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is there an easy way to slow down a ship? not using circuits and logic stuff

you can pause thruster from the GUI

You can readout the speed of the ship at the hub
If you put a pump on either the fuel or oxidizer input to the thruster you can create a circuit that regulates the fuel
Flow based upon the speed

If you asking about "brake pedal" I afraid it does not exist.
At least, when I decide to stop engines by some condition, and cut fuel supply, the ship still fly for a while, and only after that slowly stops.
I was hoping to connect logic wire to and engine, then it likely will have some settings, like % of thrust, but wire can't be connected.

But if you speak about flying "slowly" just supply less fuel using a pump control. Simplest way I think, just cut fuel supply when speed is above some value.

With circuits you can speed control varying from rough and ready (speed will bounce around a desired speed by quite alot) to very precise. Very precise control needs a huge complex circuit and some industrial control systems (PID for eg) understanding would probably help.

If doing speed control, can be worth adding ammo and fuel tank monitoring to adjust speed if low on either. Also damage detection is possible, but it seems to only reset at start/end of a journey (Grrrr) and not if ship repairs itself, and so is of limited use. If the dev were to change this to be current damage level it would be vastly more useful.

Pump controls are on/off which delivers 1200 unit/sec however you can switch them on/off more rapidly to effect more precise flow control according to how long they are on vs off.

Either way - circuits are the way to do this. A very simple circuit that switch pump off when too fast and back on when too slow will tend to bounce around the desired speed by a huge margin because of the amount of fuel inside the thrusters which cannot be read so takes a long time to react to changes. Hover thius may still be usable depends on needs. This is the main reason why it needs a complex circuit to do precise speed control as you have to do precise fuel delivery and smooth out the speed error etc, clamp values to the characteristics of the ship etc. I have also tried auto speed based upon the rate of consumption vs production of the different ammo types (assuming you are using target priorities such that ammo type consumed correlates with the asteroids sizes/types encountered).

I have been working on a circuit to do very precise adaptive speed control that is mostly working. It a a huge complex circuit, but it is pretty much a full ship computer with different configured safe speeds for each route, monitoring of and adaptation to ammo levels, fuel levels, damage and can maintain speed usually within +/- 1km/s of a desired speed once reached and adapt to the mid journey gravity shifts etc.
Sadly there seems to be no way to detect the thrust paused state (I posted a feature request for this for this very reason - please support that request if you have interested in ship speed control - viewtopic.php?f=6&t=121386).

The monster rats nest ship computer named 'Squeak' after a rat

I always thought the easiest way to slow down a ship was to simply shut off thrusters one at a time, treating your number of thrusters as a binary expression of your ships maximum speed. sure its hard to spit out a 1-100% value, but if you have 5 thrusters on a ship navigating to and beyond aquilo, which imo is realistically the only time youd ever need to begin worrying about ship speed, with 5, you pretty much have 20,40,60,80,100% speed setting, and a simple greater-than or lessthan speed setting based on your parameters/input, is all you need then. the ship will respond to a 1-100% value but only in increments.
you can also regulate that final thruster with some pretty simple techniques such as sticking something on a belt and using the pulse/hold value to turn the pump on. it probably wont work as easily for a bunch of thrusters simultaneously, but if its just one, it will really struggle and youll average out a nice slow crawl.

nsdemon wrote: Thu Nov 07, 2024 6:10 pm is there an easy way to slow down a ship? not using circuits and logic stuff

The case is if you dont want to fly with 100% speed then you have to produce less fuel per second than is consuming by engine or you have to use circut. But most important question is - why you would like to fly slower? Simplest solution is - just use less engines and build bigger platform, then it will fly slower without any regulation. But if you dont want to change size of your platform - for sure exist quite much simpler examples than this shown in this topic.

oldmanbeefjerky wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 1:41 pm I always thought the easiest way to slow down a ship was to simply shut off thrusters one at a time, treating your number of thrusters as a binary expression of your ships maximum speed. sure its hard to spit out a 1-100% value, but if you have 5 thrusters on a ship navigating to and beyond aquilo, which imo is realistically the only time youd ever need to begin worrying about ship speed, with 5, you pretty much have 20,40,60,80,100% speed setting, and a simple greater-than or lessthan speed setting based on your parameters/input, is all you need then. the ship will respond to a 1-100% value but only in increments.
you can also regulate that final thruster with some pretty simple techniques such as sticking something on a belt and using the pulse/hold value to turn the pump on. it probably wont work as easily for a bunch of thrusters simultaneously, but if its just one, it will really struggle and youll average out a nice slow crawl.

This.

If you have 10 engines, turn them off one at a time based on route. If your ship is still moving too fast with just one engine active, reduce quality to common. If that's still too fast...IMO...redesign the ship and give it more "oomf". If you find yourself having to finely adjust your speed multiple times through manual intervention on a single trip, the real solution is probably to add more guns.