"Missiles" launching asymetrically

[Mitchz95]

I've been playing around with warships recently (sacrilegious, I know) and I'm having trouble getting my missiles to fire straight. Every salvo I fire goes off course right out of the gate, and I have no idea what's causing it. It happens both in space and atmosphere.

^ This is the launcher. As you can see, it's completely symmetrical inside and the missiles are set to fire in pairs so the recoil will push the ship backwards instead of to the side.

Now, here's two salvos (two missiles each) fired in space:

As you can see, the first veers to the right and the second to the left. Each salvo alternates between left and right and I can't figure out why. Is there something I'm missing?

[panzer1b]

I have alot of experience with weapons (lets face it, i play this game as if it was any other sci-fi combat game but with the ability to custom build your armor/weapons) so ill try my best to help you out.  I cannot be certain what is wrong without a craft file, but here are a few tips i can give you with stock sepatron missiles.

The first thing you can do to make weapons fire more straight is to use spin stabilization.  The idea is to have the sepatrons angled sideways by about 1 tick, and make sure to use radial symmetry so that the sepatrons are not making it fire sideways.  This isnt essential, but it helps alot when your ship is moving slightly (its very hard to get a ship to be 100% stable using the stock SAS especially if its very heavy and low on reaction wheels).

The next best thing you can do is to avoid long stacks of weapons.  While the compactness is very tempting, it is both a bad practice in the armor department (easier to degun a ship with less hardpoints and long stacks of missiles one after the other), and it makes the weapons less accurate.  The issue is that the first few shots will wobble on the stack and make it more difficult to aim them, usually resulting in minor spread which is exasperated if the missiles are not spin stabilized.

Finally, make sure you do NOT use regular struts to attach weapons to teh ship.  From my experience struts will 90% of the time result in the weapons veering off to the side when fired.  If you absolutely must use struts to attach a wobbly stack to the craft, use the autostrut feature which doesnt seem to make missiles fly sideways as often.

Also worth mentioning is that you should be using radial symmetry when constructing sepatron missiles.  It should be obvious as to why, but occasionally even i forget and end up with unuseable weapons that fly sideways when i accidentally used mirror symmetry.

Anyways, if these tips dont help, please upload your craft so i can take a look at it in more detail then the screenshots show.

[Mitchz95]

1 hour ago, panzer1b said:

Finally, make sure you do NOT use regular struts to attach weapons to teh ship.  From my experience struts will 90% of the time result in the weapons veering off to the side when fired.

That turned out to be the problem, thank you! I'll give spin-stabilization a try. Maybe that'll help balance it out. Or even simply connecting the struts from the hull to the missiles instead of the other way around. Hmm... tests.

How do I use the "autostrut feature"? I wasn't aware there was such a thing.

[bewing]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

That turned out to be the problem, thank you! I'll give spin-stabilization a try. Maybe that'll help balance it out. Or even simply connecting the struts from the hull to the missiles instead of the other way around. Hmm... tests.

How do I use the "autostrut feature"? I wasn't aware there was such a thing.

It's new. Go into your settings menu and enable "advanced tweakables". Then when you build a craft, the autostrut feature will appear in each parts' context menu.

Edited December 3, 2016 by bewing

[Mitchz95]

13 hours ago, bewing said:

It's new. Go into your settings menu and enable "advanced tweakables". Then when you build a craft, the autostrut feature will appear in each parts' context menu.

Thank you!

Spin-stabilization didn't work - I guess the missiles don't like the cramped conditions of the torpedo bay - but auto-strutting solved the problem completely. And I shaved 16 parts off in the process - awesome! Thank you both for all your help!