The integral time (I in pid) is very useful if you have a ship that's stable in pitch, i.e. not bouncing around, but points the nose too high or low. What it does is, the longer the pitch is wrong, the more corrective force it puts, so it'll push the nose back up or down and keep it there. Also works for altitude and roll.
Its also fairly useful in small attack jets to compensate for lack of redundancies, ive found it helps my jets stay stable even after losing a good chunk of pitch control where it would otherwise have gone to space
Helium Airships they benefit GREATLY from many helium compartements, as i can attest as an avid user of them, their greatest weakness is still overpen shells, since they can break open all compartements in one go, helium airships also greatly benefit from sheer size!
@@sampletext5959 or more material to maintain your fleet of fast, small attack crafts also helium can lift ALOT in Ftd i have a zeppelin aircraft carrier that uses a alloy-sloppedHeavy-alloy armor belt and it still flies like its nothing!
My go to is to create a shape like a 3-d chessboard made of 4m wood beams/poles/whatnot, and empty space, with the empty areas having a helium pump at one end, which also holds the beams together. This results in most of the volume of the ship being an array of hundreds of tiny gas cells, which cant be all taken out at once unless you blow up the entire craft in one go, and because much of the weight capacity is in the balloon itself, destroying chunks of it will also remove a correspondingly large amount of the weight it needs to carry.
I use the AI's ability to control yaw But I often using ACB blocks to control roll, pitch, forward speed and altitude. I never use PIDs (because craft made with ACBs duck dive and weave) but they are useful if you need a stable craft for lets say.. a hover tank. (Something close to the ground/water needs stability) Also setting up all you thrusters to respond to multiple commands is a slight issue Whenever your craft needs to go up, it will lose all pitch control (if its also set to that). I try to have multiple thrusters with specific tasks but you do you
Really? I Always thought multiple Inputs get added or subtracted. Might bei little less effective but on very small craft i think it would be necessary. Edit: (eg. Front: up1+pitch0.5 = 1 thrust, but in the back it's: up 1 + pitch(-0.5) = 0.5 thrust; in this example the front thuster only respond to Up, but the back one will BE effected by pitch).
@@grandfremdling3841 yea, you're right. I always set up my corner thrusters with pitch, roll, and hover (although you might need to tweak the power to .5 to be safe) so as long as the core survives the airship can't fall until it's too damaged. (You need to add an extra set of thrusters in the center which act as a pivot for the surviving thrusters though)
When using an airship that use props for lift, disable reverse, this helps maintain zero pitch. I find if you don't do this the craft will auto balance leaning slightly forward or slightly back.
Balloon is really good cheap upward force usually I use this for satellites, ive seen people use this inside ships to lighten it up, dunno how it works and not my experties, hellium pumps has multiple benefits and downside, for one of its downside is ones it pop its slowly loose its effect. For good one its cheap and easy to understand, it create large space armor to your ship and my favorite use of it lighten some of the heavy block, using helium on heavy part can help you balance not just airship but also your ship.dediblades are one of the smoother and easier to grasp on and can make sick movements using breadboard or very aggressive pid. Helicopter blades are good for upward force not just for helicopter but also large airship. Custom wings are bit advance but helps give mobility to airship and combine with jets or custom jet can make your airship dance to the sky
Yea, I've even started considering using helium pumps/air pumps for roll control on ships. It worked out pretty well on my first attempt. Idk how it'll hold up when compartments start getting smashed but it should make ships less likely to tip over since air pumps on the bottom of the ship will turn off before the ship starts listing significantly.
Great guide, I am irritated how many guides I've had to watch and re-watch to play this game but I have also made my own totally unique designs that work surprisingly well. Although being a transformers fan the 80s Sci-Fi Aesthetic may be too difficult for me to try and create. I do have some Sci-fi ish designs so far.
Thanks, I was planning on making an airship at some point again and I think I'll get back to it soon now. I desperately want to make a airship that flies in a helical pattern. (Basically going around a circle as it travels forward) since that should prevent the ai from ever being on target. Basically it removes the 'turning around' that most wobbly aircraft due where it stops going up or down for a second. When they do this it allow rapid fire aps to get a few shots in. With a helical flight path the ai will always assume the plane is going in a different direction than it is. Assuming the ai is using a short time average and guns are decently accurate.
