Wiki / Ship sections / Controller

Controller

The controller is the ship's steering system: it rotates the ship toward a target heading, easing in and settling without overshoot rather than snapping. It is required for any ship a player or AI can fly.

With no live controller, the hull cannot steer itself - so destroying the last controller disables a ship without destroying it outright, leaving a drifting, tumbling wreck. It is also what the autopilot verbs drive when they fly the ship for you.

A hurt computer cracks and, past about a third of its health gone, throws sparks. It steers exactly as well as it did new right up to the moment it dies: handling degrades when a computer is LOST, never while one is merely damaged.

What sets how hard a ship turns

The computer does not decide it on its own. A ship turns as hard as the lower of two limits allows:

• Its computers. Their torque against the mass they have to swing. A heavier ship needs more of it for the same turn.
• Its structure. Hull metal takes 8 G and no more. The further the ship's furthest section sits from its balance point, the gentler the hardest turn that metal survives.

The patrol gunship is held by the structural limit, with a wide margin on the computer limit. Neither result is authored directly: both follow from the shape, section mass, and installed computer torque. A short craft swings on a short arm and turns harder. A long hauler swings on a long arm and turns more gently.

Two things follow that you feel in the cockpit:

• A wreck turns sharper. Shoot the bow off and the ship's balance point slides aft, shortening the reach to everything behind it - so what is left of the ship turns harder than the whole ship did. Mid-turn, on the same stick input, the survivor speeds up into it.
• A hard turn spends the margin. Holding a fast turn already loads the hull. There is less left to turn harder with, and past a point there is none at all: the ship holds that rate for as long as you hold the stick, and no amount of input tightens it further. Ease off and the margin comes back.

Stacking controllers

A big hull can mount more than one. They do not each steer it: they share one steering loop, and their torque adds into it.

On a ship that is already at its structural limit, extra torque buys no turn rate. Metal does not care how many computers push it. Only a hull heavy enough to run its computers out first gains turn rate from a stack, and only until it reaches its own structural limit too. The test rigs below show both cases.

A measured 170 degree flip - the time to come within 5 degrees of the new heading. The light hull gains nothing and pays a little; the barge nearly halves its flip by the fourth computer and then stops dead, because it has run into its own structure.

What stacking always buys is precision. A stacked hull starts arresting its turn earlier, so it stops on the heading you pointed at instead of sailing past and swinging back - which is the barge losing its 6.7 degree overshoot. The second computer gives most of that gain; the tenth is nearly dead weight, and on a light craft it is a little slower for nothing.

The other half of stacking is redundancy. Lose one of two and the ship does not go brain-dead - it drops to single-controller handling and keeps fighting. Only the last one is the ship's brain.

Variants

One flight computer ships, and every hull in the game is steered by copies of it. What a ship does with them is the ship's own business: its mass and its length decide that, and a second one buys redundancy and precision rather than turn rate.