Control smoothing?

#1 My understanding is that it is purely based on degrees from one surface to another, but I could be wrong... that's what is seems like. It would be nice to be able to input a number somewhere to specify, but I don't think there's the option at this time, at least. Best advise I can say is to run a test with different angled brushes and see when they start to smooth. If you find anything, please post again.

#2 What I've noticed is that the angle can be exactly the same but sometimes it will smooth and sometimes it won't.

I have a six-sided tower made of hexagonal "cylinders". At the bottom where the sides are bigger because the tower is wider, I get sharp edges like I want. Near the top where it gets really skinny, they are all smoothed.

I think the "smoothing scale" attribute in the worldspawn has some effect on this, but I'm not sure exactly what, as I couldn't get it to behave how I wanted with some experimentation.

#3 I'd also like to get some info on the smooting feature. Not only what each of the settings do, how they work with each other, their ranges, and suggested values... but also the parameters of the feature. Does it work with neighboring brushes or with just the polys contained in the brush (cylindars, pyramids, etc). I've spent numerous hours testing this out without any real tangible or predictable results. I'm sure the error is in assumptions on my part, but the docs don't offer any insights either.

#4 It might actually also depend on direction of face normals (AFAIK) on the top of all other things mentioned already. On bright side- it's much more predictible in Constructor then in Hammer.