Rudder Control

[Bloodhunt]

Suggestion to add a rudder angle indicator (i.e. wheel turns, etc...)  this would show amount of rudder in play for your maneuver.

[maturin]

It seems to me that there is no rudder angle. You're either turning right at maximum rudder, or you're not. Maybe the rudder takes a few moments to achieve Full Right, but the effect is the same.

 

True rudder simulation would require us to choose how many spokes of wheel to turn. IRL most tallship rudders can turn fifty degrees or so, but you don't want to use more than thirty degrees because the rudder causes a lot of drag. In the game we don't have to worry about rudder drag. But the rudder and the art of sailing ship steering is so enormously complicated as to beyond the scope of the game (and even the HMS Surprise Simulator as well).

[Poyraz]

I think there should be an adjustable rudder ingame to fine tune the course of the ship.

This can be achieved by manual controling the Masts/sails right now but it is not enough.

The turn rate/speed could be adjustable on a bar like in potbs or on a circle like a Real wheel.

Sailing a victory, one might not feel the need for adjustable turning. However if you sail a frigate with a turn rate greater than 2 rad/sec, there would be the need for fine tune the maneveur much more.

[Pepper Spray]

I definitely agree with this. Needs to be adjustable and we need a visual detail of some sort.

[Johny Reb]

I'm actually ok with it either way but here is an alternative. In autosail you have either full left or full right but in manual sail you have positions: Quarter, half, 3/4 and full. Double tap still gets you instant full rudder. This would be another way to make manual sailing more engaging and meaningful.

[BungeeLemming]

Well.. when we double tap to the right or left it should do full right/left.

If we hold on the key it should give us a lot more options to position the rudder.

 

Im all in for this suggestion

 

edit:

Yes we need some sort of shortcut to center the rudder.

[akd]

You would need a shortcut for centered rudder, otherwise you be constantly fiddling with A and D trying to get the rudder neutral with neither the tangible feedback you would have in reality, nor a subordinate who carries out your wish without micromanagement.

[Johny Reb]

edit:

Yes we need some sort of shortcut to center the rudder.

 

You would need a shortcut for centered rudder, otherwise you be constantly fiddling with A and D trying to get the rudder neutral with neither the tangible feedback you would have in reality, nor a subordinate who carries out your wish without micromanagement.

You could still use the double tap method to return to neutral. Shouldn't be to much of a hassle because your not gonna go full right to full left all that often. Right now when you are full left it says so as well as full right. You would just have add in Centered or amidship.

[admin]

i wonder what would be the use in game? can someone elaborate?

currently you usually want maximum turning in combat. What would be the use of the minor angle on the rudder? 

[BungeeLemming]

I used the rudder indicator a lot in POTBS.

 

When twoships sail on a parallel course I often used a bit rudder to narrow the distance but while doing so I could still fire. I never gave so much rudder that I cannot shoot.

In NA I can do that, too. But only with yard trimming.

 

Its a kind of substitute for me right now.

[Destraex]

full rudder should also be having a braking effect on ships that you do not always want. Light rudder retains speed. Light rudder is usually a consyand requirement to offseeet lee in order to travel in a straight line.

 

light rudder allows a course to be set that lines of ships can follow or deescribes a turn that crosses the enemy T. Right now we are all doing 90 degree angles.

[Poyraz]

You can call this also incremental turn or turning with low angles but, with the current sailing mechanics there really is no need for "Rudder Angle Indicator".

 

The reason is that there is no deceleration due to turning right now in game. I tried to elaborate this topic in this post.

 

If there would be a deceleration due to turning because of increased drag, its result would be:

• Reduction of speed in sailing direction while turning maneuver
• A progressive increase of turning speed while turning maneuver

Due to rudder brake effect, the ship speed in hard turns would be reduced much more than soft turns. If this is implemented into the game mechanics, its benefits will be not only the realism of sailing physics but also, optimizing/micromanagement of sailing course for keeping maximum speed in turning which can be very useful while chasing down an enemy, or running away from someone or trying to get in the heat of the battle to save friendly ships etc.

 

Those mechanics were included in PotBS sailing physics, but as said before by others, very few people used the Rudder Angle Indicator to fine tune their maneuvers. An example for 90 degree turn is below. The ship with hard turn loses so much speed that he can not keep up with the ship which turns softly.

 

There is also an anology to this concept with F1 and racing cars. The optimum course of a car for turning the bend like below can be compared fine turning of the ships with low angles.

 

 

[admin]

loss of speed in sustained turning will be implemented in the future

[Destraex]

This will add a new dimension to where the T crosses.

[BungeeLemming]

erm.. crossing the "T(ee)" is nothing related to the rudder.. Its a maneuver to rake an enemy fleet.. cause the line of ships look like a "T".

 

and rudder having a drag effect is cool. Especially in small vessels.

