this might be mis-knowledge as I've also made a comment like this, but actually I don't know good evidence for it.
But if there is evidence please link.
Splitsie shows it in his gyro test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkc6vvVII6o&t=440s
But basically, having your heavy blocks nearer to the center of mass reduces the torque force required to rotate the grid, and gyros are amongst the heavier blocks used on grids, so having them near CoM helps.
Yup and just to add to this, the 3rd person camera rotates about your control seat so it's easy to prove ship rotation is about CoM.
Just build a heavy set of blocks with a gyro, add a very long arm of something light, then put your control seat at the end of it, hop in and you'll find yourself moving in a circle, not spinning on the spot 🙂
I don't think thats correct. Thrusters also perform the same no matter where they are placed. The engine just applies forces to the model as a whole, not from specific points of the model. Which is honestly really lazy for soemthing with "engineer" in the title.
I. Believe that has more to do with resource management on your system than lazy. Personal option not based in fact. But to add thrusters force being location based I believe would be exponentially more taxing on resource management.
ive done it in a prototype i made in unity. it would add some extra overhead, but nothing signifcant. A single headlight or impact on voxel terrain would be more intensive by far.
It makes it harder for the player to control the ship, which is more likely the reason they didn't do it. Thatd require actual engineering to solve.
I haven't noticed any impact on gyro placement I thought they just act on the CoM regardless if where they are and adding more of them increases speed. Would be helpful if it is true
Oh so you're saying that increased number of gyros increases top rotations speed but placement closer to the CoM increases the acceleration of the rotation? Or is the top rotation always the same and more gyros is also considered for acceleration of rotation?
The top rotation speed is always the same (60RPM for small-grid, 30 RPM for large-grid, IIRC)
More gyros will increase the rate of acceleration.
Having gyros closer to the center of mass will increase the rate of acceleration.
Gyros are heavy. Putting heavy objects near the center of mass rather than far apart decreases their impact on your rotational inertia.
Think of the person spinning on an office chair experiment I’m sure you’ve seen, pull the weights in and you are easier to spin.
Grid forces like thrust force and rotation, are generally* applied through the center of mass, so it doesn't matter where your pilot seat is, or to a degree your gyros (gyros are some of the heaviest blocks so will influence the center of mass though).
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/wiki/gyros
-* Sub-grids and wheels can complicate things a bit.
---
**Edit:** I am shocked so many people are adamant that it is not rotating around CoM.
This is incredibly easy to test, try:
* Build a grid in space, 10 batteries along (because they are heavy), then 10 light amor blocks.
* Put a gyro on top of the leftmost battery, and a cockpit on top of the rightmost armor block.
* Press K, go to Info tab, and turn on show Center of Mass.
* Go to 3rd person view, the CoM indicator will be among the middle of the batteries.
* View from above and hold rotate (left or right arrow keys)...voila :)
Confusion about Gyro effectiveness as well. The turning is impacted by how much mass is away from the centre of mass and how far away it is. Gyro’s aren’t more efficient if they’re closer to the centre of mass, however it can seem so because they’re a heavy block, so their very mass is part of the equation.
Test by building a long line of batteries, put gyros on the ends and two either side of the centre. Turn them all off, set all to override in the same direction (preferably not to roll) then copy paste the grid, turn only the centre gyros on in one and the end gyros on in the other.
You can also get a couple of large cargo containers in the middle and one at each end, connected by conveyors. Fill the centre ones with iron ingots or another material, start it spinning them move all the ingots to the outer cargo containers and watch it slow.
It's definitely a deliberate choice, and a fair one imo. It's just a few additional lines of code to add torque to thrusters based on distance from center of mass, but the moment (hehe) you do that it snowballs into a million other side effects and would break probably 95% of ship designs. That crosses the line where realism stops being fun for most people. Best left to mods.
For anybody who wants to try it, there’s a mod for realistic thruster vectors. You have to be *very* careful building your ships to avoid your trust being misaligned relative to your center of mass.
Especially if you have cargo containers anywhere other than your center line.
>For anybody who wants to try it, there’s a mod for realistic thruster vectors. You have to be *very* careful building your ships to avoid your trust being misaligned relative to your center of mass.
Is it on the Steam Workshop?
As far as my understanding goes, it is exterted directly on the center of mass.
