Preventing capital ship flipping?

type = FREIGHTER or FIGHTER

If you use anything else the ship will go belly-up in turns, unless you use adoxa’s patch.

Here’s the formula for handling, if you’re smart you can make it into an Excel or Calc spreadsheet: http://forums.seriouszone.com/showthread.php?55250

i worked with your formula, ST, its quite good as far as the manual flying is concerned, but if you goto a target or dock, that is causing your ship to fly incredible maneuvers sometimes, preventing you of docking with some objects for multiple minutes. i experienced that effect can be reduced increasing the mass of the spaceship.

OK. But that is not the handling parameters. The main problem with circling a dock is the ship speed, mine is set to over 120 for most small ships and they overshoot. I never had a problem with big ships.

so there must be some further formula of optimal ship speed in relation to, let’s say, mass (as drag and thrust capacity are the speed)

I already wrote a solution for this handling problems. My values won’t cause strange autopilot maneuvers and your ship won’t turn around if you get hit by an other player.

Gisteron: Yes mass affects speed as well as acceleration, and momentum - if its mass is large, the rate at which the ship changes its direction of movement will change more slowly. I don’t mean its rotation rate on the x, y and z axes, those are calculated from the handling parameters.

Change the mass of a small ship x10 and x100 and test it to see the effects before and after the change.

Skotty: Where is it pls?

http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=41059#forumpost41059

Good, but then all ships in each class would handle the same.

Adding to the body of knowledge on this subject. Here is FoxUnit01’s notes on the topic.

Forsaken, I have simplified the mathematical formula on the anti-spin a little bit, and thought you might be interested to see:

Code:
angular_drag / rotation_inertia = anti-spin factor

For example, a angular_drag value of 50000000 and a rotation_intertia value of 1000000 will produce an anti-spin factor of “50”, which would eliminate nearly all spinning - regardless of what the steering_torque values are - steering_torque only defines how much torque is applied to the ship when you steer, and is not connected to collisions. I derived this formula based on the hypothesis that the amount of spin torque applied to your ship was directly derived from the amount of rotation_inertia on your ship - which turned out to be correct. Thus, changing either the angular_drag or rotation_inertia will directly affect the anti-spin factor.

What I found, unfortunately, is an inverse relationship between strong anti-spin and stable handling / functional autopilot / AI flight - the higher the anti-spin, the less stable the handling is. Too much anti-spin, your ship will unpredictably and autopilot will violently “wag”

To work around this, I have two suggestions:
A) Work out an anti-spin factor that is no higher than approximately 20 (this number is a rough estimate based on tests) - anything higher seems to start introducing the autopilot / AI flight “wag”, and anything higher than approximately 200 (again rough estimate based on tests) starts to introduce extremely odd turning behavior (such as ship not turning in the desired directly, turning much quicker than it should, etc.)
B) Work out a high anti-spin factor with a very low steering_torque - hypothetically, due to the ship’s very low turning speed, all bizzare turning and autopilot / AI flight issues should never surface. This is only hypothesis, however, based on the math I’ve done.

For Flak, I ended up choosing option A, and working out a spin factor that was a good compromise between stable ship handling and decent anti-spin, as ship handling rates are an enormous balancing factor of 88 Flak’s Capital Ships and Stations. For reference, the anti-spin factor in previous Flak versions worked out to be “5” - rather low, and has been increased to “16” (3125000 rotation_inertia, down from 10000000) - the ships are still able to spin, however between the NPC push-away and high collision damage, piloting even a Sleeper Ship in combat is much, much less of an issue. Even the super-large stations can be piloted without too much of a headache - NPCs are simply pushed away before they can do any major spinning, and players are damaged so much they are usually killed.

I actually downloaded 88 Flak to have a look at this and i have to say after applying some of the values with the supplied formula, makes a hell of a difference. My npc freighters have stopped their silly waggling which was annoying the crap out of me. Some very useful information i have to say