Rope resolution inconsistency resulting in larger forces required

[josemendez]

Some questions arise:
 - Why does the red particle rope have more particles? (I suspect because I required more control points in the initial shape to create the starting coil shape)

Correct, there’s always at least one particle inserted at each control point’s location to ensure the shape defined by the path can be achieved by the rope. A tight coil such as the one in your screenshot is simply impossible to achieve while keeping a large inter-particle distance, like that of your other rope. As a result, the coiled rope has a significantly smaller average inter-particle distance, which the cursor tries to keep while extending the rope (otherwise you’d have sections of different effective resolution in the same rope, which is not good!)

 - Is there a way that I can make sure both ropes have the same inter-particle distance regardless of the starting shape?

You can increase the straight rope’s resolution so that both have similar distancing between particles, but in the general case this isn’t something you can do: imagine a rope of resolution zero (only 2 particles, one at each end) but you want it to have a curved shape, that would be asking the system to bend a straight line which is mathematically impossible.

 - Alternatively, is there a way to make sure the force required to move each rope is consistent? (lower the friction on the red particles somehow?)

Friction doesn’t play any role in this: ropes with more particles are harder to move simply because they have more mass, and you need larger forces to move heavier objects because F=ma.

A simple solution exists in this case though: say you need two ropes of different lenghts/resolution to have the exact same mass: divide their total mass by the amount of particles in each, and assign the resulting mass to each individual particle. See:
https://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manu...icles.html

Kind regards,