Ship Capsizing When Firing Broadside

[Swiss Army Knife]

So I've built myself a ship I'm fairly happy with, it's slow as all hell, probably has way too much metal, but it sits nicely in the water is stable 99% of the time.

It has three large gun batteries. Two at the front, one at the back. Each battery consists of three seperate 1 barrel 240mm advanced cannons. I know this is probably way too large for an advanced cannon but I couldn't get near the muzzle velocity I wanted out of a CRAM cannon and lowering the barrel gauge for the advanced cannons make them look oddly small.

I've packed in as many recoil dampeners as I can into each battery and gotten the recoil down to about 4500 a cannon. Without throwing ridiculous recoil antlers on top of the batteries that's as low as I can get it.

So my question is is there any way to counteract the capsizing effect of firing the broadsides firing without changing the cannons or making the ship a multihull trimaran?

Is there a better place to put the COM on the ship to counteract it? Right now it's a meter or two below the waterline.

[Agnar]

How wide is the ship?
How high up are the guns?

4500 recoil is pretty good, so I think there might be some other issue at play.
Generally speaking, the lower the COM the better, but mine are typicaly 33% of the way up from the bottom of the ship, sitting a few meters under the water line.

If you want to upload it and link, I could take a better look.

[Fatboychummy]

What I usually do is use Automated Control Blocks (You should only need 2, also known as ACB), and propellors on the bottom (depending on the size of the boat, but I usually put 2 on each side, but you can put more if it doesnt prevent this enough.)
Press Q on the propellers, and set the "Complex control" control buttons to whatever buttons you want. (You can set it to any of the LETTERS, but if you use a complex controller on your boat to pilot it, do not use a letter that overlaps any others. the ACB's in the next step will control these.



Then, set the ACB's on:

"Activate if roll angle < [Input]"
and
"Activate if roll angle > [Input]"
then set the effect to "Control" then use the slider number to select the number placing in the alpabet (1=a, 2=b, 3=c etc.)


Then I set the degrees (Usually to about ~5, and ~-5, but if your boat uses leaning to turn faster, set it to about 15<>25, and -15<>-25.

"Activate if roll angle < [Input]" On this one use the negative number.
"Activate if roll angle > [Input]" On this one use the positive number.



Even though this looks confusing, I find it much easier that using PID's... I mean, what the hell is kP Gain?
KiloMomentum gain???
I'm -30 physics right now, and these numbers don't make sense to me lol.

[Swiss Army Knife]

Originally posted by fatboychummy:

What I usually do is use Automated Control Blocks (You should only need 2, also known as ACB), and propellors on the bottom (depending on the size of the boat, but I usually put 2 on each side, but you can put more if it doesnt prevent this enough.)

Thanks, that's a good idea and I'll give it a shot. I haven't worked too much with ACBs yet.

Originally posted by Agnar:

How wide is the ship?
How high up are the guns?

4500 recoil is pretty good, so I think there might be some other issue at play.
Generally speaking, the lower the COM the better, but mine are typicaly 33% of the way up from the bottom of the ship, sitting a few meters under the water line.

If you want to upload it and link, I could take a better look.

Yeah the COM may be too high, or the cannons themselves may be too high above the COM.

Here's a workshop link.

[krawll]

Adding a keel to your ship WILL help . In case you don't know what the Keel is , it's directly under your boat , it acts as a counter weight . It usualy runs from the back all the way to the front and is usualy not more than 1 - 3 meters wide , depending on the amount of weight you need.

There are a few different ways to make it and there is no limit to how deep to make it . As i said , it serves as a counter weight to allow your ship to remain mostly straight in the water . It is especialy useful for ships that use sails because the wind tends to blow them sideways and makes them roll a lot . the keel helps counter that .

SO my guess is , if you have a well built keel on your ship , even if your ship wants to roll with the recoil from your cannons , it won't be as bad and it will come back to it's original position as soon as the shots are fired .

[Admiral Obvious]

I was going to suggest the above. Try adding a layer of lead to the bottom of the hull, possibly replacing blocks as you go, they will surely help.

Granted it's more expensive, 3 times metal, but it's usually going to help. I have a similar design with two 500mm advanced guns, the lead bottom helps a lot.