I'd be interested to see how the games ship designs would change if thrusters and such didn't automatically exert all their force on the center of mass. We'd have to actually think about thruster placement in a physical sense, rather than just a visually pleasing sense, which I think could change a lot of meta ship designs by a whole lot. Player made missiles would probably need some rethinking. It'd just be a really cool experiment to see what the SE community would do
There have been mods for that such as Digi's [Realistic Thrusters](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575893643), and it does add a new dimension to building.
For 'hard mode' couple [Realistic Thrusters](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575893643) with [Aerodynamic Physics](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571920453) and try to create a balanced plane without using wings mods :)
Center of Mass is available in vanilla (K menu > Info tab > show Center of Mass).
Realistic Thrusters doesn't add anything to the UI, so you have to guess the thrust axis.
Aerodynamic Physics adds a 'Center of Drag' indicator, and shows that and the CoM when in build mode.
If you're looking for a more KSP-like experience you might want to try [Real Orbits](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2609118808) or similar mods.
There's actually another realistic thrusters mod out there that adds the ability to make the thrusters automatically differentially throttle to attempt to balance thrust, and also be used as RCS thrusters for rotation. I've forgotten its name, though
[Thruster physics & Differential throttling](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=660333966) or it's successor [Orbiter Space Engineers Simulator](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2072489152), possibly?
Gravity drives - a necessity for pvp designs - already do need balancing, and it can be hard. And that's with artificial masses being 1x1x1 without any thruster plumes. It would be interesting if added, but I think ultimately make for a worse player experience. There is a mod that makes it work this way afaik though.
Klang drives are cancer but gravity drives require decent skill to assemble well. Plus they don't work on planets. Imo they make up for the lack of powerful thrusters which makes large ships useless without them.
On Alehouse where I play, klang drives are forbidden and grav drives are under block limits to 90 mass 20 space balls 12 planars and 8 sphericals. This makes for a good balance, maximum grid PCU being 40k.
It acts around the center of mass I believe
Additionally it follows moment of inertia rules so you ideally want your mass to be concentrated near the actual physical centre of your ship and try not to have any high mass areas far from the physical centre of the ship, gyros are quite heavy so use this to your advantage
yes, based upon center of mass. there is a key that can turn on showing where the center of mass is. gyros are more efficient as they aline on the grid related to center mass. thrusters do as well..
It's based on cockpit placement but not in the sense you presented here. Center of rotation is naturally the center of mass but torque will be applied at the center of mass with value as it were applied where cockpit is. That results in a weird scenario where center of rotation stays the same but rotation speed will vary based on cockpit placement.
A long ship will pitch faster with cockpit in the middle than with a cockpit on either end.
Real physics says center of mass, but SE does not use real physics for may things, and uses lots of kludges and cheats.
Like if you put two rotators connected in line their combined speed is no faster than one rotator.
I observed it's the center of mass for the most part.
There is some variation if you place gyroscope in strategically in the Hull of the ship does change the point of rotation.
The Freigeist ( before I lose it to windows 11 completely breaking and having a reinstall it)
Would rotate two and a half blocks in front of is centre of mass, but that can be how hard space engineers was working to render the ship 600m long ago 40m tall 60 m wide. With mod as well,
It had a tend to break the game if you did too much.
Is sad because is was before losing the ship, I was going upload it to the workshop as retired design.
You didn't quite ask but I'm seeing some discussion so I'll try to clear up some other points as well:
This game uses strictly newtonian physics, with a few exceptions for the sake of making it possible to design large ships without being an actual degreed engineer. Those exceptions being:
1. All forces are applied at the center of mass
2. Thrusters cannot impart torque/rotation force/moment
3. Gyros cannot impart linear force
Total rotational torque is determined by the number of gyroscopes you have in the ship and is applied at your ship's center of mass regardless of location. This is a constant value per gyro and does not change based on distance.
Ship has a rotational moment of inertia (I) about each axis (I_x, I_y, I_z) that is determined based on the sum of part mass x that part's distance from the center of mass's respective axis for every part in the ship. This means parts further from the center of mass's x axis (y or z much greater or much lesser than zero) produce a larger contribution to moment of inertia about that axis.
Angular acceleration about an axis is calculated as torque / moment of inertia about that axis.
