston head, but I held off doing that when I loaded up creative and discovered I didn't have this issue there.

[Darugdawg]

So im not an expert unto this but based on my experience just enable experimental mode and check the distibute load thingy on the setting of all the rotors and pistons

[Solid Snack]

Originally posted by LINGLONG:

So im not an expert unto this but based on my experience just enable experimental mode and check the distibute load thingy on the setting of all the rotors and pistons

You mean Share Inertia Tensor? Already done that unless you mean something else (haven't seen anything to do with load in any of the options, and already been playing on experimental)

[Tiberius Lacedaemon]

1) The game. Pistons, Rotors and Wheels have a history of being severely unstable and this is still the case TODAY. Wheels, not so much but they still randomly explode.

You're not doing anything wrong at all. The game is. See, what people don't realize is that Single Player is -stable-. It's how the game should be. Unfortunately, when it comes to multiplayer, that is not the case. Things that are stable, turns out to not be in Multiplayer. There is not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing you could possibly do to fix this. It has been like this for years, and it will continue to be like this.

This is why most -stable- MP servers deactivate scripts, rotors and pistons because they always cause problems, including rubberbanding and severe sim issues because people don't understand the impact it has in MP.

[Bannor]

Originally posted by Tiberius Lacedaemon:

1) See, what people don't realize is that Single Player is -stable-.

Disagree.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/0/4052614174010753534/

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

Originally posted by Bannor:

Originally posted by Tiberius Lacedaemon:

1) See, what people don't realize is that Single Player is -stable-.

Disagree.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/0/4052614174010753534/

You havent actually given any more info to see if thats a collision problem though.Upload the world and lets have a look. I can honestly say all SP instances of clang iv encountered were due to bad design, or bad collision :)

[Mr B.]

Engineering in this game is TERRIBLE. I realise that I've avoided rotors and pistons for the large part over the years. But now the game is released, and supposedly stable, the parts are not.

Even in SP - connect a small fighter to a piston mounted connector - sometimes it massivly wobbles for no reason. It's connected to a large grid ship of 10000s of tons, and the small ship is around 20,000kg. Seriously?

Pistons wobble when mounted in a string of 2 or more. This is totally unreasonable, it's not like you can add more pistons to make it more stable (not without messing about and reliably).

As long as your avoiding collisions, your doing your part. It's poor work on the game engine which is to blame for the rest.

To answer the questions though, as above, as long as it's not colliding with anything it's ok. You may be able to get better results fiddling with the settings in the rotor, tho it's more pot luck than any logic.

As others have said, SP is far more stable, but will still give nonsenical issues.

All you can do is try to make whatever on the turret is as light as possible. It helps, but tbh, I think it's a pointless exercise if you want to use them for anything other than the most basic of uses in MP.

[Solid Snack]

Ok - so if there aren't any issues in SP would that imply that there aren't any collisions in the blueprint / design itself, or should I still try and experiment more on the MP server?

The thing that really makes me wonder if the fact that both the piston arm and the rotor turret are wobbling at exactly the same frequency relative to the ship - despite not sharing inertia, not being connected in any way shape or form to each other, and being on opposite sides / ends of the ship. Would one be "wobbling" the other in a sense or what would be causing that?

[Tiberius Lacedaemon]

Everything in Single Player is stable. However, rotors and pistons are still unstable, but they work 100x better in Single Player. Everything that is stable in Single Player is not as stable in Multiplayer!

The majority of problems in this game is simply Player Error. You have to look at your design 100 times from every angle if you have to, in order to find the problem. Sometimes you need an extra pair of eyes to help you, sometimes you're lucky enough to find it, and most of the time, you have to dismantle what you've done and do a step by step rebuild.

This is why I always recommend people to play on Single Player SURVIVAL with admin on and not Creative, as creative will not tell you where you messed up as it requires no power, ammo or fuel.

With that being said, this just unfortunately happens. Sometimes things just wobble and you can't fix it. That's the nature of Pistons and Rotors. Until Keen decides to do a complete overhaul of this system, which is never, this is what we have.

Volkier. If you want, throw us a screenshot, or add me and I'll come and see what the deal is, as actually looking at the design will help much more than reading about it, at least for me. =)

[Lukeh]

Anyone that finds this page and has this problem, i solved it by building small blocks down to my ground from the rotor, attached a landing gear and locked it on my large blocked floor

[Valderci]

Originally posted by Karmaterrorᵁᴷ:

Originally posted by Bannor:

Disagree.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/0/4052614174010753534/

You havent actually given any more info to see if thats a collision problem though.Upload the world and lets have a look. I can honestly say all SP instances of clang iv encountered were due to bad design, or bad collision :)

I also disagree.

I have 2 ships both with connectors. I docked the little ship to the larger one and the little ship swung left and right like a ball on a rubber band, killed me and destroyed the little ship.

This was in single player.