My first airship was a giant plane simialr to what you'd see in Ace Combat or Project Wingman, it was hideously large and a bit expensive but it could solo tyr so it made me happy
A fun thing with Dediblades that some of the airships of the Grey Talons use is vertical ones. So you place down the dedicated spinner and then from the top instead of the side you add in your blade. That allows for very long blades that you can use for forward propulsion quite well with minimal space.
My spy satellite uses a helium tank to get it airborne, and then a quartet of power reduced ion engines that barely need a single RTG to stabilize and give it altitude in space. It's slow but under 4K, and reveals a lot of the map, and being 2000m up and tiny is a pretty good defense it turns out.
Any reason why you use fake set points for altitude rather than normal set points? I've always used normal set points for altitude (or depth, for subs) and had no problems. Another little tip is, when making a thruster or CJE based airship, seal it and put in hellium pumps anyway. The hellium will reduce the workload of the engines in keeping the ship in the air, leading to reduced material use when cruising.
Yup to the helium pump thing, I did mention it's better to combine these airship methods. I use fake points just 'cos that's how I learned how to do it. PIDs were very much a 'just get the thing working' experience for me. 😅
@@BorderWise12 PIDs can get really frustrating when first learning. I can recommend experimenting on larger craft first because for small or light craft they tend to be extremely sensitive. I like to build as small and light as possible plus i love making the craft as stable as possible so you can guess what a chore it was to learn to get them working
* breathes in * KIROV REPORTING!! sorry thats what i think of when talking airships my first airship IS a kirov inspired bomber which reaches Mk 6 soonish, cause of how often i redesigned it to improve it
Borderwise (Or anyone else.), do you know anyway to stop horizontal movement (Strafe) or at least control it so that when you go up in the air, it doesn't strafe without command?
@@BorderWise12What I mean is that the thrusters aren't active strafing me, it's just drift. What I mean by that is that when I strafe, it continues until air resistance stops me. Roll would help, if I weren't using PIDs to control it. I am new though, so there may be things that I don't know about certain things. Oh, and also, I don't want to use AI to control, I want to manually control it.
@@BorderWise12 Defaults are slightly different. 2.5 seconds on the prediction time instead of 0.5. Also being bouncy can be detrimental if you are fairly big, you can end up bobbing through your entire active defence envelope real fast which can lead to hits on your top/bottom surfaces you'd otherwise avoid, a few of the faction craft can be vulnerable to this.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Dediblades are or soon will be removed from the game. Ignore any dediblade stuff in the video, plz. 👍
Look at these airships yerself on the workshop! steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2614255097
(Old-ish) PID Guide! czcams.com/video/hjeFz-EAwpM/video.html
Time Stamps:
0:00 - Ze Beginning
0:24 - The Airship Category Rundown
1:11 - Airship Definition
3:44 - Key Things For Airships
4:58 - Balloon Airships!
7:50 - Helium Pump Airships!
8:14 - Intermission: PIDs Are Useful
13:08 - Thruster-Airships (And Ship Conversion)!
15:10 - Intermission 2: Multi-Use Thrusters
15:41 - Intermission 3: Basic PID Setup
17:39 - Intermission 4: Combine Everything!
18:07 - Good Idea For Flying Thing To Do Takeoffs
18:27 - Custom Jets = Handy Ship To Airship Conversion
19:40 - Dediblade Airships!
21:03 - Surrounding Centre-Of-Mass With Upward Thrust
23:41 - Custom Jet Airships!
24:38 - Intermission 5: Bouncy PID Setup
26:44 - Meet The Flying Brick
28:04 - Conclusions and Summary
The integral time (I in pid) is very useful if you have a ship that's stable in pitch, i.e. not bouncing around, but points the nose too high or low. What it does is, the longer the pitch is wrong, the more corrective force it puts, so it'll push the nose back up or down and keep it there. Also works for altitude and roll.
First time I've heard it explained like that. I'll have to keep that on mind next time, cheers. 👍
Its also fairly useful in small attack jets to compensate for lack of redundancies, ive found it helps my jets stay stable even after losing a good chunk of pitch control where it would otherwise have gone to space
Woah, never heard it explained like that. *writes this comment down*
Helium Airships
they benefit GREATLY from many helium compartements, as i can attest as an avid user of them, their greatest weakness is still overpen shells, since they can break open all compartements in one go,
helium airships also greatly benefit from sheer size!
Can testify! Also, the added fuel efficiency lets you have more materials to use as ammo.
