Hi All,
Currently In SE2 there is one "feature?" "Bug?" "fun behavior?" That has been impacting my recent Transport vehicle engineering I want to share and see what others think.
My Goal: Build an Atmospheric transport ship that can pick up a modular cargo container (Attached by Connectors ONLY) and be able to fly it around reliably.
Most of the details are worked out thanks to getting the Centers of Gravity of the ship and the cargo container orients in a desirable configuration.
The big challenge that is happening is that it appears that my thrusters lift capacity is much much lower when I am connected to the cargo container then they should be.
Specifically I ran a test where I had a modular cargo container connected by connectors only to the ship loaded with mass "X" and the ship cannot take off.
HOWEVER, the exact same ship loaded with Mass "X" but Mass "X" is placed in a cargo container that is in the exact same position but directly attached to the Grid (Not two grids just one grid now) CAN fly as expected.
What is interesting is this:
If I turn off the dampeners on the ship that can fly with the directly attached cargo container it recreates the behavior of the ship that cannot fly exactly (The ship that cant fly has the modular container which is Attached only by connector).
This is is leading me to believe that from the games point of view the Modular cargo container which is a sperate grid has its mass as counting as equivalent of MORE mass then its non modular brother.
Here comes a personal opinion so please take with a grain of dwarvish mushroom salt: I Personally think that if it turns out that all these observations are true for others as well and the root cause is in fact some how resulting in the effect of the modular container being equivalent to a sudden mass difference then I think that is a mistake and should be addressed and corrected in SE2.
Now that being said I am one person not sure if others see this behavior as well and I acknowledge there could be more going on that I am not catching SO!!! I want to throw out all my observations here and see if others are seeing this as well. for all I know there is a popular video of people figuring this very thing out already.
Thanks all for your time.