physics in new project is acting differently

Questions & Answers
1

this is a difficult thing to describe but basically I created a project in unity and imported a few models, setup collisions etc and added a script to the main craft to control thrust movement.
this all worked great but unfortunately unity threw a wobbler and next time I loaded my project all I got was a load of pink blobs everywhere as unity had lost all the asset references, even the standard asset ones.

so I tried to recreate the project and imported the same models and used the exact same settings on the rigid body mass etc (20), except now the ship moves very slowly (about 1/8th speed).
Also the camera follow script (standard asset) now behaves very jerkily, the fps is still good and the project settings are the default ones (except I altered bounce threshold to 4 to stop shaking - this was the same in the previous project too).

I have wracked my brains trying to figure it out and I have no idea why it’s doing this.
I’ve gone over all the settings and they seem identical.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

2

I appear to have fixed this but I’m not completely sure how.
I’ll explain what happened in case anyone else encounters this issue:

I rescaled the main craft down a little (from 1 to 0.7) and I got a unity exception stating that it could not compute the inertia tensor. From there I just ran the project again and everything worked as expected.
I’m no physics guru but it does seem to me that the inertia of the craft was completely wrong in that it was taking tremendous force to move it.
However this is not something I am setting anywhere (to my knowledge) so it appears to be an odd unity bug that corrected itself after rescaling.

I do like unity a great deal but odd issues like this (and the initial corrupted project) make me a little nervous about using it in a full production cycle.