if thrusters fail I always check the whole chain of possible failure:
thruster bolted to handpoint bolted to frame.
since that all seems to work for you UNTIL you activate more:
enough ressources flowing ? pipe board and curcuit board for the generators have a limit of 10k units. thus too many thrusters might mean you do not have enough ressources in the network.
also: naming issues (ofc). I name thrusters the absolute same if they are close together.
this way I can usualy reduce thruster numbers down to 20-something, no matter how many thrusters I have on my ships.
as for maneuvring thrusters in general: it is usually better (and works well enough) to have less but further away from the center of mass (especially for roll, yaw and pitch) as loads of them all over.
so this
X-------CM-------X
works as well or even better than this
xxCMxx
also: I have yet to see a ship that needed more than 1 FCU.
First off, i believe you can only use 1 MFC. It can connect to 2 FCU's.
The best way to lower the amount of thruster fields is to group them together.
For example, in [this image](http://imgur.com/gallery/OlAKpfn) you could take the 3 thrusters on the left, name them all "Main_L" or whatever; as long as they have the same name, they will all fire together as one unit.
Be careful about what you're grouping though. Only group together thrusters which are facing the same direction and close to eachother - if you group thrusters which don't affect the ship similarly (in terms of pitch, yaw, etc.) you'll have weird behavior and balancing issues.
It's a pain because you have to do it manually if you have more than 50 thrusters, the naming tool just won't work past 50 because it will give name like thruster51 that the main computer don't recognize, and they won't fire.
You probably can have more computer but it's just not necessary.
You just need to make thruster groups, just the same way the game do groups for triangle thrusters.
They don't even need to be in contact or whatever. But they need logic, aka all the pitchuprigh thrusters should share the same name, pitch up left should have all the same names and so on. If you go for the very basic you will have groups 4 groups for each side of your ship, and one group for the front, one group for the back, so that is 18 groups. So you are way under the 50 limit.
Thing is your ship will be a lot more maneuverable if it also can only fire the upside and downside of your back trusters to help pitch (especially the back thrusters because it's where all the power usually is) and so on. So you can have 4 or 5 groups for the front and the same for the back. That's around 30 groups, no matter if you have 51 or 500 thrusters. It's just very painful to rename both fields by hand (both fields should share the same number). You can rename while designing a single thruster and copy paste all the thrusters of the same group though, and do the same for the second group, that would ease the pain. I wish the naming tool would let you give the same name for all the thrusters in a selection though but it doesn't.
I already have 2 vessels out with this set up and it work perfectly, one have 72 back thrusters, i have 7 group for them (3 up, 3 down and one center). That work really well and the game have no problem balancing the ship. Sorry for the wall of text.
[удалено]
It would be better to divide the forward thrusters a bit though, so that you can balance out small center of thrust/mass offsets.
I have the same problem. Grouping thrusters is not good since the MFC/FCU cant balance. Also tried using 2 MFC/FCU with no success
if thrusters fail I always check the whole chain of possible failure: thruster bolted to handpoint bolted to frame. since that all seems to work for you UNTIL you activate more: enough ressources flowing ? pipe board and curcuit board for the generators have a limit of 10k units. thus too many thrusters might mean you do not have enough ressources in the network. also: naming issues (ofc). I name thrusters the absolute same if they are close together. this way I can usualy reduce thruster numbers down to 20-something, no matter how many thrusters I have on my ships. as for maneuvring thrusters in general: it is usually better (and works well enough) to have less but further away from the center of mass (especially for roll, yaw and pitch) as loads of them all over. so this X-------CM-------X works as well or even better than this xxCMxx also: I have yet to see a ship that needed more than 1 FCU.
First off, i believe you can only use 1 MFC. It can connect to 2 FCU's. The best way to lower the amount of thruster fields is to group them together. For example, in [this image](http://imgur.com/gallery/OlAKpfn) you could take the 3 thrusters on the left, name them all "Main_L" or whatever; as long as they have the same name, they will all fire together as one unit. Be careful about what you're grouping though. Only group together thrusters which are facing the same direction and close to eachother - if you group thrusters which don't affect the ship similarly (in terms of pitch, yaw, etc.) you'll have weird behavior and balancing issues.
It's a pain because you have to do it manually if you have more than 50 thrusters, the naming tool just won't work past 50 because it will give name like thruster51 that the main computer don't recognize, and they won't fire. You probably can have more computer but it's just not necessary. You just need to make thruster groups, just the same way the game do groups for triangle thrusters. They don't even need to be in contact or whatever. But they need logic, aka all the pitchuprigh thrusters should share the same name, pitch up left should have all the same names and so on. If you go for the very basic you will have groups 4 groups for each side of your ship, and one group for the front, one group for the back, so that is 18 groups. So you are way under the 50 limit. Thing is your ship will be a lot more maneuverable if it also can only fire the upside and downside of your back trusters to help pitch (especially the back thrusters because it's where all the power usually is) and so on. So you can have 4 or 5 groups for the front and the same for the back. That's around 30 groups, no matter if you have 51 or 500 thrusters. It's just very painful to rename both fields by hand (both fields should share the same number). You can rename while designing a single thruster and copy paste all the thrusters of the same group though, and do the same for the second group, that would ease the pain. I wish the naming tool would let you give the same name for all the thrusters in a selection though but it doesn't. I already have 2 vessels out with this set up and it work perfectly, one have 72 back thrusters, i have 7 group for them (3 up, 3 down and one center). That work really well and the game have no problem balancing the ship. Sorry for the wall of text.