TIL: decouplers fire away from the parent COM

[Laie]

A decoupler's force moves stuff away from the parent. Until just now, I wasn't aware that the game is quite literal about this.

It appears that the force always moves away from the parent part's center (CoM or origin, I don't know -- for most parts it's the same either way). It is definitely not the parent vessel CoM, but the parent part.

I've only done limited testing and cannot say if the force simply goes through the decoupler, or if it is more complicated than that.

Edited May 17, 2020 by Laie

[AHHans]

13 hours ago, Laie said:

It appears that the force always moves away from the parent part's center

Well, as far as I can tell that's only true for the Structural Pylon. The other (regular) [Edit]radial[/Edit] decouplers behave as expected, i.e. they push themselves (and anything connected to them) away in the direction they are pointing:

(Notice how both structural pylons are in front of the smoke from their decoupling.)

[Edit:] O.K. I now also tested the TD-06 and TD-12 stack decouplers, and they also behave as described by @Laie

Edited May 17, 2020 by AHHans

[KerikBalm]

Hmm, very interesting.

The small hardpoint and structural pylon are very similar in design and appearance (just different sizes), does the small pylon behave like this too?

[AHHans]

23 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

does the small pylon behave like this too?

Easy to test. So, yes.

And btw. a cubic octagonal strut counts as a parent part (even tough it is "physicsless"). That gives you some control when you need the ejection force to be in a certain direction.