Limiting ship acceleration [feature request]

[bszlrd]

Not sure if I worded the title properly, but I mean that it could be useful, if there would be a max acceleration stat for each ship. It would not be an arbitrary limit, but would be derived from the structure of the ship.
Preferably for each direction, since ship structure is supposed to be the strongest on the main thrust axis for example.
I guess it should be overridden by the player (if under attack for example), but exceeding the limit could damage the ship proportional to the acceleration.
Maybe there could even be a manual setting for max acceleration too, which could be introduced along another gameplay feature: cargo/passenger tolerance. (Certain stuff could be fragile, so it could be even turned into rubbish if it's limit is exceeded. Which could also limit your options as a pirate if you want to get away with that valuable porcelain loot.)

My reasoning:

• Way to differentiate a bit more between ships: Currently an empty cargo hauler can easily match a fighters acceleration or even exceed it. And the upside is that differentiation wouldn't involve arbitrary top speeds like in E:D.
• Would offer additional choice/risk with the override: should I risk the damage from planetfall/full load blastoff from Earth? In combat should I choose dodging but damaging my ship some, or less dodging, more hits to the hull?
• Way to differentiate between atmo capable and space only ships. The later would nee to be less sturdy, so could be cheaper/more efficient.
• And I think that doesn't make sense from a structural standpoint.*
• Crew health and safety, cargo safety reasons (from fiction standpoint mostly, but could call for tolerance gameplay feature for these too).
• Doesn't affect travel times much. The longer the distance, less the effect. All that counts is deltaV in this regard.
• Would be easier to guess/calculate travel time / breaking distance with constant acceleration. The Brachistochrone equation assumes constant acceleration. (would give better results with ecraven's break distance meter too, especially on long ranges.)
• Could be easily disregarded by modders, if they want to. They just need to set a high enough tolerance. Or there could even be a -1 option similar to the thruster fuel use stat.
• Doesn't need update for the models.

Cons/additional work needed (That I can see)

• Some additional thing to balance (but I think it would make it easier in the long run)
• Would also need a function to calculate the damage from high acceleration (possibly even an additional stat would be needed)
• Autopilot would need some update I guess, even if it won't override on it's own.
• Override function implementation + flight UI + Keyboard shortcut
• Damage function implementation and fine tuning
• UI update for the ship info/market: Max accel and tolerance stats.
• Documentation

*: Not sure how good my math is, but for a 100t capacity ship the acceleration difference can be as high as 20*times if you assume the last couple of tonnes of propellant in a 100t tank and an empty 100t hold and count in the mass of needed structure too.
I mean if it's built for 2G full acceleration (so blastoff is possible), then it goes up to about 22-30G. And I'm sure that would warrant quite large structural differences.
I used this calculator to get some structure masses, it's supposed to be based on Traveler's way of calculating structure mass. And if I got it right, the needed structural mass for the higher acceleration would negate the gain in acceleration, which in turn would diminish the acceleration with full load.

Also, since I'm badly in need of procrastination from my IRL art tasks, I started to implement a complex ship designer that would spit out the structural mass, and hopefully even the tolerance data for ships, so hopefully the whole thing won't involve much guesswork for ship designers/balancers.

What do you think?

[impaktor]

Sounds interesting!

Especially if you have an idea of how the player would interact with the UI, to use it, and how it would be shown in ship market, and such.

I was actually thinking about Traveller just before you mentioned it. My knowledge is a bit hazy though. Good luck with prototyping/experimenting!

[FluffyFreak]

Yeah sounds interesting, I'm not sure how you'd convey it to the player, or make it easily accessible via the UI - can't quite imagine it.

[kennworl]

Don't forget that acceleration also includes turning. A nice small fighter can make a turn much better than a bulky freighter even if empty. You dont want to tear the ship apart under it's own inertia.

As for how to convey this to the player, well, you could have a hull stress bar similar to the hull temp bar. Some metal groaning sound effects would not go astray either. The cumulative effect is metal fatigue on the hull which affects the hull integrity. The same ship damage mechanics should apply. You can have the concept of a structural integrity field that you supply power to and it allows you do exceed ship tolerances during combat or atmo. You have an implied inertial damping field already, otherwise you would mashed passengers and crew when you fire the main thrusters.

I might explore this down the track. I love technical systems that interact, but it would need careful balancing.

[bszlrd]

Nope, no inertial damping field, we just don't mention the problem, because most people don't even know about it. (Same with those engines/ships being weapons of mass destruction already :D )
I instead would prefer a way to limit acceleration to 1-2G for ships that are not in combat because of that. Or even lower for fragile cargo. Heh, there may be G limits imposed by the passenger also.