[Johny Reb]

The car analogy is ok and I get where your going with that but it really isn't a correlation. A car in a turn is able to keep a higher speed like the ship turning with less rudder input but for entirely different reasons that are both connected to drag. For the car its about traction. To many g-forces on the car can lead to loss of traction. Keeping the g-forces down allows for the car to keep its speed up. No correlation with ships here.

 

I think I'm gonna test my next question on Potbs. In aviation there are, especially in smaller planes, two generic types of climb. A Vy climb(best rate) and a cruise climb(usually around 500' per minute) The question is always raised over which climb gets you to your destination quicker since a cruise climb allows you to fly at a higher rate of speed although you will get to altitude later than the guy flying at Vy. So my question is about the trade off. Surely you can keep a ships speed up by using less rudder but that means it will take longer to make your turn. The ship that turns swiftly may turn slower but it also allows him to reach his heading and accelerate before the other ship ever reaches its heading. So when is one better than the other? In aviation it is better to use the cruise climb if the flight is a long flight(usually over 50 miles) but a short flight should be done at Vy if you want to shave off a few seconds. I imagine the correlation with ships would be the amount of turn expected.

[Poyraz]

The car analogy is ok and I get where your going with that but it really isn't a correlation. A car in a turn is able to keep a higher speed like the ship turning with less rudder input but for entirely different reasons that are both connected to drag. For the car its about traction. To many g-forces on the car can lead to loss of traction. Keeping the g-forces down allows for the car to keep its speed up. No correlation with ships here.

 

This is going to be a little off-topic but, here, I can only agree with the traction being the key factor in a car turning a bend. The traction aka force transfer between the tire and road is as shown in the graph below. It has a fixed maximum value. Theoretically, the maximum value of µ is 1 which corresponds 1g. If you keep increasing your speed (y direction) or your turning (x direction) the tires will begin to slip. Because the tires cannot transmit this extra added force.

 

 

The correlation between turning and speeding up can be seen better in the so called "circle of forces" below. The car represented with the figure on left side, has a relative bigger turning (Fx), but in trade it loses its potential to speed up in cruising direction (Fy). However, the car shown on the right side has relative less turning resulting higher speeds in cruising direction.

 

 

In conclusion, we can say the more turning a car have, the less speed in cruising direction it will have.

 

If we go back to the ship turning, we have different forces in different allignment, but in the end, we have the same behaviour. The drag and kinematics casuing this effect can be seen here. The more turning a ship have, the less speed it will have in the sailing direction.

 

So, the correlation between speed and turning in those two different cases is evident.

 

 

 

[Destraex]

By crossing the T, I just mean that one can use the rudder to better effect to get into position if one does not have to do hand brakeys effectively on every turn.

 

Also I was just thinking that a shallower turns should allow you to not only keep. Speed up but keep the wind at your back for longer periods.

[Johny Reb]

Then lets go back to my question. When is it more useful? You can do a standard rate turn in an airplane and loose almost no speed for a given power setting but it will take you 3 minutes to turn 360 degrees or I can do a 45* bank turn and do it in under a minute although I will loose alot of speed. The two minutes I save is plenty time to recover lost speed as I head off over the horizon way before the other aircraft has reached the half way point. This is an extreme example but there must be a time to use full rudder and a time not to. Im trying to figure out when that would be.

[maturin]

When is it useful in game terms?

 

Probably not often, just when you want to set up a continual gradual turn and pay attention to other things instead of un-ergonomically going tap-tap-tap at the A and D keys.

 

If the game's ships did not accelerate so damnedly fast, there would be more cases where a gentle, high speed turn could be advantageous.

 

 

In real life, there are plenty of times when you would want to turn but keep your speed up. Most often because of leeway. A tight turn that bleeds off speed will also have you drifting sideways. And the key to upwind sailing is to build up speed with the wind free, and then employ it on a closehauled course. So you would never want to jam the helm over and shove your bow up against the wind as fast as possible. That would result in a slower closehauled speed overall.

 

(You probably know this already, but if you luff up to a closehauled course at 8 knots, the boat will decelerate and settle onto a steady 6.5 knots. But if you steer the same course while accelerating from 5 knots, the boat will only reach a steady 6 knots. Numbers made up, obviously.)

[Destraex]

I would love all this realism in game. I do not want to play dodgem cars on water.

Nor do I want to have nothing to do like in WOT where it was just a main gun and a turret twist. yawn.

[Poyraz]

Then lets go back to my question. When is it more useful? You can do a standard rate turn in an airplane and loose almost no speed for a given power setting but it will take you 3 minutes to turn 360 degrees or I can do a 45* bank turn and do it in under a minute although I will loose alot of speed. The two minutes I save is plenty time to recover lost speed as I head off over the horizon way before the other aircraft has reached the half way point. This is an extreme example but there must be a time to use full rudder and a time not to. Im trying to figure out when that would be.

