Simpler Platform Drag


Adjusts the drag force on space platforms such that only the ship's weight affects its drag force/top speed, not its shape.

Tweaks
a day ago
2.0
2.21K
Transportation Logistics

i Combined option

a month ago

It's very cool that it can be modded at all, but since the mod is called "better drag" and not just "different drag" I want to leave some feedback on the idea here. Maybe a mod with this exact function could be called something like "simpler drag" or "realistic drag" to avoid confusion?

So, here is this thing - if only the width limits speed, all ships should be thin and long. But if only the mass limits speed, then all ships must be as wide as possible to fit more engines. It's kind of realistic, but equally not fun as you can just make you ship whatever wide to fit more stuff on it. How about a combined option to incentivize building more varied shapes, when both super wide and super long ships are slower? Incorporating both parameters would even make a natural distinction - smaller ships are intrinsically faster but more vulnerable, while bigger ones can fit more stuff and easier to defend. It will put a rather hard penalty on ultra large platforms, but depending on how you see it it's a fair deal - You should try to make you ships more compact instead of just spamming more engines and platform tiles. Can instead make a bigger fleet if you need.

Balancing this could be tricky though, I suppose. Definitely need some testing with different configurations. You said "round platforms are unaffected" but platform's mass scales with the square of size while its number of engines and so the thrust is only linear? If you've accounted for that and made bigger mass matter less that means a horizontally tilable platform will become faster and faster indefinitely... It's not ideal for sure! I suppose that the mass drag is linear then? And bigger square platforms are actually still slower than smaller ones? So I think getting rid of the width drag coefficient altogether is rather problematic... Maybe you might consider adding some adjustable values for both ingredients in the mod's settings for people to experiment with? Oh, and sorry for any grammar mistakes, I probably didn't proofread my English enough.

a month ago

"all ships must be as wide as possible to fit more engines" — You're referring to competition ships? Normal ships don't tend to want that many engines.

"If you've accounted for that and made bigger mass matter less that means a horizontally tilable platform will become faster and faster indefinitely" — If drag was made proportional to weight, horizontally tiling a platform would leave the top speed unaffected. In the mod at present, a horizontally tiled platform will have decreased top speed because the vanilla formula has an extra slowdown term for high-weight platforms in addition to the proportionality of drag on width.

Here's the vanilla formula for reference: (thrust / (1 + weight / 10000000) - ((1500 * speed * speed + 1500 * abs(speed)) * (width * 0.5) + 10000) * sign(speed)) / weight / 60

I've renamed the mod 'Simpler Platform Drag'.

a month ago

Ok, I've looked at the actual code of the mod and I finally understand what you mean by "round platforms are unaffected". You are swapping the "width component" in the exact formula for an equivalent width of a perfectly circular platform. It's rather clever, I admit. But, if I understand that right, a ship 4 times wider and 4 times heavier with 4 times the engines will have 2 times the equivalent width with this calculation. And with the default calculation it will for sure be significantly faster. Are you sure it will actually be slower? I haven't tested it in the game but according to an online calc it could easily mean a top speed increase from 180 to 280 km/s for a rather average small ship. Just by repeating the same thing 4 times to the sides. I don't mean the mod is wrong but it looks like an unintended behavior that can be abused. You might not want a very fast ship but you can as well make a very-very efficient ship just by making it bigger. Which doesn't really makes much sense? That effectively punishes building smaller ships. I'm sorry to touch the name again but it's not a very "simple" drag as well ;) I don't think it is really possible to make it "fair" without a linear mass to width conversion with the default formula...
(The calculator in question https://www.desmos.com/calculator/yklumpvipo)

a month ago
(updated a month ago)

Where the vanilla formula uses the actual width, this mod's formula uses an equivalent width equal to the width the platform would be if it was the same mass, but circular. Doubling a platform's width has less impact in this mod than it would in vanilla because the equivalent width is multiplied by Sqrt(2) rather than 2.

This mod is 'simpler' in that there are less variables players need to pay attention to when building their platform — optimizing for weight is sufficient.

a month ago

I believe you're correct that building platforms optimized for top speed is easier in this mod.

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