My Ship Maneuvers Like a Pig!

[Salvagebot 1.0]

My ship maneuvers fine until I load it with ~400 shots of ammo, at which point it turns like a pig in quicksand.

From there I can continue to load up the ship with an extra ~62 tons and it doesn't get any worse -- because it's already an unflyable slug.

I'm flying a "mod ship", the "Kriegshund", because I liked how it looked. Maybe I should've stuck with one of the stock models? Anyway the fact that it's a mod ship means I can change it!

So two questions:

1. Are there any devices that help a ship rotate as its cargo weight increases? I bought a pretty expensive engine upgrade but all it did was improve acceleration, not rotation.

2. If I wanted to [re-]mod my ship so it could still rotate normally at, say, half maximum cargo mass, how would I do that?

3. Should such a tiny amount of cargo really completely hose the ship's maneuverability? Maybe there's a bug in the mod or something.

[FourFire]

Yeah I've noticed this effect with lower powered motors it has to do with the thrust/mass ratio (which you see at the starting screen)
the thrust/mass ratio is dynamically calculated as you add/remove cargo. (but not armor/devices for some reason)
try modding your ship to have more initial thrust.

[Amilir]

Actually, it IS affected by armor/devices. You'll notice if you spend time flying the woflen with 10 ton armor segments vs lighter armo

To make your ship accelerate faster regardless of loading, increase thrust. To make your ship keep turning at the same speed despite heavy loading, increase mass. Rotation speed is defined by initial rotation speed * total mass / current mass.

*Rotation speed is defined by number of frames to turn one facing. 2 is standard for the wolfen and sapphire, and I think it increments in amounts of 2. The huge difference from a small bit of mass is a rounding issue in the engine.

So:
1) No.
2) Increase your ship's mass.
3) It's a rounding issue in the engine.

[Salvagebot 1.0]

Thrust seems to be balanced pretty well. Without engine upgrades loading up the ship with cargo makes it accelerate very poorly. With a good engine upgrade that effect is almost completely mitigated. It seems right to me.

If I increase the ship's base mass will the change be retroactive to my current ship, or will I need to restart with the modded ship in a new game?

[PM]

Compared to most other ships, Sapphire and Wolfen are among the lightest ships in the game. If either ship hauls over about 65 tons worth of equipment and cargo, turning speed slows, and there is nothing you can do in the game to fix that besides lightening your load. This is why the Wolfen's 10 ton limit for armor is worthless. Both Sapphire and Wolfen armor limit is effectively 5 tons due to other equipment getting progressively heavier. This is one reason ammo weapons are suboptimal late in the game.

If you want to change Sapphire and Wolfen stats to prevent them from turning slower, increase the mass stat. Since doing this will impact acceleration, increase thrust as well. Just adding a zero to both mass and thrust should suffice. To answer your question, yes, changes are retroactive, if the ship mod was included at the beginning of the game. If the mod was added midgame, its inclusion (and changes) or lack of may vary by game version.

If you play a mod that features opposition with Shatter, add several more zeroes to mass and thrust. This is because immunity to shatter depends on high mass alone.

[Salvagebot 1.0]

I couldn't be using the ship myself unless I had loaded it from the beginning, could I? Or are there mods that let you change ships mid-game?

Anyway since changes are retroactive I can eventually work out a ship that turns like it should. I've finished the game with the Freighter and Fighter in previous versions and wanted to try something new. I don't remember the previous versions having rotation degradation this punishing, but I didn't use ammo weapons on the Wolfen, either, so maybe it was just serendipity.

Now that I think about it that was a really long time ago when I last played a Wolfen. That game was so long ago you could fire all weapons at once by rapidly pressing "W". I never really felt the need for a weapon that used ammo when I could throw a massive barrage of type-balanced firepower downrange from a good mix of non-ammo weapons. After the multi-barrel barrage was nerfed there was almost no reason not to use the Freighter.

Heh, I'm both newbie and old timer. The game is so different now, more challenging, more stuff to do, and it's harder to pop into a Teraton fab with a Level 1 Peasant Ship and pop out with a ship fit for flying Domina to the Goddesses' Ball. To take the easy way out now you have to really work at it. So thanks for the advice, I need it!

[PM]

If you want to play as any standard ship, change ships, and/or buy automated wingmen, download and add my Playership Drones mod. Playership Drones even has patches for other playership mods. Click the link in my signature.