How to troubleshooting thrusters?

[Soondead]

I have a ship that can fly straight, and while strafing works as expected, it can only roll to one side. I have another ship, which cant even fly straight and any attempts to roll instead violently pitches up and down.

Clearly, there are connection problems with some of the thrusters, the problem is that they all appear to be connected when visually inspected so instead I have to troubleshoot them.

The only problem is HOW? The game tells me to "open the inspection tool with the U key". That's it. Nothing more. What EXACTLY is this tool supposed to tell me? Am I supposed to aim it at something? Click on something? When I'm standing near a generator, there's a stream of data coming from that, I can filter it or pause it but otherwise I'm pretty much dumbfounded by this tool. Is it supposed to tell me anything about a thruster at all? Is there any way of telling if the thruster in front of me is connected to the Mfc or if it has propellant?

Not only are these things not explained anywhere in the game, but googling about the problem only tells me there were loads of other people stuck on this exact problem. In a game that is pretty much about designing space craft and very little else, it seems odd that such a fundamental part of designing a space craft appears from my perspective to be impossible.

Why can't the Mfc simply have some way to communicate which of the named thrusters are currently reachable and have propellant? Or at the very least a COUNT of those two?

[Askannon]

Thrusters are probably the most interconnected devices in the game, which makes the troubleshooting difficult.
And no, the MFC wouldn't be a proper place to collect the troubleshooting data, because thrusters can be grouped by sharing the name (ThrusterState, whose default assignment is ThrusterPowerLevel##)

Note before the list: if there is nothing in the U-tool because the network is inert, press a button or change a lever to cause an update

How I go about troubleshooting:
-Is there power, is there propellant? (just a quick check on batteries, fuelrods or propellant tanks)

If the thruster doesn't fire when it should due to the movement requested:
-Does the Thruster have data (data always comes with electricity)?
-Does the Thruster have a proper name (device field shared with MFC)?
-If I rename the Thruster and manually trigger it with a button, does it fire? (if no, --> Propellant is missing, if yes something went wrong on the way from the lever)

-Do the levers work? U-tool the lever: is it named as you would expect? does it see the FCU (I'd search for one of the FCU fields from the lever)?

-Does the FCU connect to the MFC? (U-tool search for the FcuMfcIO fields from the FCU)



if all thrusters do fire, when they seemingly should due to the movement requested, but something is off overall, it is more something that is either Thruster grouping (where the names are and what thrusters share names) or thruster placement (above/below/in front/behind center of mass for the respective direction).

If it only occurs after a moment and your ship is suddenly spinning out of control, it is your generator is not (yet) producing enough power or had to reset due to overheating and can't produce enough power at all.


I'm sure I forgot something, but I hope something in here helps.

[Askannon]

Something I forgot:
Thruster like to be bolted to the ship frame (beams).
And sometimes you think you placed the thruster correctly on a hardpoint, but it isn't properly set (triangle thrusters are egregious for this for beginners)

[Soondead]

The ship I'm trying to figure out right now has 12 main thrusters, 4 retro and 24 maneuvering thrusters. All the maneuvering ones are mounted on corner hardpoints, which makes it all the more puzzling that everything works as expected EXCEPT I can only roll to one side and not the other. If one of the corner hardpoints wasn't connected, I would expect strafing to be imbalanced as well. I have plenty of power and propellant, and cooling works as it should.

I have spent several hours going over each and every cable and pipe several times and I just can't find any broken connections. It's driving me mad.

Because this is in the game world and not in the designer, everything I want to try means I have to craft the parts, which means I have to rely on the (mostly useless) diagnostic tool a lot. If there was some way to just point it at a thruster and say "does this have power?" and "does this have propellant?" then this whole process would take seconds instead of hours.

[Sylwester]

Originally posted by Soondead:

If there was some way to just point it at a thruster and say "does this have power?" and "does this have propellant?" then this whole process would take seconds instead of hours.

There is a way to do it using U tool (data tab).