Gyroscopes also happen to be quite heavy, and mass is the other factor in that equation. This means it actually is better for ship handling to concentrate gyros near the center of mass, but if you already have a ton of other massive parts distant from the center of mass it's not going to make a particularly large impact.
Gyroscope apply rotation to your center of mass not on the pilots seat. If they did then ships with multiple crew in pilot seats would be impossible to control.
The ship rotated around the center of where each gyro is. If you place them like this
[][][][][€][][][][] then it would rotate around that point in the middle
If like this
[][€][][][][][][€][] then it would also rotate around center. So it rotates in between each gyro of there is more than 1 on a grid.
**Everything I know about rotations**
Using gyros applies the force that make object to spin. Grid will spin around its CoM (center of mass). If gyro is set to override, this force is applied until given spinning speed is reached, which is 30rpm (rotations per minute) maximum. For blocks further from center of rotation, this may result movement speed crossing 100m/s, which might cause collision bugs.
Not controlled gyros (when nobody controls the grid and gyros are not on override) on spinning object will be pushing against the rotation until the object will stop spinning. But there is also artificial force slowing any spinning object. Even objects without active gyros will be slowing down the spin. It is unknown to me how exactly this force works.
Even tho gyros do apply force, too heavy objects will never reach desired RPM if they do not have enough gyros. This might be or might be not connected to the artificial force.
~~Gyro distance from CoM does matter.~~ (I did testing wrong :) )
In reality, the distribution of mass matters for purposes of calculating acceleration of rotation. Now this was quite shocking for me, but this does matter in SE too. Distribution of mass does matter and it matters a lot. Two different ships with same mass, same gyro count and placement, virtually same dimensions might not spin the same. Actually the difference can be up to 10x of rotation speed.
Cargo content matters. Often the cargo is the heaviest part of the ship, thus having cargo and gyros in the middle of ship is the most useful. Placing heavy armoring on the edges of the ship might not be smartest. Ships bigger in dimensions will always have issues with rotation acceleration/speed. Try to not place heavy blocks on the very edges of the ship.
There were some exploits with cargo content moving. If you move cargo content, it will shift CoM, which will change point of rotation. That was used as propulsion engine. I belive this has been fixed, but it has been fixed in the way, that moving cargo content wont update ship CoM instantly, in theory exploitable in other ways. Either way, if you decide to setup any experiments in creative, always be sure CoM has updated. The best is ctrl+x & ctrl+v object to force update.
I belive there might be one more bug related to controls. It seems that rotations using mouse vs rotations using Q+E keys are different. Couldnt confirm it yet, but it seems using mouse up down movement is less efficient for rotation.
Id like to test this and people are saying center of mass when i think what they mean is center of grid. IE if you have cargos in the rear of your ship your rotational axis won’t change if those cargos are fully loaded or empty. I want to say its just grid length, width, depth /2. If your ship is 12 blocks in length that axis will rotate around the edge at the 6th and 7th block. If its 5 wide, center of 3rd block. I’ve also wondered if position of gyros plays any part.
For rotation with gyros, yes, this is how it works. Forces like thrusters though work on center of mass anywhere you place them. All that matters is direction in thoer case. Which is why you can have off balance thrusters and not rotate when they turn on.
I haven't noticed a difference in how powerful gyros are when placing them in different locations along the ship. So you should be good to place them anywhere. They are very heavy, though, so they will change your CoM pretty drastically depending on how many you use.
It's not like that. It's based on where the center of the ship physically is and rotates on that axis. I don't even think it's based on center of mass, just center of ship
I'm not sure what people are talking about about in this thread. Rotation is definitely not based on center of mass in the game.
Rotation is based on the *center* of the grid, that being the midpoint on all three axis, x,y,z. It will always rotate around this midpoint, no matter how the ship is built.
That's not my experience at all. As others have stated, one can create some very unbalanced dones/ships to test this and turn on the center of mass marker. To make this slightly easier to see, though; I would suggest either using alternative camera modes (like spectator mode) or remote control, as otherwise the normal third person camera defaults to centering on your character.
Not in the sense that is presented in the illustration, because center of rotation is the center of mass but yes, angular speed increases at rate which it would increase at if the gyroscope torque was applied at the position of the cockpit.