@@sampletext5959 or more material to maintain your fleet of fast, small attack crafts
also helium can lift ALOT in Ftd
i have a zeppelin aircraft carrier that uses a alloy-sloppedHeavy-alloy armor belt and it still flies like its nothing!
My go to is to create a shape like a 3-d chessboard made of 4m wood beams/poles/whatnot, and empty space, with the empty areas having a helium pump at one end, which also holds the beams together. This results in most of the volume of the ship being an array of hundreds of tiny gas cells, which cant be all taken out at once unless you blow up the entire craft in one go, and because much of the weight capacity is in the balloon itself, destroying chunks of it will also remove a correspondingly large amount of the weight it needs to carry.
Making a bunch of pre-fabed balloons then spamming in a sausage works great. Just wrap it in armour, and you even get airgaps for HESH protection.
Fill it with hydrogen and then you get the hindenburg disaster
I’ve only ever built one ‘airship’ ever. I’m not sure if I’m going to build more. But I certainly will refer to this if that day comes.
I will mention steam is probably at its best with airships as they need consistent power to remain airborne which steam provides best
ay i was just about to build my first airship! this will be a great help!
I use the AI's ability to control yaw
But I often using ACB blocks to control roll, pitch, forward speed and altitude.
I never use PIDs (because craft made with ACBs duck dive and weave) but they are useful if you need a stable craft for lets say.. a hover tank. (Something close to the ground/water needs stability)
Also setting up all you thrusters to respond to multiple commands is a slight issue
Whenever your craft needs to go up, it will lose all pitch control (if its also set to that).
I try to have multiple thrusters with specific tasks but you do you
Really? I Always thought multiple Inputs get added or subtracted. Might bei little less effective but on very small craft i think it would be necessary.
Edit:
(eg. Front: up1+pitch0.5 = 1 thrust, but in the back it's: up 1 + pitch(-0.5) = 0.5 thrust; in this example the front thuster only respond to Up, but the back one will BE effected by pitch).
@@grandfremdling3841 yea, you're right. I always set up my corner thrusters with pitch, roll, and hover (although you might need to tweak the power to .5 to be safe) so as long as the core survives the airship can't fall until it's too damaged. (You need to add an extra set of thrusters in the center which act as a pivot for the surviving thrusters though)
I did manage to build a huge Zeppelin using Helium pumps to float that can 1V1 a Bulwark
Cool. I might wanna try that.
How did you manage to make a ship that can take cram shots while also stay light enough to be lifted by helium?
@@loctite417 by making it have about the same volume as the bulwark and using alot of helium chambers for redundancy
When using an airship that use props for lift, disable reverse, this helps maintain zero pitch. I find if you don't do this the craft will auto balance leaning slightly forward or slightly back.
Balloon is really good cheap upward force usually I use this for satellites, ive seen people use this inside ships to lighten it up, dunno how it works and not my experties, hellium pumps has multiple benefits and downside, for one of its downside is ones it pop its slowly loose its effect. For good one its cheap and easy to understand, it create large space armor to your ship and my favorite use of it lighten some of the heavy block, using helium on heavy part can help you balance not just airship but also your ship.dediblades are one of the smoother and easier to grasp on and can make sick movements using breadboard or very aggressive pid. Helicopter blades are good for upward force not just for helicopter but also large airship. Custom wings are bit advance but helps give mobility to airship and combine with jets or custom jet can make your airship dance to the sky
Yea, I've even started considering using helium pumps/air pumps for roll control on ships. It worked out pretty well on my first attempt. Idk how it'll hold up when compartments start getting smashed but it should make ships less likely to tip over since air pumps on the bottom of the ship will turn off before the ship starts listing significantly.
@@solsystem1342 a advice have a custom engine that will kick in once you either start rolling or loosing altitude
@@bd5317 that's a good one. Let me just write that down...
Great guide, I am irritated how many guides I've had to watch and re-watch to play this game but I have also made my own totally unique designs that work surprisingly well. Although being a transformers fan the 80s Sci-Fi Aesthetic may be too difficult for me to try and create. I do have some Sci-fi ish designs so far.
Thanks, I was planning on making an airship at some point again and I think I'll get back to it soon now.
