I freaking love this mod but recently I have been having a lot of trouble with it. The reason is that I love building things with lots of smaller subgrids to build stuff like doors, landing gear and other useful mechanical stuff.

However when using those builds with this mod they usually handle very badly and have a very low top speed since even if all grids are safety-locked together the smaller grids still create significant amounts of friction and lift.

The same problem also exists with fighters parked inside a closed hangar or when using small grids to create a more detailed interior on a larger vessel.

Now, I thought quite a bit on if there was any way to fix this problem without hitting performance, being overly complicated to implement, creating exploits to reduce drag, or impeding designs where lift on sub grids might be wanted (like rudders or wings on fixed rotors).

This is the proposal I came up with:
If two grids get rigidly locked together (through connectors, landing gear or safety lock) the system checks two things:
1. Is one grids base mass less than 5% (2%? 10%?) of the other?
2. Is the lighter grid completely inside the rectangle box of the heavier one?

If both of these are true then drag and lift won't be calculated for the lighter grid.


I feel like this would be a good solution since it would fix all the problems with stuff like docked sub-crafts and ramps while still allowing aerodynamics on things like wings and rudders (since usually they stick out of the box of their mother-grid and in case of rudders can't be safety locked).

It also wouldn't hit performance too badly since the checks only need to be done once when the grids get locked together. Apart from those moments it would actually lessen the workload since all those sub grids wouldn't need aerodynamic calculations at all.

That being said I never programmed anything of this scope so if there are any problems I overlooked feel free to go with a different idea or just completely tell me off.