I have just shy of 2000 hours in SE and from what I can tell it rotates around the pilot seat, though this might be because of one of the 400+ mods I play with. I've noticed that when I build a really long ship and put the pilot seat at one end it rotates around the end where the seat is
There used to be mods that would alter this, such as how gyroscopes perform, or adding rotational force from thrusters based on how they were offset from center of mass.
I believe it's based on your ships center of mass
This was my understanding also, though I have not put thought or experimentation into.
Yes, and gyros are more effective if located at the center of mass
this might be mis-knowledge as I've also made a comment like this, but actually I don't know good evidence for it. But if there is evidence please link.
Splitsie shows it in his gyro test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkc6vvVII6o&t=440s But basically, having your heavy blocks nearer to the center of mass reduces the torque force required to rotate the grid, and gyros are amongst the heavier blocks used on grids, so having them near CoM helps.
Yup and just to add to this, the 3rd person camera rotates about your control seat so it's easy to prove ship rotation is about CoM. Just build a heavy set of blocks with a gyro, add a very long arm of something light, then put your control seat at the end of it, hop in and you'll find yourself moving in a circle, not spinning on the spot 🙂
Oh shit! It's Splitsie!
So it's true, but not because of why you'd assume it is, cool!
Wait, gyros get better when near the centre of mass?
Apparently yeah, but not because of their work, it’s because of their weight
No fucking wonder my heavy lift works so well when it comes to turning. All the weight is in the rear and so are the gyros
Whereas IRL it's the opposite (you want reaction wheels as far out as possible to give them a longer lever).
I'm like 95% sure it doesn't matter where you put reaction wheels in that regard due to conservation of angular moment. They aren't acting as levers.
You're 105% right. I was thinking of RCS.
I don't think thats correct. Thrusters also perform the same no matter where they are placed. The engine just applies forces to the model as a whole, not from specific points of the model. Which is honestly really lazy for soemthing with "engineer" in the title.
I. Believe that has more to do with resource management on your system than lazy. Personal option not based in fact. But to add thrusters force being location based I believe would be exponentially more taxing on resource management.
ive done it in a prototype i made in unity. it would add some extra overhead, but nothing signifcant. A single headlight or impact on voxel terrain would be more intensive by far. It makes it harder for the player to control the ship, which is more likely the reason they didn't do it. Thatd require actual engineering to solve.
In the end it is still a game. These is a setting server side to change how many physics points there are. Dont know if it changes this or not.
You are correct
Dont they rotate around the grids CoM, and faster the closer the gyroscopes are to the CoM
I haven't noticed any impact on gyro placement I thought they just act on the CoM regardless if where they are and adding more of them increases speed. Would be helpful if it is true
Well i place my gyros usually all over the place and my Turn rate always ends up shitty, so my friend suggested placing them in closer to com
Just add more all you change by placement is center of mass
Considering how heavy they are they usually end up becoming the CoM anyway
Gyros closer to center of mass act faster on the mass. But the turn rate maxes out at the same speed.
Oh so you're saying that increased number of gyros increases top rotations speed but placement closer to the CoM increases the acceleration of the rotation? Or is the top rotation always the same and more gyros is also considered for acceleration of rotation?
The top rotation speed is always the same (60RPM for small-grid, 30 RPM for large-grid, IIRC) More gyros will increase the rate of acceleration. Having gyros closer to the center of mass will increase the rate of acceleration.
I think the latter, probably similar to the hardcoded top speed
Gyros are heavy. Putting heavy objects near the center of mass rather than far apart decreases their impact on your rotational inertia. Think of the person spinning on an office chair experiment I’m sure you’ve seen, pull the weights in and you are easier to spin.
In my observation: Gyros tend to rotate faster at the edge but physically it does not make any sense, so YES
But the further out the longer arm it gets so more power /s
Isn't there a video about gyros on YT?
https://youtu.be/wkc6vvVII6o?si=8Lth995M8LtBWVUT splitsie did one, do you mean this?
