shadowmage45
commented
7 years ago Thanks for taking some time to play with the configs/values.
Looks like the basis for the system works for the most part -- too steep = explode from peak heating, too shallow = run out of ablator (and then explode from heat). Just need to tune exactly where the safe 'corridor' is by tuning the configs a bit.
One change I likely will make regarding the code-side of the heat-curves (and thus the config-specified values as well), is to rework them to use 0-1 as inputs, and 0-1 as outputs, with scalar values on either side. This is to allow for the curves to be used in an abstract manner -- simply create one curve, and use different scalars to effect the 'more or less headroom' bit of things.
Cleaning up the curve tangents is probably a good thing -- the existing curve data was brute forced from an excel plot of manually input data points, so 'rough' would be putting it nicely.
MikeOnTea
Curve data:
As mentioned on the forum, i plotted the current heatCurve and noticed some interpolation issues which i confirmed in an in game editor (because the plotter i use interpolates a bit differently than the game, so the plots don't exactly represent the ingame curves):
The issues can be seen before and after the steep slope where the curve gets wobbly.
Thus, i tried to create a new, smoother and yet simpler curve with less points, and came up with:
Now, because the ingame interpolation uses tangents and works a bit differently, i sadly need tangents for all the points except one, for that one the auto-calculated tangents of the game work fine.
The new curves in in game format look like this, in this case scaled down for the light shield:
The two medium shield curves i have came up with are now 3.635 the light curve for less headroom, and 3.75 light curve for a bit more headroom. The important thing here is that the tangents need to also be scaled alongside the values. Thus, the the 3.75x curve for the medium shield with higher headroom would look like this:
As mentioned on the forum, i reduced the weights and ablator of the shields to match the apollo weight, the 3.75m medium shield for example is down from 600 to 450 ablator. This means the ablation weight is a bit more than the weight of the shield structure but roughly in the same area which seems good. This also leads to nicer values in the UI, eg the 1.25m light shield now has 25 ablator instead of 33.33333333. :) The structural weight has gone down from 1 to 0.4 for the 3.75m medium shield, together with the 450 ablator that makes the 3.75m medium shield weight 850kg, about the same as the 3.9m apollo shield.
I also changed the weight scaling of the shield types, making the light shield weight half as much as the medium shield, because it also has half the ablator - i think the structure mass to ablator mass factor should roughly stay the same for the shields.
Edit: Some data from my testing with those curves:
Light 1.25m shield, tested with just a single mk-1 pod with a battery and parachute, total weight with light shield: ~940kg:
Medium 1.25m shield, tested with above curve with a bit more headroom: First tests use mk-1 pod, ~1000kg weight including medium shield:
Now I added some additional weight to the medium tests, first a test with ~1500kg:
And another test with 2000kg: