Best Thrusters for turning a very large ship

[Nobukado]

What is the "best" type of thruster to turn a capital ship? Best means also: best cost, best space efficiency and power usage. Also Engine Rooms optimized.

Is spamming lots of Standard thrusters the best for this purpose? Are Standard thrusters better than Large or Huge ones for turning?

[Plaus42]

Definitely mrt. Best thrust/cost.Best thrust/crew. Best thrust/space.
The big downsides of mrt are the worse redundancy and the rampup. Both are heavily mitigated with the proper piloting and design. Protect the mrt well. Ramp your thrusters up early and dont lose that rampup (this means you should probably directly control the ship).
Huge thrusters are a lot less efficient but are a lot more redundant and have less rampup.
Anything smaller gets even less efficient bit reduces rampup further. Those smaller thrusters are only useful for places with limited space or for very specialized designs.

[Nobukado]

Hi Plaus42, No I specifically mean for turning, not for cruising. Ramp up time for turning is bad.

[Paradox]

Originally posted by Nobukado:

Hi Plaus42, No I specifically mean for turning, not for cruising. Ramp up time for turning is bad.

There's probably a math formula somewhere that will tell you, good luck, but there's a few things to consider. The degree of rotation (how far you plan to rotate), the mass of the ship, and the placement of the thrusters in your specific ship (how closer/far are they from the center of mass), etc. If you only want to turn 1 degree, a bunch of large thrusters might be better than an mrt. If you want to turn 360 degrees, there's probably nothing faster than an mrt that occupies a similar amount of space.

On my rail I used huges and that worked fine, other people prefer larges. But, as you can tell, it's not as simple as one is better than the other. One is better than the other only when a specific thing is considered.

[Nobukado]

Okay: turning a capital ship a few degrees to aim at a ship that's strafing it, but from a far range (ion beam ranges); or turning to face another target after crippling the previous target. I know it depends on lots of factors, but what works for most people for these purposes?

[Vin]

Originally posted by Nobukado:

Okay: turning a capital ship a few degrees to aim at a ship that's strafing it, but from a far range (ion beam ranges); or turning to face another target after crippling the previous target. I know it depends on lots of factors, but what works for most people for these purposes?

missiles. if a ship is strafing your capital ship, dont try to turn it into a agile fighter. use the proper weapons.

[lalelunatic]

depending on the mass of the ship you have at hand, and the fact that all the modules are technically upscaling improvements, bigger is better for almost all stuff so far.

now there might be ppl saying "but bigger is slower (e.g. ramp up time)" but consider that the bigger the ship is, the less the thrust of an individual small thruster matters. furthermore, you need supply for all of that stuff, probably ERs to boost them, and finally the space.

this combined with the fact that theres a "softcap" on the max speed vs. weight, just adding tons of small engines because "they fit" might actually lower your cap velocity / manouverabiltiy.

and what most ppl forget with all the theoretical math is, as its in a loooot of games, can the game (the AI behind it, or its technical mechanics) even work with that in reality? e.g. is the ship build to look good on paper, or did you actually test out if a ship can be handled well by the AI steering it? because thats a hell of a difference!

now, i might be a bit biased as im making mostly cap sized ships. but not exclusively. so having also a lot of smaller craft on my ship folder, i can tell you the most broadend out tip ever... fit the right stuff for what you wanna do and test it... over and over and over again...

because thats the only way to ensure you get what you want for the specific ship.

[Nobukado]

Lalelunatic: for your capital ships, which thruster do you use for sideways just for the purpose of turning/rotating?

[lalelunatic]

for the most part just huge. simply because of the statet fact that smaller engines just dont have the power to move large/huge masses effectively. if you take the dread i posted in the other thread, the 160, its 18k tons. having the thrusters placed optimally, does net me more effeciency than saving up the tonnage for huge blocks or having worse ramp ups. (and no the thrusters on the 160 arent really optimal =P, best way for it would be a "engine "ring"" around the outer extremes of the building grid. but you cant do that easily for obvious reasons)

i also did a lot of testing with small thrusters, that are bossted with ERs and i found that even if they might perform better thrust wise, they are a nightmare at supply, because they tend to run dry much faster. first thought was "why the heck" but after testing i kind of felt it was becasue they trigger much more supply pings even via a ER. meaning, you get slightly better effects for smaller vessels, but much worse supply chain / crew needs.

the higher internal energy storage of huge blocks, gives your supply chain much more "space" to handle potential lag based downtimes of your engine clusters. i cant pin point elaborate it to you, as i dont have the formulas, but as said, i do test my stuff pretty extensively and thats what i found are the results, at least on my rig.

[Nobukado]

Do you mean that the energy storage of each thruster is still counted, even when they're attached to an engine room? Do you mean that 3 huge thrusters also contribute 3x8 energy storage on top of the engine room's 4, whereas the standard thrusters hold less charge each? Legit question, I really don't know.

[lalelunatic]

well, if you make an engine cluster and fly that thing to the map edge, looking at their storages you see that they as well as the ER are losing energy. as said, i have no clue of the formula, if its internally calculated and just a visual thing.

but what you will see is that if an engine runs dry, it stops. so considering all the other stuff in the game, i would assume that the ER is just a distributive module (like the MRT extenders) which also has its own storage and demand (this you can confirm via their tooltip stats).

so yes, i think thats how the game handles it. especially as, if you look at shields for example, energy is not counted as "batteries" internally, but as an energy value. so, ER gets energy value depending on battery size supplied, distributes that amount equally/or not (depends on unknown (to me) formula) to all engines connected, and if one engine runs dry itself will stop, or if the ER runs dry the boost stops, as for MRTs the complete thing stops if anything runs out of energy.

PS: each engine is counted individually for its energy storage though, as well as the ER is, its just a distributive module as said. just added to be clear =).

[Nobukado]

Learn something new about cosmoteer every day!

[Plaus42]

Originally posted by Nobukado:

Hi Plaus42, No I specifically mean for turning, not for cruising. Ramp up time for turning is bad.

Rampup isnt bad for turning if you already are ramped up and faster thrust also means faster turning.
I guess it is reasonable to not want to micromanage your own ship like this though. If you plan on turning from a standstill I would use huge thrust for very heavy ships and large thrust otherwise. You can also mix in boost for even quicker response time.

[Nobukado]

Got it, thanks.

[Plaus42]

Originally posted by Nobukado:

Do you mean that the energy storage of each thruster is still counted, even when they're attached to an engine room? Do you mean that 3 huge thrusters also contribute 3x8 energy storage on top of the engine room's 4, whereas the standard thrusters hold less charge each? Legit question, I really don't know.

Er redirect surplus energy to adjacent thrusters upon being powered by crew. Thats why you do not need doors to your thrust if you have er.