Point at thruster and open U tool. If you pointed correctly you will see variables of this thruster. If there is power you will see a massive amount of updates in log frame and you will be able to see your generator variables on the variables list (you can filter them).

If there is power, then you can check if there is fuel this way: temporarily rename thruster variable (thrusterstate / thrusterpowerlevel) to something else, so it's not controlled by MFC and set variable value manually to 10000. If there is fuel and power, the thruster will start firing.

When your ship behaves like that, you should inspect thrusters while they fire. Set centering speed on your lever to 0 and move it until ships starts flying incorrectly and leave it like that. Then go around your ship and look if there are thrusters that should be firing, but are not doing that and then try to fix those thrusters.

In most such cases the cause of the problem is incorrectly installed engine (no power/no fuel) or incorrect variable naming.

[NTPS]

There's a troubleshooting flowchart on the main discord, pinned to the #starbase-questions channel titled 'MY FCU DOES NOT WORK FLOW CHART'.
Have a crack at going through that, as it'll solve people's issues most of the time.

I also highly recommend posting a screenshot of the ship (if you're comfortable with that) to the ship design channel and asking around as there's loads of people there (including myself when I'm around) willing to help troubleshoot.

[Askannon]

Originally posted by Soondead:

The ship I'm trying to figure out right now has 12 main thrusters, 4 retro and 24 maneuvering thrusters. All the maneuvering ones are mounted on corner hardpoints, which makes it all the more puzzling that everything works as expected EXCEPT I can only roll to one side and not the other. If one of the corner hardpoints wasn't connected, I would expect strafing to be imbalanced as well. I have plenty of power and propellant, and cooling works as it should.

My suspicion is that some thruster names are doubled up especially if you manually named them, though I admit I am not fully sure if the automatic naming tool of the SSC does have issues with the corner hardpoints.

Another is to maybe check the durability tool and see if some thrusters complain about thruster base or some sort (they will have a cube in the center that, when clicked on with the durability tool in the U-tool or the hand held version will display what is wrong with it). If this is the case, it is a bolting problem and the thruster needs a direct bolt connection to the ship frame (beams) or maybe is not properly set on the hardpoint

And if the other thruster on the corner works, it should have prop and power, but you may want to consider piping/cabling both sections

[DivineEvil]

Yeah, 90% of the problems with ship design is making a working thruster array. The rough sequence of checks goes as follows:

- Pin-point the thrusters that are malfunctioning by performing all the basic maneuvers. Once you've picked up a faulty maneuver, set the CenteringSpeed of the associated lever to 0, repeat the maneuver and leave the ship to observe the behavior of the thrusters from the outside. If there's a symmetrical maneuver that works as expected, compare the two. This helps narrow down the problem to specific thrusters.

- Note that the thruster, the hardpoint, and the frame has to be connected independently. If the thruster is bolted to the frame, but not to the hardpoint, or if the hardpoint is bolted to the thruster but not to the frame, there will be no valid transfer of stress between the three eelements, and such thruster will not work.

- Power/signal network is present if the U tool detects the data flow from the thruster's body, which interacts with that flow to operate. Setting PowerLevel to any value will cause the thruster to fire even for a mere moment before being reset back to 0. If it does, then it has the working fuel feed.

- Otherwise operational thrusters that do, or do not fire when expected is typically a result of incorrect grouping. Thrusters that are grouped together with the same PowerLevel field name will be counted as a sum of their vectors and cannot operate independently.

[Crimzin]

Hi, using the U key to inspect is the best way to see if your engines are hooked up OK, you dont need to go around checking all cables and piping etc, you press U on your thruster casing and if you get data flowing, coolant, electricity etc it means its connected fine.

Like DivineEvil says, this issue is normally a grouping issue, If its bad and taking you a long time to figure out, as you are under 50 thrusters, just open the thruster naming tool on the top and reset all to default or automatic naming that will fix any grouping issues.

