Flyable Capital Ships

Yes, i use uncle Stardtrader’s little tutorial for this as well and the handling is vastly superior to original settings now. Let’s not forget, capships were never meant to be used as flyable ships in FL so obviously the programmers were thinking fighters and freighters and concentrated on those.

Glad it’s helped, guys. Sorry that, as you have seen, it’s not perfect, particularly the strafe force settings, so some tweaking is needed.

One tip - I had a drop-down variable of +20% to -20% in 5% steps in my spreadsheet as a multiplier on the steering_torque so I could make ships in the same class more sluggish or more manoeuverable than the standard, this gave a nice variation in performance of similar-sized ships.

Someone else said somewhere (sorry, forgot who & where but it’s here somewhere!) that the engine force was not calculated - well that’s very easy to add into the same spreadsheet, since the mass is used there - I did that in mine. And I found it easy to format the output cells ready tocopy & paste into the ini file, e.g. steering_torque = + the X, Y & Z parameters. My spreadsheet is very hard to find your way round it or I would have released it already. But it is really easy to make your own the way you want it.

The formatting command is quite easy in Excel:
For the Steering Torque, type this into the cell you want to copy from ready for pasting into the shiparch.ini file:
=Concatenate("steering_torque = ",(cell for X force),", ",(cell for Y force),", ",(cell for Z force))

and in the next cell below for Angula Drag:
=Concatenate("angular_drag = ",(cell for X drag),", ",(cell for Y drag),", ",(cell for Z drag))

and in the next cell below that for Rotation Inertia:
=Concatenate("rotation_inertia = ",(cell for X inertia),", ",(cell for Y inertia),", ",(cell for Z inertia))

If you have a formula for strafe force put this in the next cell below:
=Concatenate("strafe_force = ",(cell for strafe force))

And for nudge Force in the next cell below:
=Concatenate("nudge_force = ",(cell for strafe force))

And if you calculate strafe power usage:
=Concatenate("strafe_power_usage = ",(cell for strafe power usage))

If you want to be more expert then you can name the cells containing the values for your settings, and refer to them by name in the concatenate cell, e.g. X-Force, Y-Force, Z-Force, X-drag, Y-drag, Z-drag, X-inertia, Y-inertia, Z-inertia, strafe-force, nudge-force, strafe-power:

e.g.: =Concatenate("steering_torque = “,X-force,”, “,Y-force,”, ",Z-force)

You can name cells by clicking in the cell and overtyping the cell reference in the little Name Box window (left of the formula bar) with the name you want the cell to be called.

Simples! <click>I can help with some Excel queries, just ask.

:D</click>