At what stage of development is thruster placement, thruster power, mass distribution, and other elements related to flight integrated? How far along the process does the ship go before it, or a facsimile of the ship, is "flown" for the first time?---Good question. How will the ships like the Xi'an Scout which is fewer but more powerful thrusters? Is there a "blank" ship that can have variable mass and various thrusters thrown all over it like KSP to take a dry-run of a ship before it's design is finalized?asked by Beer4TheBeerGod and Deadweight

This is a great question, So Randy is also involved in implementing ships and so he has some experience in this as well, our flight system uses the mass and the actual physics bounds of the ships, along with its center of mass to determine what it's flight characteristics are. Are thruster placement, the output of the thrusters, what angles of attack the thrusters can actually influence, and other variables like our turning speed for the actual spinning speed of the ship, are variable we all can play with but to the end result of all of this, we can take a cube and make it fly and we can place thrusters on it how we want and fortunately we don't have to get to that step typically.We do have the white box model that we can take as a reference. We physicalize it. We put actual geometry on it that determines its physical bounds and then we position the thrusters based on the concept and see how it actually flies. We can do things like take, actually nudge the actual thrust itselves so they can influence the mass of the ship better but all this stuff is possible without having any finalized geometry, so we can actually figure out what the ship will fly like before having something that's anywhere close to final and so that helps us out alot what the ship's flight characteristics going to be, *Looks over at Randy Vasquez* What's your experience been like with that?

So Caterpillar that we're working on, you helped me out with where were looking at the thruster placement with all that and one of the issues we've with was the Asymmetry of it. So the Asymmetry of it, basically ,once we placed the initial thrusters, that thing was flying all over the place and it was so hard to control, and you were helping me trying to adjust some of the things.

Right and something Randy discussed with me earlier was that the mass distribution does play an important part in the flight characteristic of a ship and so asymmetrical ships with mass that isn't quite balanced makes it a challenge to have the ship fly straight in a way that you kind of need the ship to fly so that you can actually make it do what you want it to do in space.

The ballasts controls and everything were trying to like start getting onboard and online, that would with the asymmetrical ships would help big time. Even the regular ships, once the ballast gameplay and everything gets in, so like if you're using so much ammo the ammo goes away, the ballast can fill in for that and adjust to where it needs and wherever.

Well eventually be able to do things like putting ballasts in places of the ship. here's a secret, the vanduul ships are completely faked as far as their balance because of the wings are so large that they make the flight characteristics difficult to balance and we cheated a little bit on the wings and this is especially true in the case of the scythe because of it's large right wing and rather miniscule left wing, we needed to kind of cheat the system so that the flight model thinks that both of them weigh the same, therefore it would fly in a straight line, otherwise it would be in the crazy thing that you could not control. But again rest assured we're using real physics to fly the in space.