Planetary Landing Discussion

With the upcoming release of planets, I think it'd be good to have some discussion on safely landing various hulls on various surfaces under varying gravity influence.
Experiment, report, discuss, adapt.

 

... are you asking us to experiment landing in situations we know nothing about? Because that's what it sounds like.

What we know:

• Gravity on the surface will be roughly 1G.
• The effect of gravity will be stronger the closer to the surface you are.
• They want this gravity to effect ships, regardless of Artificial Mass Blocks or Space Balls.

What we don't know:

• How the gravity will effect ships (will it be like thrusters, and not care about the center of gravity, or will it be like gravity drives, and care about the center of gravity. From an existing physics perspective, we'd expect center of gravity, but from a gameplay perspective, the thrusters might compensate as needed)
• Are there different surfaces to land on? Is dirt more forgiving on your polished ship hull or is it just as likely to leave a scratch as rock?
• Will ships generate heat when entering the atmosphere of a planet? Will there be a block to compensate for that?
• Will there be some basic aerodynamics applied to ships in an atmosphere?
• Will there be other technologies besides ships for going from surface to orbit? (space elevators of some sort)
• Will planets rotate?

I think you need to expand what you're thinking a little more if you want any sort of meaningful testing done.

 

You bring up several valid questions. I suppose for now it's all theoretical discussion until planets are actually released.

 

The below thoughts are made under the assumption that all blocks are affected by gravity and not just artificial mass blocks

Well three concepts that immediately come to mind are of course:

Thruster driven mobile concepts
These are usually ships that fly off the planet. Here large ships are in a huge disadvantage due to how high their mass is compared to the thrust in one direction.
Furthermore small block thrusters got a huge advantage due to their very high performance compared to large block thrusters.
Small block large thrusters got about 199.72 N / kg compared to 22.83 N / kg for the large block small thruster and 27.78 N / kg for the large block large thruster.
Furthermore small block thrusters generate about twice as much newton per watt (360 N/kW) compared to large block thrusters (178,57 N/kW).
That concludes that small block cargo ships are most feasible, no matter how big the cargo is. Especially because thruster exhaust has a very limited length.

Gravity driven elevators
A floating platform that gets its upforces from gravity drives.
Essentially you would have a platform with several gravity drives that both balance the whole platform aswell as rise it slowly.
The easiest approach would be to have either a 3-point or 4-point platform for that. The payloads center of mass would be aligned at the center of the platform so that all points have to push with equal forces.
Additionally the platform could have a position system to not drift too far aside from its ideal spherical coordinate relative to the planet.

Mechanical elevators
Some mechanisms that rise a platform out of space. Here the easiest concept would be a simple mass-stacked piston that pushes a ship out into low gravity orbit where it can take off alone.
Alternatively some rotor-arm constructions to rise up, though the moments with their lever might not produce enough force to push the payload up.
Wheel elevators are thinkable too.

Huh where did you read that?
All i read is

And that only refers to the way how gravity works, not essentially the magnitude of its gravitational acceleration from what the text "sounds like".


Edit:
Almost forgot.
I would highly say that most ships are badly suited for actually landing on planets due to their low acceleration into one direction. Also without using one of the many OP thruster mods out there.

So the only feasible way is what most good sci-fi themed books, videos, games do and build in space at low gravity.

So once again, it is more feasible to see small crafts flying on- and off-planet than seeing large ships doing that.

 

@plaYer2k: excellent post, sir. This is the kind of post I hoped to see in this thread.

 

This video is cool.. it has a space elevator in it.

Also the bit with the asteroids around a planet... just.. wow.. if something like that could be in Space Engineers it would be amazing.

 

Hey, time to build some antigrav vehicules. Expect some "rough landing" in the first iterations.

 

Building a frigate in a planetside shipyard and hooking it up to a launch vehicle to get it orbital doesn't sound too bad. I'd have easy access to most resources (except platinum knowing my luck...) and I'd be able to have an excuse to use wheeled vehicles for an actual industrial job.