I desperately want to make a airship that flies in a helical pattern. (Basically going around a circle as it travels forward) since that should prevent the ai from ever being on target. Basically it removes the 'turning around' that most wobbly aircraft due where it stops going up or down for a second. When they do this it allow rapid fire aps to get a few shots in. With a helical flight path the ai will always assume the plane is going in a different direction than it is. Assuming the ai is using a short time average and guns are decently accurate.
My first airship was a giant plane simialr to what you'd see in Ace Combat or Project Wingman, it was hideously large and a bit expensive but it could solo tyr so it made me happy
A fun thing with Dediblades that some of the airships of the Grey Talons use is vertical ones. So you place down the dedicated spinner and then from the top instead of the side you add in your blade. That allows for very long blades that you can use for forward propulsion quite well with minimal space.
People doing thruster craft and airships.
Me making thruster ships: i am against the law
I make thruster tanks
My spy satellite uses a helium tank to get it airborne, and then a quartet of power reduced ion engines that barely need a single RTG to stabilize and give it altitude in space. It's slow but under 4K, and reveals a lot of the map, and being 2000m up and tiny is a pretty good defense it turns out.
Any reason why you use fake set points for altitude rather than normal set points? I've always used normal set points for altitude (or depth, for subs) and had no problems.
Another little tip is, when making a thruster or CJE based airship, seal it and put in hellium pumps anyway. The hellium will reduce the workload of the engines in keeping the ship in the air, leading to reduced material use when cruising.
Yup to the helium pump thing, I did mention it's better to combine these airship methods.
I use fake points just 'cos that's how I learned how to do it. PIDs were very much a 'just get the thing working' experience for me. 😅
@@BorderWise12 PIDs can get really frustrating when first learning. I can recommend experimenting on larger craft first because for small or light craft they tend to be extremely sensitive. I like to build as small and light as possible plus i love making the craft as stable as possible so you can guess what a chore it was to learn to get them working
* breathes in *
KIROV REPORTING!!
sorry
thats what i think of when talking airships
my first airship IS a kirov inspired bomber
which reaches Mk 6 soonish, cause of how often i redesigned it to improve it
The Helium airship looks adorable
After my sea based boat, I shall make an air boat. :P Very handy!
very helpful thx
You're welcome! 👍
Is Space battlecanoe possible?
Yup!
Air ships are like the only thing I make
i always end up building airships because my battleships never float
AHA! CZcams disabled my bell! That's why i was missing your streams!
Glory to the camoo!
Has anyone else done balloon assassins for starters? Powerful 1 shot balloon units that are dirt cheap to make?
Funny enough, I have more airships than regular ships.
same, I find it so much easier
You have a talent for building airships.
Borderwise (Or anyone else.), do you know anyway to stop horizontal movement (Strafe) or at least control it so that when you go up in the air, it doesn't strafe without command?
Can you give more details? If a craft is moving sideways unprompted, the first thing that comes to mind is a roll control problem.
@@BorderWise12What I mean is that the thrusters aren't active strafing me, it's just drift. What I mean by that is that when I strafe, it continues until air resistance stops me. Roll would help, if I weren't using PIDs to control it. I am new though, so there may be things that I don't know about certain things. Oh, and also, I don't want to use AI to control, I want to manually control it.
Man I love custom jets, but man do they love my materials
What's about an airship doesn't fall out of the Sky, when it stops moving?
That's basically all of them. It if falls out of the sky, it probably doesn't count as an airship.
What about flying fortress jets, or are they unreliable for airships?
Fortress engines can only be placed on fortresses, which are way, WAY too slow to be useful in an airship role.
@@BorderWise12 Ah, thank you.
I only have 50 hours in FTD, I don't think I belong here.
Yes you do! Some people start with airships and never stop. :D
Sky Canoe.
You show the types but not how. Trying to make a thick short bomber and it charges into the ocean every time. So confused
I learned nothing about setting up the PIDs for these
I have separate tutorials for PIDs.
Also Borderwise. Flip the Fire System Controler so that it looks like a dashboard behind the control wheel
Borderwise. You do realise that those settings for the PID is the default settings right?
Isn't default 0.5/1.5?
They are? When did that happen? Those PIDs were from a prefab I made literally years ago!
@@BorderWise12 Defaults are slightly different. 2.5 seconds on the prediction time instead of 0.5. Also being bouncy can be detrimental if you are fairly big, you can end up bobbing through your entire active defence envelope real fast which can lead to hits on your top/bottom surfaces you'd otherwise avoid, a few of the faction craft can be vulnerable to this.