You might need to move the props though since it likely will change the center of mass.

[Agnar]

Subscribed, gonna load her up and take a look

[Agnar]

Originally posted by Swiss Army Knife:

So I've built myself a ship I'm fairly happy with, it's slow as all hell, probably has way too much metal, but it sits nicely in the water is stable 99% of the time.

It has three large gun batteries. Two at the front, one at the back. Each battery consists of three seperate 1 barrel 240mm advanced cannons. I know this is probably way too large for an advanced cannon but I couldn't get near the muzzle velocity I wanted out of a CRAM cannon and lowering the barrel gauge for the advanced cannons make them look oddly small.

I've packed in as many recoil dampeners as I can into each battery and gotten the recoil down to about 4500 a cannon. Without throwing ridiculous recoil antlers on top of the batteries that's as low as I can get it.

So my question is is there any way to counteract the capsizing effect of firing the broadsides firing without changing the cannons or making the ship a multihull trimaran?

Is there a better place to put the COM on the ship to counteract it? Right now it's a meter or two below the waterline.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=660177657

Alrighty mate, made bare minimum changes, tested her under manual drive and combat AI conditions with no capsizing, and barely any tilting. If the paint looks really janky to you, it's because fleet colours get set player by player, so when you load it up it should revert back to your paint settings, I promise Ididn't re paint the whole ship :P


Screenshotted changes for new file, and left them unpainted for clarity.
(uploading in a minute, will edit this post with link)

Changelog (with descriptions)
-Moved main propulsion.

Your propellors should be in line with your center of mass. Technically speaking it should be center of drag, but center of mass works well enough and it can be a pain in the butt to figure out the center of drag.
(side effect, faster top speed)

-Centralized rudder and removed spares

The force of the rudder block is scaled with the mass of the ship, so even realy heavy ones still only need one or two.

-Removed patrol card from AI

As of last update, patrol card functionality is in built. Did this in case it was being skrewy. I reccomend you pull out the target tracker cards and such because they don't do anything, but I didn't touch them.

-Added small nose lateral props in line with COM

Provides stability while turning, and boosts turn rate.

-Shortened and elongated Lead keel, added slope to front of keel to cut drag.

Stabilizes length of ship and reduces forward drag for better speed.


Thats it for changes, but below I'll make some reccomendations, if you would like them.
-Replace some of the metal on the bottom with alloy to give a little more bouancy
-Possibly trim out other obsolete blocks like some AI cards and ammo routers

Other than that I think it's a pretty sweet ship, I like it!

[Swiss Army Knife]

Originally posted by Agnar:

Alrighty mate, made bare minimum changes, tested her under manual drive and combat AI conditions with no capsizing, and barely any tilting. If the paint looks really janky to you, it's because fleet colours get set player by player, so when you load it up it should revert back to your paint settings, I promise Ididn't re paint the whole ship :P

Other than that I think it's a pretty sweet ship, I like it!

Thanks for this Agnar. The changes are great, I wasn't sure about propellors and the best to use/where to place them to get decent speeds. The keel helped with the tipping as well, I may have to put a cap on the main batteries fire rate so it has some time to reorient in the water.

I'll get rid of the specified AI cards as well. I think I remember watching some tutorial that said to pop those two cards on and ignore the other one. Same goes for the ammo routers, the ones on the ship are left over from the last update, forgot they were there lol. Same goes for switching out some of the bottom's metal for alloy.

Thanks again mate!

[Agnar]

The "Aim Point Selection" and "Target Prioritisation" cards are important to keep, it's the tracker and tracker information or whatever that are worthless.

Also PS, when I was combat testing it either the lateral hex guns just hadn't reloaded yet or werent firing for whatever reason, might want to check that.

[Vsolid]

You could always try PID blocks and put yaw-correcting-devices on the side to keep it steady (Propellers :P)

[not madattak]

I can never get PIDs to behave smoothly, they always make horrible jerky movements, or at best make large sin curve wobbles.

[Vsolid]

Originally posted by madattak:

I can never get PIDs to behave smoothly, they always make horrible jerky movements, or at best make large sin curve wobbles.

They're a little finiky but they're easy to use and somewhat reliable