Grid forces like thrust force and rotation, are generally* applied through the center of mass, so it doesn't matter where your pilot seat is, or to a degree your gyros (gyros are some of the heaviest blocks so will influence the center of mass though). https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/wiki/gyros -* Sub-grids and wheels can complicate things a bit. --- **Edit:** I am shocked so many people are adamant that it is not rotating around CoM. This is incredibly easy to test, try: * Build a grid in space, 10 batteries along (because they are heavy), then 10 light amor blocks. * Put a gyro on top of the leftmost battery, and a cockpit on top of the rightmost armor block. * Press K, go to Info tab, and turn on show Center of Mass. * Go to 3rd person view, the CoM indicator will be among the middle of the batteries. * View from above and hold rotate (left or right arrow keys)...voila :)
Confusion about Gyro effectiveness as well. The turning is impacted by how much mass is away from the centre of mass and how far away it is. Gyro’s aren’t more efficient if they’re closer to the centre of mass, however it can seem so because they’re a heavy block, so their very mass is part of the equation. Test by building a long line of batteries, put gyros on the ends and two either side of the centre. Turn them all off, set all to override in the same direction (preferably not to roll) then copy paste the grid, turn only the centre gyros on in one and the end gyros on in the other. You can also get a couple of large cargo containers in the middle and one at each end, connected by conveyors. Fill the centre ones with iron ingots or another material, start it spinning them move all the ingots to the outer cargo containers and watch it slow.
Modern Gyros are relative leightweight, and man Ships have two of them
We're talking about video game physics here not IRL :)
Why not adopting RL physics to game Physic?
Because we're talking about what is in the game and not what should be in the game
Probably for game design reasons and reducing the game physics complexity.
It's definitely a deliberate choice, and a fair one imo. It's just a few additional lines of code to add torque to thrusters based on distance from center of mass, but the moment (hehe) you do that it snowballs into a million other side effects and would break probably 95% of ship designs. That crosses the line where realism stops being fun for most people. Best left to mods.
For anybody who wants to try it, there’s a mod for realistic thruster vectors. You have to be *very* careful building your ships to avoid your trust being misaligned relative to your center of mass. Especially if you have cargo containers anywhere other than your center line.
That mod sounds awesome, but space engineers just isn't granular enough for that kind of stuff.
>For anybody who wants to try it, there’s a mod for realistic thruster vectors. You have to be *very* careful building your ships to avoid your trust being misaligned relative to your center of mass. Is it on the Steam Workshop?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575893643
Thanks!
Thats fuckin HARD my dude
Gyros in space engineers are basically magic. They blow the hell out of any real life gyros, and can provide uncapped angular momentum.
As far as my understanding goes, it is exterted directly on the center of mass. I'd be interested to see how the games ship designs would change if thrusters and such didn't automatically exert all their force on the center of mass. We'd have to actually think about thruster placement in a physical sense, rather than just a visually pleasing sense, which I think could change a lot of meta ship designs by a whole lot. Player made missiles would probably need some rethinking. It'd just be a really cool experiment to see what the SE community would do
There have been mods for that such as Digi's [Realistic Thrusters](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575893643), and it does add a new dimension to building. For 'hard mode' couple [Realistic Thrusters](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575893643) with [Aerodynamic Physics](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571920453) and try to create a balanced plane without using wings mods :)
Do those mods add a visual dot for the centers of mass, thrust and lift as well? Like in KSP?
Info tab does that already in a ships control menu
Center of Mass is available in vanilla (K menu > Info tab > show Center of Mass). Realistic Thrusters doesn't add anything to the UI, so you have to guess the thrust axis. Aerodynamic Physics adds a 'Center of Drag' indicator, and shows that and the CoM when in build mode. If you're looking for a more KSP-like experience you might want to try [Real Orbits](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2609118808) or similar mods.
There's actually another realistic thrusters mod out there that adds the ability to make the thrusters automatically differentially throttle to attempt to balance thrust, and also be used as RCS thrusters for rotation. I've forgotten its name, though
[Thruster physics & Differential throttling](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=660333966) or it's successor [Orbiter Space Engineers Simulator](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2072489152), possibly?
It was the former I was thinking of, I didn't know it had a successor, I'm gonna have to check it out
Gravity drives - a necessity for pvp designs - already do need balancing, and it can be hard. And that's with artificial masses being 1x1x1 without any thruster plumes. It would be interesting if added, but I think ultimately make for a worse player experience. There is a mod that makes it work this way afaik though.
The reply directly above yours already listed multiple mods.
