My large ships won't turn

[Eleven]

I'm loving this thread now. Learning lots of new stuff. I don't know if it was the physical accelerated time or not, but shortly after learning that, I tried it out and didn't see any noticable shaking, but *after* I turned it off and went to make another move, one of my 4 nuke engines fell off

I'm going to disable it's opposite and try to continue this mission to Eve, there is enough fuel left to make a difference on my ship in orbit. In the meantime I'll disable all the middle RCS ports and just use the ones on the ends to see if that helps on this mission. I'll re-do this transport ship with linear RCS's and an additional command pod and see if that helps in the future.

[Eric S]

use linear rcs. the four way uses WAY to much fuel

Only true if you're using the linear thruster in a more efficient manner than an RCS quad, and if the RCS quads are properly placed, there won't be much room for improvement, so certainly not way too much fuel.

The quads have the same mass, same thrust, same ISP. The only difference is that the quads can thrust on any of four vectors, the linear thruster can only thrust in one vector.

Colonel_Panic has a better point. The quads that are not at the ends of the craft (I'm assuming that this craft is actually two docked craft which is why that there are even quads located there) should but shut down while the two craft are joined, as they're too close to the center of mass to provide much leverage and they wind up thrusting at an odd angle because they're about 45 degrees off from the center of mass. Linear thrusters in the same position would be no more efficient.

[J0hnsmine]

Three Words. Need more torque.

I get that using 8 symmetry place-anywhere RCS ports. i used 4-5 series of these to turn one ship.

Gimbaling Might also help. have more gimbaling than thrust if you can. Works for me, i think it'll work for you, i hope!

[Vanamonde]

Wait. The linear RCS has the same thrust as the quads? I thought they were stronger?

[Eric S]

Wait. The linear RCS has the same thrust as the quads? I thought they were stronger?

I thought so too until I looked in the config file. In fact, every time I state that, I check the config file to make sure that 1) I read the config file correctly to begin with, and 2) that it hasn't changed in any updates. It doesn't make much sense, but I'm OK with that until they get closer to a released version and write it off to the fact that while they've done gross balancing, there's still some fine tuning in balancing that hasn't been done.

On the other hand, the linear RCS thruster does have a higher crash tolerance (50 vs 15 for the quads).

Three Words. Need more torque.

I get that using 8 symmetry place-anywhere RCS ports. i used 4-5 series of these to turn one ship.

Gimbaling Might also help. have more gimbaling than thrust if you can. Works for me, i think it'll work for you, i hope!

x8 symmetry for RCS (quads or linear) is bad for efficiency for translation in the normal/antinormal/radial/antiradial directions, as well as yaw/pitch, as half the blocks are positioned 45 degrees off of the direction you want to thrust in. Since for translation in the prograde/retrograde directions and roll, all the RCS quads can fire, I don't find the extra quads to be that helpful. I have been known to double up RCS quads on my more massive craft, as well as use more powerful RCS quads from a mod pack that I can't remember.

[J0hnsmine]

Thanks for the constructive criticism, Eric.