More on simulation

I spent quite some time figuring out the physics of the motion of the ship. Torque proved to be a more complex problem than I thought since the ship is not rotating around a fixed point; it floats and therefore rotates around its center of mass (that alone took me some time to google).

Interesting, too: When the bow and stern thrusters push in the same direction the produced torques cancel each other out and produce a linear thrust. I could not find anything about that on the net and filled a lot of paper with drawings and formulas before I found something that could be passed on as a solution.

The general idea: calculate two separate sums of left turning and right turning torque. The difference will be torque indeed and accelerate the turning rate of the ship. The canceled out part will provide a translation force acting on the center of mass.

I refined that idea by calculating for each engine the amount of force directed to the center of mass (translation) and perpendicular to that vector (torque).