Number of engines per kg of weight?

[Morphzilla]

I started with the asteroids "yellow bus" ship and have been steadily adding things to it, and I've noticed it's getting more & more sluggish. I'm curious if anyone has a good rule of thumb for how many engines to have on a ship for every kg of weight in order to keep it fairly mobile?

Related question which might help: How much force does one engine produce?

[VanGoghComplex]

There are a couple wikis for Space Engineers, Google them. They have all the specific numbers on most blocks. =)

[Vargali]

you might also add gyros too..they affect things a bit as well

[raymazoida]

It really depends on how fast you want to go. But some things to remember

1 - If you want to turn fast thats gyros, not thrusters! You see designs with loads of left/right thrusters, these don't let you turn any faster at all. They are for moving sideways. And yes you will want to go sideways if you are docking, but really, is it worth the ammount of thrusters? Plus you have to think about how often your ship will dock, and if you are happy with much slower left/right/up/down movement - I am so I usually have 1/4 the thrusers left/right/up/down as I do going forward

2 - Dampners are more powerful than using the thrusters manually. What does this mean regarding thruster numbers? You don't need equal numbers of forward/rear thrusters, You can easilly have half the number of "breaking" thrusters in an unmodded speed world and as long as you are not a shockingly bad pilot will never crash. Of course if you have modded the speed limit you may want more breaks!

3 - My general rule of thumb for large ships is to have 4 forward thrusters if the ship is under 250kg, add a large if its under 500kg, and another large for every 500kg thereafter..... but then generally I'm ok with not having my ships accelerate super fast - and really if you are building a giant whatever you shouldn't expect it to accelerate like that, no more than you would expect a Big Rig Truck to keep pace with a Veyron!

[DarkExcalibur42]

I find that less that 0.75m/s/s of acceleration is simply intolerable for maneuvering. I'm impatient. I enjoy rates around 2 to 3m/s/s.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=344534260

[Ex-Mørtis]

Originally posted by mrraybaker:

It really depends on how fast you want to go. But some things to remember

1 - If you want to turn fast thats gyros, not thrusters! You see designs with loads of left/right thrusters, these don't let you turn any faster at all. They are for moving sideways. And yes you will want to go sideways if you are docking, but really, is it worth the ammount of thrusters? Plus you have to think about how often your ship will dock, and if you are happy with much slower left/right/up/down movement - I am so I usually have 1/4 the thrusers left/right/up/down as I do going forward

2 - Dampners are more powerful than using the thrusters manually. What does this mean regarding thruster numbers? You don't need equal numbers of forward/rear thrusters, You can easilly have half the number of "breaking" thrusters in an unmodded speed world and as long as you are not a shockingly bad pilot will never crash. Of course if you have modded the speed limit you may want more breaks!

3 - My general rule of thumb for large ships is to have 4 forward thrusters if the ship is under 250kg, add a large if its under 500kg, and another large for every 500kg thereafter..... but then generally I'm ok with not having my ships accelerate super fast - and really if you are building a giant whatever you shouldn't expect it to accelerate like that, no more than you would expect a Big Rig Truck to keep pace with a Veyron!

1. Yes, at least in a warship you most assuredly want lateral thrust to be pretty high and unless you like gliding on ice when making maneuvers. And in a warship you will be making evasive and hard strange demanding turns in combat. Less so with utility and industrial stuff.

2. Yeash dampners rock for that, they also rock for overloading your power if you don't plan accordingly.

3. If one is just making small utility ships this is a good rule of thumb. For anything that lives and breathes by its ability to move and get a gun on target this methodology will make you salvage. Good rule of thumb is about 1.5 M/S/S for non warships. 2.5+ M/S/S for warships. Also, if you take up the Ultra Gyro Mod, the Azimuth Master pack, and the titan Mod, you should expect any ship you make of any size accelerate however you want it to be, because the cascading mass to thrust to power limitation is taken away and it becomes more "How ridiculously badass do you wanna get, and how many resources do you really wanna burn into making a superheavy warship move like a fighter?"

[DarkExcalibur42]

Originally posted by mrraybaker:

2 - Dampners are more powerful than using the thrusters manually. What does this mean regarding thruster numbers? You don't need equal numbers of forward/rear thrusters, You can easilly have half the number of "breaking" thrusters in an unmodded speed world and as long as you are not a shockingly bad pilot will never crash. Of course if you have modded the speed limit you may want more breaks!

You can actually have 1/10th as many braking thrusters as acceleration thrusters and still stop just as quickly as you started.