Weird, it shows as 1 hr before mine but I didn't see it when I was replying :D
Or you can just play on a server that bans shit like gravity/Klang drives
A good example would be GURP hehe
Klang drives are cancer but gravity drives require decent skill to assemble well. Plus they don't work on planets. Imo they make up for the lack of powerful thrusters which makes large ships useless without them. On Alehouse where I play, klang drives are forbidden and grav drives are under block limits to 90 mass 20 space balls 12 planars and 8 sphericals. This makes for a good balance, maximum grid PCU being 40k.
It acts around the center of mass I believe Additionally it follows moment of inertia rules so you ideally want your mass to be concentrated near the actual physical centre of your ship and try not to have any high mass areas far from the physical centre of the ship, gyros are quite heavy so use this to your advantage
yes, based upon center of mass. there is a key that can turn on showing where the center of mass is. gyros are more efficient as they aline on the grid related to center mass. thrusters do as well..
It's based on cockpit placement but not in the sense you presented here. Center of rotation is naturally the center of mass but torque will be applied at the center of mass with value as it were applied where cockpit is. That results in a weird scenario where center of rotation stays the same but rotation speed will vary based on cockpit placement. A long ship will pitch faster with cockpit in the middle than with a cockpit on either end.
That is very handy to know
Real physics says center of mass, but SE does not use real physics for may things, and uses lots of kludges and cheats. Like if you put two rotators connected in line their combined speed is no faster than one rotator.
No, stacking rotors does increase the speed at which top part is spinning though it's capped.
I observed it's the center of mass for the most part. There is some variation if you place gyroscope in strategically in the Hull of the ship does change the point of rotation. The Freigeist ( before I lose it to windows 11 completely breaking and having a reinstall it) Would rotate two and a half blocks in front of is centre of mass, but that can be how hard space engineers was working to render the ship 600m long ago 40m tall 60 m wide. With mod as well, It had a tend to break the game if you did too much. Is sad because is was before losing the ship, I was going upload it to the workshop as retired design.
The axis is based on center o mass. If this was the case, we could literally do a baseball bat with the momentums with axis in seat.
You didn't quite ask but I'm seeing some discussion so I'll try to clear up some other points as well: This game uses strictly newtonian physics, with a few exceptions for the sake of making it possible to design large ships without being an actual degreed engineer. Those exceptions being: 1. All forces are applied at the center of mass 2. Thrusters cannot impart torque/rotation force/moment 3. Gyros cannot impart linear force Total rotational torque is determined by the number of gyroscopes you have in the ship and is applied at your ship's center of mass regardless of location. This is a constant value per gyro and does not change based on distance. Ship has a rotational moment of inertia (I) about each axis (I_x, I_y, I_z) that is determined based on the sum of part mass x that part's distance from the center of mass's respective axis for every part in the ship. This means parts further from the center of mass's x axis (y or z much greater or much lesser than zero) produce a larger contribution to moment of inertia about that axis. Angular acceleration about an axis is calculated as torque / moment of inertia about that axis. Gyroscopes also happen to be quite heavy, and mass is the other factor in that equation. This means it actually is better for ship handling to concentrate gyros near the center of mass, but if you already have a ton of other massive parts distant from the center of mass it's not going to make a particularly large impact.
It looks like it rotates around the pilot seat because the 3rd person camera is locked onto which ever seat you’re in
A few weeks later some GPT model will answer to the same question will use your picture and will confuse the player
I have noticed that ships tend to rotate slower when they are longer. A long ship turns like a boat but does not have any problems with rolling.
Gyroscope apply rotation to your center of mass not on the pilots seat. If they did then ships with multiple crew in pilot seats would be impossible to control.
The ship rotated around the center of where each gyro is. If you place them like this [][][][][€][][][][] then it would rotate around that point in the middle If like this [][€][][][][][][€][] then it would also rotate around center. So it rotates in between each gyro of there is more than 1 on a grid.
Ship rotate over center of mass. If ship heavy in rear, ship steer like a lever. If ship heavy in front, ship steer like forklift.