If you have grouped them yourself make sure never group them for ease of use or anything, e.g group all left side thrusters together as that would be bad, your ship would need to fire the front left sometimes and the back left sometimes to rotate, grouping them together would make this impossible.

Make sure to use your durability test tool, and check everything that is even in orange, if you are getting orange warnings on your thrusters or thruster hardpoints / connectors you need to fix those, it would say something like "hardpoint needs to be connected to 2 beams" you would need to fix that.

[Soondead]

Originally posted by DivineEvil:

- Pin-point the thrusters that are malfunctioning by performing all the basic maneuvers. Once you've picked up a faulty maneuver, set the CenteringSpeed of the associated lever to 0, repeat the maneuver and leave the ship to observe the behavior of the thrusters from the outside. If there's a symmetrical maneuver that works as expected, compare the two. This helps narrow down the problem to specific thrusters.

This trick was somewhat useful, in that I could at least get to see what thrusters were firing. That's the good news. The bad news is, the thrusters firing when I attempt to roll made no logical sense at all. Like, opposing thrusters firing at full blast and one of the main forward thrusters working against all of the retro thrusters. So, I assumed there had to be something horribly wrong with the thruster numbering, like duplicates somewhere causing the wrong ones to fire. I therefore spent some 30 minutes renaming each thruster to something that reflect their position on the ship.

This had but one effect: Now rolling stopped working altogether, everything else still works. Repeating the experiment with setting CenteringSpeed to 0 revealed that... *drumroll*... exactly the same nonsensical thrusters fire when I attempt to roll, but now it's just as bad to either side. The ship is perfectly symmetrical, maneuvering thrusters are all paired and placed far away from the center of mass, this should be trivial but apparently isn't. I should probably add that this ship *used to* work properly, I've been deep into the belt with it several times but that was a couple of years ago.

If anyone else wants a headache too, I'm just above Origin 1. You can't miss the giant box.

[Garth Zader]

Make sure you don't have 2 MFC with identical names in them, is the FCU pointing the correct way?
Start a new automatic keybind, the sat in the seat 'V' key thing, sometimes you have too many things bound to one key.
When you have thrusters firing like that it's either 1)the keybindings, 2)other thrusters simply aren't firing, 3) your thrusters are at 45 degree angles, it just confuses the FCU as it can't work out what direction it is facing. (Note it can sometimes work if you're lucky)

[Soondead]

All thrusters are at square angles and I'm operating the roll lever manually at this point so key bindings shouldn't be an issue even if there were conflicting ones. The way the thrusters are clustered, it's impossible for them to not be connected at this point, because each one has been observed to properly fire in one maneuver or the other. All the front maneuvering thrusters are interconnected with the four retro thrusters which can be visually confirmed to work properly from the cockpit seat. All the rear ones are interconnected with the main thrusters, without which the ship would be unable to travel forward in a straight line.

I have triple and quadruple connections everywhere at this point, and still the ship flat out refuses to roll to one side. Rolling to the other side suddely started working again for no apparent reason. I do not think that this is a problem I can solve.

[Askannon]

Originally posted by Soondead:

If anyone else wants a headache too, I'm just above Origin 1. You can't miss the giant box.

For completeness sake after spending some time looking at everything:
Hardpoint Corner seems to be bugged and only one of the two faces works.

[Garth Zader]

'twas very weird. My only suggestion would be a repair back to original BP in the repair hall and re-add heatsinks.

I think it's probably due to how the hard points are attached, those corner beams have given me problems in the past with mounting thrusters to them, maybe the FCU now sees them as 45 degree hardpoints mounted the way they are.

[DivineEvil]

Do not see any ships other than a black mining ship, not sure if its your or not.
Corner hardpoints are first and foremost terrible because of their weight. There's simply no reason to use them instead of regular small ones.

[Soondead]

Originally posted by DivineEvil:

Do not see any ships other than a black mining ship, not sure if its your or not.
Corner hardpoints are first and foremost terrible because of their weight. There's simply no reason to use them instead of regular small ones.

We gave up and left, sorry.