Derpy engines

In the kick starter video (bear with me) the engines on the asteroid all lined up nicely forming an awesome looking unified engine array. However in the current game the engines radiate out wards away from the lap nets core in a deeply unsatisfying distinctly un-parallel way.

Will this be *fixed* or changed?

Do you agree?


Btw, if anyone could supply some images I would be grateful, but currently I am on mobile.

I know what you're talking about.

I dunno. Maybe.

Uber is working on the kick and drag functionality, so maybe that'll help.

They probably won't be as pretty as the Kickstarter trailer since the Kickstarter trailer was a cinematic rendering, rather than in game.

From my understanding the engines are treated just like any other building and are built directly outwards from whatever terrain they are on. If it's a really small body then it will be a lot more noticeable due to the curve of the surface. I'm not too sure if this is something Uber will address or not as they might have to make some serious code changes to allow for it... No idea really i'm just putting it all out there.

Cheers,

-Todd

i indeed would like that.

the mechanic could be this.

the first Hailey you place on a planet will sticky and you must orient it across two axis (hold shift to go to the other axis) you can set what orientation you want by panning the mouse. once your satisfied click again to validate your choice and construction starts.
all engines you place on the planet will henceforth bear the same orientation.

It would kind of make sense if the engines had more degrees of movement, so that they weren't a solid block, but the square was a housing for something which rotated.

Do you mean like trust vectoring nozzles on fighter jets (f22 raptor).

Exactly. I couldn't remember the technical term for thrust vectoring. Didn't think it was that simple lol.

The current treatment of engines as structures somewhat necessitates this silliness.
What's an engine supposed to do about it if you build two of them on opposite sides of the planetoid?

They could actually open up some interesting game mechanics if the delta V engines actually calculated the "front" of the planet correctly, and then scaled the thrust the engines provide based on how far they are from the "back." Do you build all your engines right at the back for efficiency, or spread them out? If you spread them out, someone else could easily counter it by making just one or two engines directly on the "front."

Getting much more complicated than that turns PA into Kerbal Space Program pretty quickly, but currently the engines don't really make sense even in a universe where robots blow up other robots on tiny cartoon planets. We don't need anything close to realism, but I wouldn't mind a system that makes just a little more sense.

Here's the funny thing. Where is the "Back" of a planet .. the planets rotate so in the end anything along the equator is shifting from front to side to back then side then , yeah ... lol

Right. There's no way to make this be actually real, but I think we can do better than what we have now. My suggestion would cause the planet to stop rotating as soon as the halleys turn on, which definitely doesn't make any sense. The game would just have to average out the thrust vectors of each engine and calculate a front. Any more complicated than that, and you're not actually playing an RTS about robots killing robots anymore.

I think thats the point about the lack of real mechanic's on the thrusters.
Uber are aiming for AWESOME not realism.
To add that kind of realism may do exactly what you said and detract from the actuall RTS and make it more of a SimCity with killer robots . lol

I am worried about that too, but in this case a little more realism might actually help the AWESOME. I'm not going to complain though, because I still get to fly planets into other planets either way.

There is a more dreadful option: Only having engines on asteroids, and not being able to move planetoids (at least, not without a tech much more vast and terrifying than 55,000 metal would warrant).

You're referring to the centre of mass, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the situation. If they have enough thrust vectoring to all be able to "fire" in the same direction, that would be the same.

If you have two engines "right at the back", and one engine at the front and one engine at the back, provided they are both able to fire in approximately the same direction it is exactly as efficient.

In that situation, they would both fire in the same direction to rotate the planet, and then both fire "backwards" to go "forwards".

Basically, the engines in Planetary Annihilation already have thrust vectoring. It's just not shown on screen.


You're right in that someone could "counter it" by building engines directly on front. But according to Newton, they would have to build exactly the same amount of engines as you placed on the planet.

i think the dev's are implementing that if 2 players build halleys on same planetiod.
each halley made cancels out one from the other player. so to move a planet that needs 10 halleys you need 10 more than the opponent to gain control over the planetiod.

You're right, I wasn't imagining them vectoring. I was picturing a fixed vector going directly out (or in, depending on how you think about it) from the center of the planet, which would cause spread out engines to press against each other. If they can get the planet to face the direction it is traveling in and implement the vectoring effect, it will probably look a lot better without the need to change any game mechanics.

What a conundrum!

Indeed.

just imagine now, if the "place moon in orbit or sumthinglikethat" mechanic is in, you might have to install engines all over a moon to make it steerable ... with reverse speed and **** to get it to hold a specific place in space ... or lock it in orbit above the enemy base ...

i really hope something like the last thing will be implemented... like you create a star system where a planet is locked in rotation... meaning one side always dark and one always light ...