Landing...I really hope for aerodynamics to be a thing in this, at least some simple version would suffice. Landing a large ship? Unless it's been designed for planetary landing (Large amount of thrust from the bottom), I think I'm fine keeping to shuttles.

 

Perhaps they could add an additional feature to the gravity generator block where it nullify local gravity around a ship. As you get closer to a planet the generator draws more power to counter the effect of gravity due to a planet (also related to the size of ship). It means you can land on a planet with your thrusters etc... and have to think about how gravity may effect your ship design (i.e. not too big) if you want to surface land.

 

Here's how it's going to be: don't expect to land your gigaton mothership on a planet... unless you do it as a pursuit of science. Gravity generators will synergize with planetary gravity, making it impossible for a gravity drive to lift its own ship off the planet (a tower with grav gens might work as a gravity elevator, and gravitic repulsion might be one way to make hovercraft). A second type of thruster will be added that uses fuel+oxygen and has superior thrust v.s. normal thrusters. These are going to be the workhorses that get most ships to/from planet surfaces.

Planet surfaces should be places to boldly go (or boldly escape from). I will be quite disappointed if planets are as easily conquered as your average 'roid cluster.

 

In SciFi literature/films/series, large ships are build in a space dock and not on a planet.
And even in reality we would do that, if we already had the resources for it.
For a good reason: It's not reasonable with current technology to start a heavy ship from a planets surface.
With anti-grav engines, this may be another story. But still:
Landing a large vessel on a planet for me is nothing I'll worry about.
There are little to no reasons to do so.
I will construct vessels specificly designed to land and start from planets by using thrusters or supplementary gav drives.
For example freighters, supply ships and shuttles. But those won't be outfitted for deep space operations then.

 

I think we may need springs or some sort of damping shock system to reduce landing impact.

Not quite true... there's plenty of those does that.

I know you don't see reasons to do so, but there are quite some. Here are the major reasons to land. I'll use scifi reference while I'm at it.

Heavy Damage: So much damages that you'll need a lot of crew repairing them on outside. Landing on a planet with oxygen is ideal work environment than in space. (In Star Trek: Voyager as example above, they need to land to avoid being spotted in deep space.)


Large Mining/Salavage Operation: Some ship would come with few & large or small & many mining rover vehicles roll out from a large land-able ship and mine around the planet. The ship could be filled with ores and take off without the rovers for mass replacement and return for another load. (Even old sci-fi novel covered this.)


"Tug" Hauling Ship/Colony Transportation: To move an entire colony station to another planet. Wheither it's mining, outpost, or whatever. I'm sure there will be reason to control or benefit something from a planet. (In Alien, USCSS Nostromo was towing this large colony refinery to another location.)


"Dropship": Large Interstellar Cargo Transportation Ship. It can be used for war, planetary invasion. (MechWarrior and Battletech fans knows this all too well.)

 

So we seem to have come to the conclusion of miniaturize or specialize. Let's talk about specialized landing equipment.

 

I've been Playing around with the SAturns Moon mod by DuneD, and have done some testing with normal build ships.
result: not really able to take off again without wheels and a runway, which is bad for your ship, because it gets shreddered^^

after that I tried it with swithable engines, and I must say it really works good:

Before Landing:


And the Landing itself (not as rough as i have thought it would be)


I've started to build more ships with switching engines, because they really have no problems handling the gravitation, and can land and start with ease

 

We actually don't know if gravity will be stronger closer to the surface, likely it will be like a giant spherical gravity gen.

having gravity pull from center of mass is actually easier than you seem to think, you know that "show center of mass" checkbox in the terminal? That's where it would pull from, it wouldn't effect thrusters unless they are changed to care about center of mass as well, also if gravity doesn't care about center of mass, where would the force be applied, with thrusters it's all local to the grid, with planetary gravity it isn't

will planets rotate: probably not, from a physics perspective that's hell. Will ships generate heat in atmos? also not likely, no system exists to represent it. Aerodynamics: possibly, not too different than SI, from a mechanics standpoint.
other tech to get into orbit: OF COURSE, we will have to build it ourselves but the game is called Space Engineers.

