Overview
This guide will cover the construction of a gravity propulsion system. It will offer you the opprtunity to accelerate a ship that you build it into to max speed in just a couple of seconds. While I am not the first one to come up with this idea, I think I made some great progress in terms of safety and controlability. By expanding the size of the system you can easily adapt it to bigger ships and/or achieve a higher level of acceleration. I think G.P.S. is kinda missleading. Let’s call it Hyperdrive 😉
Introductiom
This is a guide for players who want to try something new. I created it, because lets face it,the idea is awesome. What does it do? Accelerate a ship to max speed realy fast with far less energy consumption compared to normal engines. U still can’t go faster than defined max speed (something around 110 m/s; it changes frequently; it can be modded).
Since the devs gave us the right tools to do this properly it’s fairly easy and not the witchcraft it used to be. Have fun and keep in mind that the breaks aren’t nearly as strong as the Drive. Happy crashing 😀
The underlying game mechanics
Gravity generators on a ship pull objects or blocks with mass (very old versions used asteroids, later included artifical mass blocks work better). If the mass is attached to a vessel, it accelerates as well. Using more generators and/or a higher mass increases the effect. This has nothing to do with real life physics, it’s an aspect of the game’s physics which can be exploited.
I am not the first one with the idea to accelerate a ship with this concept. I started working on my own designs after watching this video a long, looong time ago:
The obvious problems with this design are frequently still true for more rescent designs since the physics haven’t changed match. Total lack of manuverability and the possible threat of crashing into stuf or just colapsing onto itself is still a pretty common sight when doing this on bigger ships. So be mindfull and safe a lot when you’re experimenting with this kind of stuff.
Things to keep in mind while constructing and using
Within the current version of the game, you only need to build a grav gen and an artificial mass block inside it’s field.
I recommend using the settings on the grav gen to adjust the field to as little as you need to have the mass block inside. This also avoids instant death of every player aboard, items or floating rocks shredding the ship from within, etc. Reducing the field radius also safes a ton of energy.
If you want to build a more powerfull system, for example for a bigger ship, you can do this by using more gravity generators and multiple mass blocks. Regarding the mass blocks, you normally want to do this symmetrically to avoid the already mentioned problems of creating a giant spinning disaster.
For the grav gens, it doesnt matter if they are placed symetrical, just make sure they affect all mass blocks.
It is important to place the mass blocks alligned to the centre of the ship. Otherwise it won’t accelerate straight forward, but also sideways. It’ll also make your whole ship spin around, which by the way looks realy funny 😀
To avoid this, I recommend to keep the mass blocks near the central axis of your ship. It needs to push or pull the center of mass of your ship in order to do what it’s supposed to without causing too many side effects.
The further away from the ship’s center of mass the system is placed, the more you need to care about accelerating straight. If the ship starts to turn somewhere during braking or accelerating, it is most likely that the system is not placed exactly behind (or in front of) the center of mass. Sometimes it’s a matter of trial and error. Using mass blocks at asymetrical positons can stabilise the system but its farly difficult and not really intuitive. Most people who played kerbal space program (hi folks :D) should be familiar with the basic mechanics.
A big ship might need quite some high mass affercted to be accelerated properly. Be aware that you will also need more gyroscopes and engines to keep control while accelerating and breaking, even if you balanced it correctly.
Keep in mind that it takes a lot of force to deaccelerate your ship. The higher the mass, the more distance and conventional engines it takes to get back to normal speed. You might want to think about this before crashing accidentally into an asteroid while screaming at your monitor. The results might be fairly permanent and time consuming.
To avoid this, you can use your existing gravity drive and reverse the generators field strength. This should help to deacelerate more quickly, but also makes the thing slightly more complex.
To control everything, I prefer control groups. Activating the genrators or blocks one after another is not a good or comfortable thing to do.
If you activate the system you can either press “z” to stop your ship from trying to break with your regular engines or you just use your engines to support the acceleration (pressing “w”). If you chose the second way, your gyroscopes will help you to stay in control, even if your drive is not balanced properly.
Also: do not leave your ship at max speed. It may be very difficult or impossible to return to your seat since the game might glitch you through walls or simply kill your charackter.
By the way, if your normal gravity generators on the ship affect your gravity drive, it’s not a big deal. You can simply use gravity generators to balance the effects within the gravity drive.
During construction or maintenace, you rly want to deactivate ALL gravity generators and mass blocks on your ship (and nearby ships). If you forget about this and build new generators or adjust existing ones (including the ones to keep you standing on the floor), your ship will spin… A LOT. You might also watch your ship as it accelerates into infinity. Both can be rly hard to stop once it happened, so prevent it and do frequent quick saves.
Another thing to look out for, are floating ingots and rocks. Rocks within the field = baaad idea. They will accelerate and railgun your ship from the inside. This happened a lot before the introduction of mass blocks, but on mining vessels, it might still be a thing. It’s probably the most effective way to create windows in your ship’s hull, and not the pretty ones.
[If you’re feeling nostalgic, there’s still one of my old ships in the workshop that works just fine without mass blocks, control groups and stuff, just good old fashioned asteroids and rotor madness]
Conclusion
I hope this guide helps you to upgrade your ships and offers you some ideas and opens up opportunities. Feel free to experiment and make some suggestions or develop own designs and concepts. For some further inspirations you could check out the gravity tram systems on the workshop or the gravity tube concept. Those are awesome.
I hope the number of typos is acceptable to you fellow engineers and the wall of text didn’t put you to sleep 😛 Feel free to correct me and ask questions.
Happy egineering 😉