Rotor abuse in race records.

[SimplyBenjamen]

Nothing like making a car that can get 4th place but never beat something that will use rotors to turn on a dime. I am looking at you AintGoinBac in Valley Formula League.

[Agent West]

By 'rotors' you mean 'helicopter engines', right? They have been used for both balance and improved control for a long time now. Why are you against it?
One thing I will say against that is since the Rally update the steering hinges are much weaker, making 'alternative' means of control more viable.

[SimplyBenjamen]

I mean rotating Servo with the large four grid square attached to it. You can try putting some on anything set the speed to max and rotation to 360 and watch it have massive effects on a vehicle by just spinning a plate. Some people use it on wheels to make a car turn very fast and it is simple physics abuse that should not be.

[Agent West]

Not really abuse since a spinning servo with a weight is a 'reaction wheel' and those are quite common IRL for orienting satellites in space, for example.

[SimplyBenjamen]

And yet these builds don't even have a weight on the servo, it is just the mounting plate. So they don't even need to have the extra weight that you'd normally have with a reaction wheel, so it is nothing more then a abuse of physics yet to be fixed with servos.

[Volrishan]

i have not seen it with servos but i have seen it abused with helicopter engines with no blades attached. Hell even the example plane on the race map has 3 helicopter engines without blades for turning and pitch. i fully agree they need to be fixed to stop this as it does not make any sense why it is working the way it does.

[Sareth]

helicopter engines are 100% working as intended.
They are basically the best thing to mimic 'reaction wheels' we currently have, and they have a core-cost, it's fine. It's not a totally realistic implementation, but then again look at the rest of the game.

The other stuff is differnt. Most race-records on race-islands are made by bionic creations using self-made propellers (spinning servo, hinges & tailfins etc) - these 'cars' jump to 350kph in basically 1 second. Not sure how I feel about that.
Spinning servo's have no core-cost, so the counter-torque should probably be balanced to take that into account.

[Agent West]

Would be nice to have a separate gyro/reaction wheel part with it's own sound and physics. But as Sareth said, helicopter engines and servos are the closest thing now and probably will stay that way.

Building a single-rotor helicopter is rather difficult since the motor makes so much torque and can't be countered with just another motor (especially with blades installed) so perhaps that does need a rework.

[Sareth]

I'm also not really seeing where you're getting these issues / complaints

I'm currently 3rd in formula league Three Brigdes (0:30.50s) and 3rd in formula league Valley (0:34.79s) - with a car using regular suspensions, steering hinges, engines/jets for propulsion and tailfins for stabilzation/downforce.

1st place is Ozy with his insane bionic thing. 2nd place looks beatable to me, though I haven't checked the ghost/car... 3rd place is me.

https://imgur.com/a/wdtQDPS

[SimplyBenjamen]

So your telling me it is fine that a large heavy tank with insane weight with just a few of these can turn on a dime and almost fly off the ground with torque, that does not make any logical sense either for game balance or for real physics. Reaction wheels don't just work like that, in fact the real NASA reaction wheels on space satellites are far slower then RCS and even that is quite slow. In the end you should learn to build a real vehicle and not abuse physics like that to take first place in records and ruin the fun of competition.

[Sareth]

satelites weigh several tons, have no air-resistance to slow them down and have little energy/weight to spare. They also basically never need to turn in a hurry. Of course they turn slowly.

Sure, game phyics don't emulate real life incredibly well - it's a game after all. There'll surely be improvements made, but for now it's working quite well I think.
Heli Servos have their place and their jobs. Self-Stablizing motorcycles would be very difficult without them f.e. Of course you can 'abuse' them by stacking them - but that applies to *all* blocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y

[SimplyBenjamen]

Though you forget that like that cube most videos that show this kind of Reaction Wheel system are built on not only very light body's but the Reaction wheel system makes up close to 30% of it's own size. You can't see a Reaction Wheel turn a tank unless half the body was a huge spinning disk now do you?

[SimplyBenjamen]

I am not saying the Reaction effect should not be there, but the level of physics effects they exert on any given vehicle is insane and very much broken for how small they are.

[Sareth]

Again - you can totally build a competetive racer without relying on any reaction wheel physics - especially more so since they were nerfed hard in the rally update.

[SimplyBenjamen]

But it does not change the fact that the position number one won't change until I or someone else will stoop to their level and break said Reaction Wheel physics. Why have a race records for the world if everyone at the top might as well be a cheater. The only reason why you even took 3rd is because they wiped the score board after the update so all the other people with records of like 5-20 seconds on most tracks are not there anymore, for now. But I am sure you'll find some reason to not agree with me as most people will just see this as butthurt complaining instead of my competivite view on fair play.

[Sareth]

This is a creative building game with a side option of 'competitive' races. People use the tools they're given to their advantage - if you want to limit yourself to 'realistic' buildstyles, or omit build-options that you think are 'unethical' that's fine - so do I for the most part.
But that also means you can't really complain about people not doing so while making better times.
The ideal use of the leaderboard is comparing your creation to your friends. Past the initial scramble, the world wide top spots will always be filled with min-maxing race enthusiats. Literally any decorative block on your creation will cost you that place. Those 2kg matter worlds there.

This has nothing to do with "cheating". It's using the parameters & tools you're given, your own time and testing to make it work. Literally no one is injecting their own parameters, blocks or changing the physics - that would be cheating.

Balance can of course be debated, and it IS continously adjusted, updated etc. It has been adjusted in the Rally update. It will be adjusted in the hotfix. it will be in the future.
This is a process. But there's a difference between that and declaring people cheaters.

probably zero of the 1. places on non-water races use reaction wheels to turn - they use bionic prop design for their speed (which one could still term rotor abuse, but that is confirmed to be nerfed / fixed in the next hotfix, which might also alleviate your issues.) and aero or hinge turning.

In fact, I know they don't use reaction wheel turning because I have the blueprint by the original creator - it's on the workshop as well.