# Braking a Space Ship with random Velocity and Direction

I have a space ship moving in XYZ space in a random direction. That ship is facing a different random direction. Given both the ships velocity and direction I am trying to calculate braking power for each of the ships thrusters, 1 in each direction of the ship (forward, backward, left, right, up, down or x+, x-, y+, y-, z+, z-). Further complicating the problem, the ship may be using thrusters on any of it's axis.

I am trying to find three velocities that I can apply along the ships axis to stop it's motion along any of those axis.

As an example the ship is moving with a velocity of (1,0,0) and facing (0,0,1), I need an equation that will bring the X velocity to 0 so the ship does not continue to slide along the X axis. This is just a simple example however as the equation needs to be able to work on any vector.

Does anyone know how I could solve this problem?

I am trying to write this for a computer simulation, and my current solution of just dividing the current velocity and then adding thrust doesn't work very well.

Once again, I know the: Ships Velocity, Ships Direction and Current Thrust.

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It seems that where you write "random" you mean "arbitrary"? –  joriki Nov 19 '12 at 16:30
It is easy to represent the velocity as $\vec v=(v_x,v_y,v_z)$. How do your represent the heading? Just taking the vector along the ship axis leaves the angle of rotation around that vector unspecified. –  Ross Millikan Nov 19 '12 at 16:39

Let's call our ship's orientation vector $\mathbf{\theta}$, its current velocity $\mathbf{v}$ and say that we have thrusters that fire in directions $\mathbf{t_1}, \mathbf{t_2}, ... \mathbf{t_n}$ (all specified relative to the ship).
First we want to transform our velocity and thruster directions into the same co-ordinate system, which we can do just by finding the rotation matrix $R$ corresponding to $\mathbf{\theta}$ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix for how to do this), then just rotating $\mathbf{v}$ into ship-space: $$\mathbf{v'} = R \mathbf{v}$$
Now we want to find how much to fire each of the thrusters so that we come to a stop. That's the same as solving the following equation: $$\mathbf{v'} + \sum_i \alpha_i \mathbf{t_i} = 0$$ where each $\alpha_i$ tells is how much we need to fire thruster $\mathbf{t_i}$. This is actually just a system of 3 simultaneous equations that we can solve using Gaussian elimination or whatever we like and use the solutions for the $\alpha_i$ to tell us how much to fire each thruster.