Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The drag in space increasing with platform weight and width should be documented in the game.

What?

This has a bit of a story to it.

So, I first asked this question here, in the discord: https://discord.com/channels/1396775903 ... 9328390214

Which prompted days of experimentation and nerdery until eventually, a user named Legitimate Teddy came in and they made this calculator: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/0vkrjrw50s

This is great! But, this never would have had to happen in the first place if it was documented somewhere in game. The effect of width is so much more than someone would realize, and of weight so much less than I had initially expected.

This REALLY should be explained in the game somewhere, complete with a chart with as much detail as thrusters have (Which helped the drag+top speed calculations) to ensure people do not need to load up a (helpful) link to a website where this math was snuffed out.

Why?

This information is important to gameplay, and as such is something players need a considerable amount of detail on to figure out their building strategies in space. It can be dealt without as it's floating around the community now, but I only see that as more reason to put it in the game -- new players won't know that there is an external tool for this.

Better idea: remove space drag.

myridium wrote: Sat Nov 16, 2024 12:31 am Better idea: remove space drag.

Yep. Factorio space has density compared to Earth if you look at the curls of smoke coming out of thrusters. The smoke should move as fast as everything else ejected from the thrusters. And it seems they've coded this into the shape of platforms as well. So silly.