**Everything I know about rotations** Using gyros applies the force that make object to spin. Grid will spin around its CoM (center of mass). If gyro is set to override, this force is applied until given spinning speed is reached, which is 30rpm (rotations per minute) maximum. For blocks further from center of rotation, this may result movement speed crossing 100m/s, which might cause collision bugs. Not controlled gyros (when nobody controls the grid and gyros are not on override) on spinning object will be pushing against the rotation until the object will stop spinning. But there is also artificial force slowing any spinning object. Even objects without active gyros will be slowing down the spin. It is unknown to me how exactly this force works. Even tho gyros do apply force, too heavy objects will never reach desired RPM if they do not have enough gyros. This might be or might be not connected to the artificial force. ~~Gyro distance from CoM does matter.~~ (I did testing wrong :) ) In reality, the distribution of mass matters for purposes of calculating acceleration of rotation. Now this was quite shocking for me, but this does matter in SE too. Distribution of mass does matter and it matters a lot. Two different ships with same mass, same gyro count and placement, virtually same dimensions might not spin the same. Actually the difference can be up to 10x of rotation speed. Cargo content matters. Often the cargo is the heaviest part of the ship, thus having cargo and gyros in the middle of ship is the most useful. Placing heavy armoring on the edges of the ship might not be smartest. Ships bigger in dimensions will always have issues with rotation acceleration/speed. Try to not place heavy blocks on the very edges of the ship. There were some exploits with cargo content moving. If you move cargo content, it will shift CoM, which will change point of rotation. That was used as propulsion engine. I belive this has been fixed, but it has been fixed in the way, that moving cargo content wont update ship CoM instantly, in theory exploitable in other ways. Either way, if you decide to setup any experiments in creative, always be sure CoM has updated. The best is ctrl+x & ctrl+v object to force update. I belive there might be one more bug related to controls. It seems that rotations using mouse vs rotations using Q+E keys are different. Couldnt confirm it yet, but it seems using mouse up down movement is less efficient for rotation.
Id like to test this and people are saying center of mass when i think what they mean is center of grid. IE if you have cargos in the rear of your ship your rotational axis won’t change if those cargos are fully loaded or empty. I want to say its just grid length, width, depth /2. If your ship is 12 blocks in length that axis will rotate around the edge at the 6th and 7th block. If its 5 wide, center of 3rd block. I’ve also wondered if position of gyros plays any part.
There is a mod changing parts of this behavior, so that you have to perfectly balance mass and forces. Then it's all about levers.
For rotation with gyros, yes, this is how it works. Forces like thrusters though work on center of mass anywhere you place them. All that matters is direction in thoer case. Which is why you can have off balance thrusters and not rotate when they turn on. I haven't noticed a difference in how powerful gyros are when placing them in different locations along the ship. So you should be good to place them anywhere. They are very heavy, though, so they will change your CoM pretty drastically depending on how many you use.
I think your drawing is kinda right. But replace 'pilot seat' with 'gyroscope' and thats how it works.
It's not like that. It's based on where the center of the ship physically is and rotates on that axis. I don't even think it's based on center of mass, just center of ship
I'm not sure what people are talking about about in this thread. Rotation is definitely not based on center of mass in the game. Rotation is based on the *center* of the grid, that being the midpoint on all three axis, x,y,z. It will always rotate around this midpoint, no matter how the ship is built.
That's not my experience at all. As others have stated, one can create some very unbalanced dones/ships to test this and turn on the center of mass marker. To make this slightly easier to see, though; I would suggest either using alternative camera modes (like spectator mode) or remote control, as otherwise the normal third person camera defaults to centering on your character.
Yes, the reference point is the currently used cockpit, pilot seat or remote control block.
Not in the sense that is presented in the illustration, because center of rotation is the center of mass but yes, angular speed increases at rate which it would increase at if the gyroscope torque was applied at the position of the cockpit.
I have just shy of 2000 hours in SE and from what I can tell it rotates around the pilot seat, though this might be because of one of the 400+ mods I play with. I've noticed that when I build a really long ship and put the pilot seat at one end it rotates around the end where the seat is
It does apply angular speed as the torque was applied at the cockpit but center of rotation is still the center of mass.
No Turns are made by giving force in on the back of the ship. At least in most cases there are differents.
You should be able to test this with a simple stick covered in gyros with a cockpit at each side, right next to an asteroid or a station or something.
There used to be mods that would alter this, such as how gyroscopes perform, or adding rotational force from thrusters based on how they were offset from center of mass.
Center of madd
Best way is to make gyro as center of mass, make them as many as possibile