RCS behaviour

[Teilnehmer]

I’m making a test. The center of mass of my test craft is inside the ore tanks. 4 sets of vernors are located on the beam. I’m trying to turn the craft pressing W or S. (I also tried using monoprop RCS thrusters with the same result.)

The result is:
The thrusters near the CoM burn at full throttle. The farther a thruster is located, the less throttle is applied to it. Even when I disable or decouple the nearest thrusters, the farthest ones do not change their throttle.

Why is the way the RSC is behaving so inefficient?

Edited January 21, 2016 by Teilnehmer

[Dafni]

Hmmm, interesting. It almost looks as if it tries to correct the offset COM on a translation movement, but since you stated that you try to rotate (pitch) this does not make much sense. For rotation one would assume the game uses the thrusters with more leverage even more, if anything.

Edited January 21, 2016 by Dafni

[Boris-Barboris]

36 minutes ago, Teilnehmer said:

Why is the way the RSC is behaving so inefficient?

Because you have precise control enabled (Caps lock).

[Dafni]

hahaha, good catch boris! Indeed! He is actually translating!! That makes perfect sense now. The game does just correct for the offset COM.

So it's not inefficient at all, just a smart physics engine at work. Nice!

[Teilnehmer]

1 hour ago, Boris-Barboris said:

Because you have precise control enabled (Caps lock).

Well, yes. Disabling the precise control perfectly helps, Thanks! But why?

1 hour ago, Dafni said:

hahaha, good catch boris! Indeed! He is actually translating!! That makes perfect sense now. The game does just correct for the offset COM.

So it's not inefficient at all, just a smart physics engine at work. Nice!

So I understand nothing!

Precise control has no connection with rotation/translation mode.

I made 4 pictures:

• Rotation. Normal control.
• Rotation. Precise control.
• Translation. Normal control.
• Translation. Precise control.

Look:

 

[Boris-Barboris]

21 minutes ago, Teilnehmer said:

But why?

It's a naive solution for translation on asymmetric crafts without creating wobble. On your rcs-rod craft, shift one of those vernors a little and compare translation dynamics. Long story short: rcs port thrust is multiplied on 1/moment_arm in precise mode.

[Dafni]

Thank you Boris, I see. I thought the precise mode toggles the WASD keys into translation commands. But yeah, what you say makes sense too. They must have implemented a sort of pseudo stability enhancement in precise mode.