going lighter in mass for more maneuverability? -Not effective?

[imdavidfindley]

I have a scheme and am comparing ships ..
it seems maneuverability is not greatly affected by additional mass?

so for example two chieftains, one going very heavy and one going very light, ... there won't be a significant enough difference in maneuverability to justify going light ?? The difference seems pretty small and unjustifiable??

It is kind of hard to be conclusive about this, though.

...wouldnt it be a lot better if you had to (really) sacrifice maneuverability for mass, and vice versa. when outfitting your ship?

[malorob]

maybe you should post a couple of builds

as even a type 10 can maneuver quite well

[Agony_Aunt]

Even when below optimal mass you can still eek out a bit more manouverability with each ton of weight lost. I think the cut off point is if you get below the minimum mass, which is near enough impossible to do if you are kitting for almost anything.

But whether its worth it, i'd say only experimentation can tell you.

[L37]

There are few ships that can stay below minimal, at least before its reduction by DD. At least vulture and iClipper. Vulture can also realistically stay below minimal even with DD5.

As for actual differences between "light" and "heavy", this is most noticable for small ships with small thrusters, where the difference can be between staying close to minimal and going close to maximal. In this case difference in both speed and maneuverability is large and clearly noticable. On bigger ships with large thrusters, where relative changes possible are much smaller, and especially on ships with oversized thrusters (already mentioned vulture, iclipper, possibly icutter, may be something else), changes will be much less signifacant to the point of being negligibly small and unimportant, and surely hard to notice (apart from obvious speed difference).

Also, looking at coriolis, chieftain is indeed one of those ships. With minimal mass being 720T and "bare bones" combat build mass ~620-630T it will always stay at least near minimal if not below minimal and actual mass will have near-zero impact on maneuverability.

[Paradox]

Originally posted by imdavidfindley:

I have a scheme and am comparing ships ..
it seems maneuverability is not greatly affected by additional mass?

so for example two chieftains, one going very heavy and one going very light, ... there won't be a significant enough difference in maneuverability to justify going light ?? The difference seems pretty small and unjustifiable??

It is kind of hard to be conclusive about this, though.

...wouldnt it be a lot better if you had to (really) sacrifice maneuverability for mass, and vice versa. when outfitting your ship?

Depends really what you mean. The rotation won't really improve a lot, but the momentum and top speed is more effected.

[imdavidfindley]

yeah I wanted to be able to maneuver my asp explorer around a bit better, but I don't think it will work, (not if a chieftain can manuever just as well fully loaded down, despite how light I try to make myself.) ...The goal was to at least be able to out-maneuver medium combat ships, at least by an effective margin. I think I will keep trying with engineering, but i still don't think it will work in the end...

I tried coriolis and it didn't give any adequate information on manuerability changes from weight

[Paradox]

Originally posted by imdavidfindley:

yeah I wanted to be able to maneuver my asp explorer around a bit better, but I don't think it will work, (not if a chieftain can manuever just as well fully loaded down, despite how light I try to make myself.) ...The goal was to at least be able to out-maneuver medium combat ships, at least by an effective margin. I think I will keep trying with engineering, but i still don't think it will work in the end...

I tried coriolis and it didn't give any adequate information on manuerability changes from weight

The differences are usually only comparable to the same ship with different builds. A ship that out maneuvers another ship is generally going to do that no matter the build.

https://coriolis.io/

You can sort it by maneuverability (agility).

[L37]

There was info about how mass in relation to minimal/optimal/maximal mass for given thrusters affects performance somewhere on official forums long time ago.
But IIRC what's important is:
-Mass does not matter at all as long as it is below minimal.
-Very little but still existent effect between minimal and optimal, increasing as mass increases.
-More noticable effect between optimal and maximal, again, increasing as mass increases.

Which means that actual impact will depend on specific ship a lot (basically hull mass in relation to thruster size).
For example chieftain has class 6 thrusters, which have 720T minimal mass for A-grade and 400T hull mass. This means that you can add 320T of equipment before getting any (even theoretical) difference in maneuverability, and then few hundrend T more will, most likely, be unnoticable too.
On the other end, diamondback explorer has class 4 thrusters (210T minimal, 420T optimal for A-grade) and 260T hull mass. Meaning that it is inevitably above minimal and any added mass will affect performance in some way. And any practical loadout is very likely to go even above optimal. For this ship you are very likely to actually notice both speed and maneuverability difference between light and heavy loadouts.

[imdavidfindley]

ya I want that changed plz

doubling the weight of the hull with add-ons should affect manueverability greatly
overall I want the weight -- manueverability balance to be much more sensitive, which would add some strategic depth to outfitting.

also a TON is a lot of weight. 10 tons more so. ..I would like to see difference on at least per-10 ton scale. Shouldn't be able to fit stonehedge into your cargo hull and not notice the difference.

[L37]

Everything is relative.
For 100T ship 1T is just extra 1% of mass. For 1000T ship - 0.1%. Not very significant, and not something you can ever notice. In fact anything less than like ~10-20+% difference in speed/maneuverability would be really hard to notice.
Basically this ships are HUGE. And it also makes sense that they are designed to be used with some equipment, not just empty hull. After all things lire powerplant or thrusters are not really optional...

But if you want something really sensitive in terms of mass - buy icourier. There you can easily loose like ~140 m/s of speed by adding 10T...

[Josey Wales]

Originally posted by imdavidfindley:

ya I want that changed plz

We'll get right on that for you.