 

nah that's taking away the engineering challenge of a ship that can get off a planet, why build any different if you can nullify gravity?

 

The big question is whether or not thrusters can overcome gravity. As it stands, having even one artificial mass block is a challenge to overcome with thrust... I can't imagine even 100,000 kg ships being able to support their own weight.

Also: No jetpacks is going to affect planetary station design quite a bit!

 

Physically speaking, 1G = 10m/s², so, we need to propel ourself with more than 10 m/s² upwards.
So, for a 10,000kg ship (that's a quite small ship...) you would need 100 000 N, so 8 small thrusters (12KN each) if you don't want to fall, so at least 10 trhusters to leave the planet.

(SE gravity nowadays doesn't work like that though)

 

They will be able to, if the mods out there are anything to go off of, just not in every situation, assuming Vertical take off approach, you need enough thrust to mass to have acceleration greater than gravity (most warships don't make the cut in 1G) the trick is you need to utilize your main thrusters to escape, not just you ventral ones.

 

Having a gravity generator nullify gravity would overcome that.

 

and any engineering challenge planets would present.

 

You can create an anti gravity device already (gravity drive). What I'm suggesting (by increasing the amount of power required by the gravity generator as ship size and planet gravity goes up) limits it.

 

But an "Anti-Gravity Generator" would make sense. If we have the technology to create gravity with a gravity generator, why shouldn't we have the technology to let them work in the other way? It's like an invention which causes an invention to counter it. A super weapon only works one time, before somebody can counter it. (The Empire should have considered that, before building a second Death Star.)

 

We dont KNOW anything

if there was a HYPE drive this forum could kick the universe into another plane of existence

 

I think it's fair to say that the fact we are in space would mean we must have developed the technology to travel vast distances in a relatively short period of time. To stop time dilation, because of that speed, would probably require the manipulation of gravity. Within this context a gravity manipulation device would make scientific sense. I'm a little unsure about the artificial mass block though. Mass and energy are the same which means the amount of energy required to create the mass described in the game would be HUGE.

 

Let's just discuss landing itself with what we have. Perhaps you could split the suggestion about anti-grav to the suggestion forums.

 

gravity generators were added to make life easier, beyond that the game is based in 2070, as for the artificial mass block, that was so we could make weapons and such. think of the gravity generator as a monopole magnet, we don't know what system SE is based in, but for all intents and purposes it is the home system for the engineers who look human.. an anti grav generator is an easy way out, i wouldn't mind gravity generators failing automatically in natural gravity or at least artificial mass blocks, but I completely disagree with anti-gravity generator, I don't want megaships having an easy time landing on planets let alone taking off from them, I want to see them crash spectacularly after they get too close to the gravity well, makes a planetary base a tactical advantage, you can use gravity to trap your enemies.

Edit: You are also assuming that we would warp space time to achieve FTL, rather then travel through tunnels within space-time commonly referred to as wormholes to achieve the same effect.

 

We already have anti gravity, -1G what I'm suggesting (by increasing power requirements against mass of ship and planetary gravity) will stop mega ships landing and taking off. You have to think about ship size.

 

If you want to use gravity drive to counter planet's gravity, you would need more than one generator with -1G if artificial gravity still push only artificial mass

 

It's still a magic block that will make it easier, people who have played with mods to have gravity that effects ships, have found several non gravity generator ways to get decently sized ships off the ground, some can tail land, others use runways to achieve an effective HTOL, you have to be creative, YES there will be people who use gravity gens assuming they aren't disabled within natural gravity, but adding a block that does the job of countering gravity for you no strings attached takes away the task of engineering (at least with gravity drives you have to align the center of mass, not ideal if you may find chunks blown off, causing the grav drives to be misaligned), need more energy: add more reactors. we should not have a block that negates natural gravity, countering it with grav drives is one thing, frowned upon but nevertheless they are more engineering than a block that negates natural gravity, regardless of energy requirements.