Ballast

[The Beast at Tanagra]

I find myself having to readjust my course more often than I'd like with one cargo pod. Would it be possible to in the future add a tuning option for adding/removing ballast at various points to change the CG of your ship?

[ling.speed]

This is hard sci fi not KSP thou. Ballast makes quite a lot of sense here. Maybe not the "best" solution but fits the lore.

Plenty of real spacecraft used ballast, from last stages of early rocketry like delta or ariane, through many spin stabilized spacecraft to long thin elements like antennae and solar panels needing to control natural frequency.


Actually let me check the numbers i bet we can get something interesting.
Trying a BMW torch with NDVTT thruster on KX37. With one impact absorber as off center "cargo".
One sim run with just one "cargo" absorber to 500m/s and one with added 2nd absorber to balance it out. Result? More effective delta V on the ballasted run (by ~10%). So yeah, for the tools we have in game ballast would not be out of place.


ps: that said i wouldn't say i "want" ballast. Maybe if it was something interactive like telescopic weight with its own wiggly inertia and asteroid clearence problems.
Or realistically thinking a manual adjustment to fuel positon on the mechanics screen.

[Zanthra]

It would be possible for a fly by wire system to be programmed to keep track of the ship CG, and use asymmetric thrust to avoid the need for ballast. I don't think it currently does, as large CG imbalance would cause the net thrust to tend towards half of what your RCS can provide without asymmetric trust, but would be far more stable and propellant efficient. (Naturally would not work for the main drive on ships with only one main drive).

[Bisexual Lion's Pride.tar.bz2]

Zanthra eredeti hozzászólása:

It would be possible for a fly by wire system to be programmed to keep track of the ship CG, and use asymmetric thrust to avoid the need for ballast. I don't think it currently does, as large CG imbalance would cause the net thrust to tend towards half of what your RCS can provide without asymmetric trust, but would be far more stable and propellant efficient. (Naturally would not work for the main drive on ships with only one main drive).

It does (thought you can't program it yourself). I fly with the ER-42 autopilot all the time with fly-by-wire, and it correctly computes the thrust for mass shifts, thruster damage, and other such conditions to fly straight with an imbalanced load (very useful with gimbaled RCS and main propulsion thrusters). Very handy for running a single THI monocargo container, which imbalances up to 90,000 kg.

[Milkshaker]

You might want to check out the MA-337 and ER-42 autopilots. While not as elegant as fuel/weight distribution, they do account for mass shifts, and at least make your ship easier to control.
https://delta-v.kodera.pl/index.php/Autopilot

[Charlie Foxtrot]

i suggested ages ago that in any real life scenario people would have come up with a jury rigged solution a long time ago. something like a simple slider in the cockpit that just puts more thrust to one side or the other.
should be fairly easy to do for a halfway decent ship mechanic, no?
my best guess as to why this is not implemented is because it would make life too easy.

[Enorats]

Man, this poor OP. He's completely correct. Ballast is not only possible, it makes complete sense in this scenario and is quite literally the sort of thing the whole concept is intended for. Heck, boats use ballast tanks for this sort of purpose all the time. They're effectively just internal tanks they fill with water as needed to balance the load in the ship.

As they stated on the first page, you'd essentially be making your ship unbalanced to start off when it is lightweight and has thruster power to spare (so you woudn't really notice the imbalance with an autopilot that corrects for it), and as you filled your container your ship would grow more balanced. Once it was say, half filled, your ship would be balanced and grow unbalanced again as the container was filled more. You'd never be as unbalanced as you are when you have an entirely unbalanced ship with a filled container though.

The other drawback, of course, would be that you would be hauling around a whole lot of dead weight from the get go, and your ship would be even more sluggish when filled.. albeit more evenly sluggish.

[gear_head]

I really like what Koder was talking about with propellant shifting. Boats and planes have pumps to shift fuel around for that.
I never start a dive at full tank, as I dial in the amount I need for where I want to go (and melt the rest on the way).
It would make engineering gameplay have much more depth if it was added as a in flight option!