[DarkExcalibur42]

Originally posted by Raxamon:

3. If one is just making small utility ships this is a good rule of thumb. For anything that lives and breathes by its ability to move and get a gun on target this methodology will make you salvage. Good rule of thumb is about 1.5 M/S/S for non warships. 2.5+ M/S/S for warships. Also, if you take up the Ultra Gyro Mod, the Azimuth Master pack, and the titan Mod, you should expect any ship you make of any size accelerate however you want it to be, because the cascading mass to thrust to power limitation is taken away and it becomes more "How ridiculously badass do you wanna get, and how many resources do you really wanna burn into making a superheavy warship move like a fighter?"

Depends on the size and purpose of the warship. Once your ship gets big enough, speed isn't very important any more. I find 1.0 to 1.5m/s/s acceptable for my medium weight warships, though vessels like my destroyer are much faster than this due to their function. Small military ships I've built range from 2.0m/s/s to almost 5.0m/s/s again due to their desired role. BIG ships can be as slow as 0.5m/s/s

[VanGoghComplex]

I will generally put as many large engines on the backs of my ships as will fit, then fill in any gaps with smalls.

... I'm not saying this is good advice. It's just what I do. XD

[Morphzilla]

Thanks VanGoghComplex -- This helped a lot: http://spaceengineers.wikia.com/wiki/Thruster_mechanics

Thanks mrraybaker -- that's exactly what I was looking for. I like the 1/4 rule for left/right/up/down.

Here's what I discovered from the wiki numbers...

• Thruster force when using intertial dampeners is max, but when flying manually (w/a/s/d movement), the force is only 2/3rd as powerful.
  
• If you want to stop as fast as you go forward, then it might make sense to have 2 backwards thrusters for breaking per every 3 you have forward.
  
• Large thrusters are 12x more powerful than small thrusters, so if you're thinking about adding a 13th thruster to your ship, it might be time to upgrade to a large thruster.
  
• If you want a large ship to get 10m/s acceleration (meaning it takes 10 sec to go from zero to max speed), then you'll need 1 thruster per every 10,000 kg of mass. (But of course as mrraybaker said "it really depends on how fast you want to go")

For my growing ship -- which mostly does mining and hopping from asteroid to asteroid, and doesn't need to be too nimble -- I think I'll go with the 1 thruster per 10,000 kg rule, and probably keep the same number of backwards thrusters because i want to be able to stop quickly if I misjudge the distance.

[DarkExcalibur42]

You can use the spreadsheet I linked to in my guide to quickly calculate how much thrust your ship has: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jx1oSSEj-6P0s1DOzDAhJUd3A2EXI16t38lVc7Y8sBo/edit?usp=sharing

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to make spreadsheets report to multiple decimal places so you have to divide your total force by your ship's mass manually to get it to tell you the ship's acceleration ._.

[raymazoida]

Originally posted by DarkExcalibur42:

Originally posted by mrraybaker:

2 - Dampners are more powerful than using the thrusters manually. What does this mean regarding thruster numbers? You don't need equal numbers of forward/rear thrusters, You can easilly have half the number of "breaking" thrusters in an unmodded speed world and as long as you are not a shockingly bad pilot will never crash. Of course if you have modded the speed limit you may want more breaks!

You can actually have 1/10th as many braking thrusters as acceleration thrusters and still stop just as quickly as you started.

aye.... I just tend to go for half as it means I can stop much much faster, kinda like a car doing an emergancy stop.

[raymazoida]

Originally posted by VanGoghComplex:

I will generally put as many large engines on the backs of my ships as will fit, then fill in any gaps with smalls.

... I'm not saying this is good advice. It's just what I do. XD

Ie - It goes as fast as it possibly can.... a top gear man ;)

[DarkExcalibur42]

Originally posted by mrraybaker:

Originally posted by VanGoghComplex:

I will generally put as many large engines on the backs of my ships as will fit, then fill in any gaps with smalls.

... I'm not saying this is good advice. It's just what I do. XD

Ie - It goes as fast as it possibly can.... a top gear man ;)

I was gonna say Tool Time. Especially given the explosive nature of Space Engineers XD

[raymazoida]

I guess Tool time is some show I've not heard of lol

[VanGoghComplex]

Originally posted by DarkExcalibur42:

Originally posted by mrraybaker:

Ie - It goes as fast as it possibly can.... a top gear man ;)

I was gonna say Tool Time. Especially given the explosive nature of Space Engineers XD

If you can fit more engines on it, it doesn't have enough. XD