 

Well, it all depends on the speed loss rate, turn rate, acceleration as well as distance to the target. Assuming we have the speed loss during a sustained turn,

 

For the maneuvers to a target up to 45º left or right, gradual/slight turn maneuver looks beneficial if keeping speed and ETA to the destination is important.

 

For the angles between 45º and 90º, the time to destination depends on speed loss rate, acceleration and distance to destination. There would be an inflection point where hard turn would result shorter ETA than gradual/slight turn.

 

However, you can say definitely for sure, that for turns to targets more than 90º left or right, hard turn is the way to go. Basically, for the maneuvers to targets standing between 90º and 180º to the ship, this means the ship turning backwards on the route, you will better use a hard turn.

 

When is it useful in game terms?

 

Probably not often, just when you want to set up a continual gradual turn and pay attention to other things instead of un-ergonomically going tap-tap-tap at the A and D keys.

 

If the game's ships did not accelerate so damnedly fast, there would be more cases where a gentle, high speed turn could be advantageous.

 

First of all, I agree that the acceleration of the Victory looks pretty fast. I could not test other ships.

 

Secondly, if there is no deceleration due to turning, than we can say the shortest way between two dots is a straight line. So assuming the wind not coming directly from the destination, you would turn to your target and that’s the shortest and quickest way to reach your target.

 

But as devs stated that the loss of speed in sustained turning will be implemented in future, here are some examples for the benefits of it.

 

• The realistic modelling of ship behavior while turning. Considering the detailed micromanagement of sails, it is really odd having only basic and fixed arcadish turning with A and D.
• Micromanagement of maneuvers for optimum turning and speed, thus reducing the ETA. There are lots of examples from various situations like chasing down enemies or running away from them or trying to get a destination in shorter time.

 

For example, you have to maneuver to sail into the best wind. But you have a heavy ship with low acceleration and high deceleration. Every hard turn you make will lose you high amount of speeds which can be accelerated very slowly later on. Same happens at every wind change.

 

To concretize with a recent example, in a port battle yesterday we had the following situation in the famous stingray map in PotBS.

 

The enemy had full wind on British fleet and with the present positions, British tried to go into the channel to form a line before the enemy would go in the channel and begin to sail close hauled. The light/medium ships sailed easly close hauled and got to beginning point of the line hugging the coast. The heavier ships had to sail close hauled and form the front of the line.

 

 

Now the heavy ships on the rear of british fleet have 3 options.

1. Keep beam reach sailing and turn after getting enough distance,
2. Sail beam reach with slightly turned rudder to gain max speed with a given turning,
3. Sail directly close hauled to get in to the front position.

The first scenario is the safest one, but will take too much time. Maybe after the tacking and close hauled route, heavies won’t make it in time to get into the heat of battle and lose many guns firing

 

Second one is the optimum speed turning curve, which would give the heavies enough speed to get further from enemy and enought turning to reach their destination.

 

The third scenario is a very risky choice. While trying hard to close haul they would sail slowly with their big masses. They could easily be caught by the enemy fleet, standing with their sterns to the enemy broadsides at relatively close range.

 

There are many different variations which could be affacted by micro managing the sailing course with rudder when time is the most important parameter. To implement realistic turning behavior to the ships, next step would be turning acceleration/deceleration.

[maturin]

 

The realistic modelling of ship behavior while turning. Considering the detailed micromanagement of sails, it is really odd having only basic and fixed arcadish turning with A and D.

I'm of the opinion that micromanagement of steering in general isn't a good feature to look into. Because simply put, the game's helm is a car's steering wheel, and the ships are on auto-pilot. They steer absolutely, unerringly straight, with only very slow deviations when using manual skipper. It has nothing to do with the actual business of steering any kind of sailing vessel, because that's out of the game's scope, in simulation territory.

 

If you take a step away from arcade, it looks even odder to have rudder angle modeled, but with the ship sailing perfectly straight over a smooth surface with absolute steady wind speed and thrust.

 

Rudder angle might be useful, because we can still pretend that we are giving orders to the helmsman. I'll leave it to the devs to decide.

 

Edit: I don't have permission to view that image. The forum keeps having this problem.

[Barberouge]

Without a full micromanagement of the rudder (controlling the helm angle), the game could feature a "rudder turn slider" which would enable to choose between a slight or a tight turn. It doesn't seem particularly needed yet, but with turn rate acceleration and turning deceleration, it would be both realistic and interesting regarding gameplay.

 

The helmsman would still correct the constant pressure (rig balance) and fluctuating pressure (luff due to swell and gusts), and we would control the desired turn of the ship (actual maneuver relative to the course).

[Clinch]

I need to take some remedial math classes before I can comment here. I understand the concept Poyraz has illustrated and it makes perfect sense. I do think (physically) that sailing mechanisms (turning) needs some fine tuning.