Ships unable to hold formation

[last juniper]

Weird bug where ships fail to hold formation. The two hauler ships have a noticeably higher top speed than the fighter ship, and thus slow down to match it; however, due to how thruster utilization is incredibly bad, they for some reason power down one side of thrust only, and then try to balance it out with other thrusters; due to these ships not having strafe thrust, they just refuse to hold formation.

The underlying issue here is the really broken thruster utilization. I've always been a big proponent of fixing how the game uses thrusters to get a ship from point a to point b, since it seems like the system is very flawed and archaic. These ships control perfectly fine in manual control, too

i really do not see why they cannot just run their thrusters both at a lower power to match my fighter

log + save file

some elaboration on the bug:

even when the ships START on the proper orientation as a fleet and begin moving, they cant hold it because the freighters run their thrust asymmetrically for some reason

[clear dagger]

If I'm understanding this correctly, by default ships in a formation all try and point in the same direction as the lead ship, meaning since these two ships can't strafe, they can't reach their intended position. There is a system in place where ships too far away from their intended position will move in whatever way possible to meet it, but I think both of those ships are barely within the radius where that doesn't happen.

[last juniper]

yes they can, due to thrust vectoring on the thrusters, they still have slight strafe that should allow them to at least stay on course

if you look at the image, you can see the ships are firing their thrust asymetrically

this is a fundamental issue with how the game handles thruster utilization

they do quite literally just drift further and further apart from the lead ship

[clear dagger]

Thrust vectoring exists, but it's very slight to begin with, and any strafe vector thrust those ships get is going to be extremely off-balance. I'm not by any means saying the AI couldn't handle this sort of situation better, but adding even a couple small thrusters on the front sides of each ship would likely help immensely.

[last juniper]

Why should i have to do that? There isnt an easy place to put them that wouldnt look weird, and if the utilization system had a modicum of logic this would not be an issue in the first place

This is a bug. Just because it can be worked around doesnt mean something is not bugged