Ship

Characteristics

Any ship in DarkSpace has the following basic characteristics :-

Mass

Ship masses are individually set for each ship, but generally, the base mass of a ship hull is:

Scout: 5
Frigate: 6
Destroyer: 12
Cruiser: 16
Dread: 28
Assault Dread: 31
Station: Varies between 73 and 83

Two gadgets contribute to the mass of a ship, which are Armor and Jump Disruptor. The formula for mass added is:

Armor: <Current hp> / 125000 (One arc of UGTO standard armor on a dread adds about .95 mass) 
Jump Disruptors: 4 mass if active, 2 if not active

The total mass of a ship is calculated as follows :-

Base mass + Mass of armor + Special mass (interdictor device)

So if a UGTO interdictor cruiser with standard armor is taken for example, its mass is 16 + (8 * 0.85) + 2 = 24.8 mass

Now that we have our mass numbers, let’s talk about thrust. Thrust is set by hull type + gadgets that add thrust so here are the numbers:

Scout: .5 Frigate: .65 Destroyer: 4 Cruiser: .5 Dread: .5 Assault Dread: .5 Station: .5

Only engines add thrust right now (note: If damaged, they do add less thrust) and the numbers are:

AFE and AME: 6.84 + (level() * 0.28) IE and PIE: 6.00 + (level() * 0.25) PFE: 5.26 + (level() * 0.22)

Station AFE and AME: 48.2 Station IE and PIE: 42.5 Station PFE: 37.3

Right, so let’s get some dummy numbers up for our formula. Let’s take the UGTO EAD which has the following numbers:

Base Mass: 31 Mass added from Armor: .95 per armor, 9 armor total so 8.55 mass added Total Mass: 39.55

Base Thrust: .5 Thrust added from engines: 7.75 per engine, 4 engines total so 31 thrust added Total Thrust: 31.5

Acceleration is calculated by thrust divided by mass or 31.5 / 39.55 = .796 ish. That means the EAD will accelerate at about .8 gu/s

Ship turning is calculated by the ships base yaw divided by mass and then adding a tenth of max acceleration. An Assault Dread’s base turning is 3.14 so we get:

Turning speed = (3.14 / 39.55) + (.8 / 10) = .15 radians per second or about 8.5 degrees per second

After all these calculations, modifiers from ship enhancements are added

Velocity is calculated separately and is a combination of the base velocity of the ship hull + the velocity of the engines. There’s no need to show these numbers because basic math from looking at ships in game will tell you them.

Energy’s only relation to velocity/mass/thrust is that engines produce less energy linearly at higher speed (meaning if your engines are operating at 50% max speed they only produce 50% as much energy)