[Suggestion] Include Turn Rate in Engine Specs.

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

As much as I love the new “Keep Moving” command, I’ve found an annoying side affect on some of my frigates. I’ll build a bunch of short-ranged frigates to take on slower, long range ships with the “Keep Moving” command, and the ships tend to break either left or right depending how they engage. So far so good. But the annoying this is say that ship is destroyed (so annoying! ;)), well now half the ships are going the wrong direction, and it can take them forever to turn around.

So this gave me the idea of adding a stat that is something like degrees/(sec*mass) to engines. Either this is something that some engines are good at, others not. Or just better engines in general have more turning power.

This is something that could distinguish dog fighters from fast bombers. Turning is a key capability in dog fighting, and could really give one design a leg up. Bombers wouldn’t need this nearly as much.

Not sure if this stat would be useful on cruisers as they tend to be slow, and all weapons have a 360 degree firing arc. Now if weapons were not 360 degrees it would matter more, but I’m not sure if that’s a great idea or not.

2

It would be a nice engine stat to add detail to fighter and frigate engines, both of which -sorely- need some extra options.

3

This is vaguely related, but the turning speed for fighters increased 50% in the latest patch. I like the idea of different hulls having different turning speeds though. (or engines)

4

Especially because you could make a module, perhaps called Thrust Vectoring or Maneuvering Thrusters, that increases that like the targeting module increases the track speed of weapons. Get an engine with good turn rates and a half dozen of those and sure your cruiser might not be nearly as fast as a frigate but it can flip end for end in ten seconds flat.