My volume/mass equation : where is the flaw ?

There is the fact that rotation speed is not just a speed but result in pilot acceleration. I considered that for my steering torques, that’s why they are not easy to get used to; however my method includes the acceleration as a relevant factor to both while earlier we were viewing angular and linear motion as separate and the centripetal accelerations our pilots felt were different from linear accelerations.
For engines are affecting only the linear motions you can define all ships of the same class to have the same mass and acceleration. This way all these ships could swap engines. This is, for instance, how I solved it (though to me it was a simplification of the process, I never was interested in swapping engines).

I’ll give you some relations once I get into them again (i.e. ‘asap’^^).

I don’t think I was the first, but I did make one because I wanted to understand how it worked.

I used an Excel sheet for my calculations too, but only because I get around Excel more easily.

The nice thing about that was that I could quickly and easily just copy and paste the parameters into shiparch.ini.

One bad thing of course was that all similar mass ships ended up handling the same, and this was obvious in the game, and became boring.

So I introduced another variable factor which randomly (or manually, when I preferred), changed the handling by altering the X, Y, & Z steering torque by +15%, +10%, +5%, 0%, -5%, -10% and -15%. Much more interesting, varied handling, and ships are less “granular” too.

Good work.

I used StarTrader’s formulae, too, at some point. And I also worked with Excel (though I had to exchange the decimal separator each time for here in Germany it is a comma, too), even developing my equations.
ColdFire, you mentioned there was something wrong about the torques and that’s right. When reordering the code I realized there was a mistake I did for the accelerations used to calculate the torques were not translated to m/s² but kept at g. The next update will fix this bug.

individual torques are provided with individual radiuses, so that’s not a problem with my method (now, as the torque calculations are fixed).

a word on the linear_drag:
while the linear_drag on the engine is a necessity for the program not to have to deal with divisions by 0 (infinitely high velocities, as relativistic masses and improbability of light speed is not considered in the FL phys engine), linear_drag on the ship affects its behavior with engines killed more markably. if it is kept at 1 you can reach the maximal speed you expect from your thruster so if you change this, you have higher decelerations and lowered maximal speeds in dogfight.

a word on the nudge_force:
the nudge_force is the force a ship translates to dynamic objects on collision. knowing the mass of the other object one could estimate the change of the flight vector. that’s how it happens with too high values we get from elder formulae, that when a player flown battleship hits you just a little bit you may be strafing away at ridiculously high velocities (for your mass may be as low as 100kg) which, provided you have the weak vanilla engine, can be decelerated and set back to normal over a longer time. so nudge_force can very well be the same on all ships or dependant on their maximal angular velocity. making this value depend on the mass exclusively would result in weird and disbalanced collision reactions.

more essential for object avoidance is the actual strafing capabilities and flight speed.
I figured that the nudge force to be three times the mass is at least not true for the vanilla game (example: li_fighter - mass = 100; nudge_force = 300000 = mass * 300); and docking issues such as strafing away with velocities not given through the other forces and drags are still there.
However, we have to consider how surrealistic the vanilla game is. The equation of nudge_force = mass * acceleration is also wrong for the li_fighter’s (engine) acceleration is 48000N / 100kg = 480m/s^2 = ~ 48.9G and not 300m/s^2 which would explain the nudge_force with your formula.

conclusions:
a) - The relation may be not as proportional as you get it with a simple multiplication.
b) - nudge_force does affect flight capabilities.
c) - How nudge_force affects collision, collision detection and where this force affects the ship and/or distinct objects is not clear yet.

This basically is why I did not include nudge_force into my calculations. I would if I knew the exact effect and I will once I do know or have discovered.
Bad, with the methods we have (manually flying in FL and seeing what happens), trial and error are our only ally and reliability of that is questionable.

Well it is good fun experimenting when we have the time, and a great feeling when things come to light and we understand them better.

But Real Life has taken over for me for the past many months, so I’ve not been able to contribute much.

I’m still making new surs and cmps now and then as we have Schmackbolzen and P1p3r’s and Adoxa’s tools, but I can’t spend much time on those either.

At the end it’s a free-time hobby, and we would waste our time on other things if it wasn’t FL.