I suspect when I use the FSD to approach a planet I will end up parked in low orbit with the planet wizzing below me. The real problem here is not the orbital instance as such, but how do I get on the planet? The speeds of 200+ m/s are nowhere near enough to deal with the situation. I honestly have no idea how they are going to deal with planetary takeoffs and landings, and ballistic hops around the planet. I expect to make the London to New York run at the speed of a ballistic missile, and with much the same trajectory.
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I suspect when I use the FSD to approach a planet I will end up parked in low orbit with the planet wizzing below me. The real problem here is not the orbital instance as such, but how do I get on the planet? The speeds of 200+ m/s are nowhere near enough to deal with the situation. I honestly have no idea how they are going to deal with planetary takeoffs and landings, and ballistic hops around the planet. I expect to make the London to New York run at the speed of a ballistic missile, and with much the same trajectory.
If you want to fly down to the planet.
Engage supercruise and fly down. Done! See that wasn't so hard, was it?
When you reach a certain altitude supercruise is disengaged and the last few kilometers is done by normal flight. When launching you do the same thing but in reverse.
It's pretty much like how you couldn't engage hyperspace in Frontier until you had reached a certain altitude.
If you want to fly down with "normal flight mode" for some reason then they could just do a slow gradient between the different velocities. Sure, not perfectly "accurate", but seamless enough when moving at those slow speeds.
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If a ship came out of FTL supercruise near you, it would simply appear instantaneously, followed by an image of the ship appearing to move backwards away from you at high velocity along the course it just took.
It would look rather strange (and cool) I think! Devs, can we have it in the game please!
If a ship came out of FTL supercruise near you, it would simply appear instantaneously, followed by an image of the ship appearing to move backwards away from you at high velocity along the course it just took.
It would look rather strange (and cool) I think! Devs, can we have it in the game please!
Yeah! And we'll call them Voyager-Rog trails.
Owh:
Hey Sterlino, funny that you bring up the Facepalm by Picard... It was HIM who ordered the use of the tachyon beams in the three different timeframes that nearly casued humanity's non-existence in the last ST:TNG episodes
For planetary landings, I suppose FD themselves have no idea yet.
Maybe FSD will play a role there, maybe with the planetary landing expansion the speed limit will be lifted for those specific purposes.
well, I agree with Sandro in his 'meet the team' interview.
Fun over realism.
In which case I would just fly down.
I don't think you understood my point. The planet is orbiting and rotating at realistic speeds. If you are in orbit, pint your nose towards the planet and start thrusting, seemingly quite unintuitive things happen. They need to come up with something to create that "fun".
I suspect Tinman is correct and the Frame Shift will be used somehow. It just usually means that the ship isn't operating under normal logic when it comes to velocity, acceleration and such. I hope they can figure out a blend that maintains some orbital and even slingshot flying feeling.
If a ship came out of FTL supercruise near you, it would simply appear instantaneously, followed by an image of the ship appearing to move backwards away from you at high velocity along the course it just took.
It would look rather strange (and cool) I think! Devs, can we have it in the game please!
This! Also, when engaging FTL, can we have the frameshift effects where you appear to go backwards, colours change and you can basically just see a cone in front of you? Fizzysists can explain it better
I dont think so.
I think the issue with that is that traders could then basically "jump" straight to the space station without the risk of being intercepted by pirates (NPCs or other players). Kind of a key component in the previous games, don't you think?
Maybe, but it would depend on how expansive you make it and you could perhaps extend the intercept methods for the FSD to micro jumps.
+1
This 'problem' (which is in fact no problem if you dont care about physics) was endlessly discussed in the topic linked in my signature. First: What orbit do you expect when exiting FSD? I mean you are certainly aware of the fact that there is no such 'orbit' but a family of solutions. Therefore second: I expect that you will simply exit at rest relative to the next largest mass, i.e. an orbital object or the planet itself. If you are exiting near an object in orbit and start flying towards the planet, you will probably smoothly dragged into the planets (rotating) frame. With the tiny speed of 200m/s this process takes very long time and wont be noticable, but it means you will loose more and more speed and finally are in a frame which is coupled to the ground level of the planet closest to you. The same mechanic will probably be in place when you take off from a rotating planet: At a very large distance you will lose the rotation and begin to drift with respect to the central star (or center of mass) of a system. Of course this is all very unphysically.
"Atmospheric/surface impacts will cause a ship to drop out of super-cruise – potentially causing damage or destruction to it depending on their degree of frame shift at that point"
So yeah we can be pretty sure that we will probably super cruise down to the planets very carefully. Then once we slowly hit the dense part of the atmosphere (if there is one) we drop into normal flight.
So yeah we can be pretty sure that we will probably super cruise down to the planets very carefully. Then once we slowly hit the dense part of the atmosphere (if there is one) we drop into normal flight.
Lets do the maths shall we .. According to this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Earth_orbit
A high earth orbit is around 100,000km at 200m/s thats 500 seconds by my maths. Which is roughly 8 minutes.
Of course that is straight down, which might not be a good idea!!
So if you wanted to do it 'the old fashioned' way lets say about 10 minutes from a high orbit. I could live with doing that for the sense of realism.
Errrr.....no. That's 100 000 000 metres devided by 200 m/s, which is 500000 secs, which is 139 hours. Also HEO starts from 38k km, which turns descent in 200 m/s into 52 hours.
Or I can't do math today
It is quite clear that you will descent to atmosphere via FSD like way in expansion. Landing all the way in local speed would be very very very long process.
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What we know from the alpha is that your ships has to be 5km away from an interfering mass to use hyperspace (based on experience of Port Zelada and Impeccable).
Using this as a guideline and the idea that FSD and hyperdrive are linked, this suggests that you could use FSD to get down to 5km, from then on you could hit the ground in a little under 23 seconds in a Sidewinder or 12.5 seconds in a Cobra (perhaps less is you use boost). Warning, trying to reach the ground in these times may have negative consequences
Using this as a guideline and the idea that FSD and hyperdrive are linked, this suggests that you could use FSD to get down to 5km, from then on you could hit the ground in a little under 23 seconds in a Sidewinder or 12.5 seconds in a Cobra (perhaps less is you use boost
). Warning, trying to reach the ground in these times may have negative consequences
Yeah! And we'll call them Voyager-Rog trails.
Ha, this made my my day!
Errrr.....no. That's 100 000 000 metres devided by 200 m/s, which is 500000 secs, which is 139 hours. Also HEO starts from 38k km, which turns descent in 200 m/s into 52 hours.
Or I can't do math today
It is quite clear that you will descent to atmosphere via FSD like way in expansion. Landing all the way in local speed would be very very very long process.
139 Hours is fine by me ... LOL Yeah its been a long day .. I will get me coat
Looks like supercruise has been confirmed for Alpha 4, so we get to try it out soon.
I'm quite glad they've gone the superluminal route for the frame shift. Large systems would take quite some time to get across, even at high multiples of c -(was playing with Space Engine, thinking - how are they going to do this without massively upping the speed - and lo and behold...)
As long as any autopilot used doesn't 'goal seek' (i.e. fly back and forth whilst overshooting and slowing, then smack you into a planet occasionally) as much as the Frontier one, I'll be happy.
As long as any autopilot used doesn't 'goal seek' (i.e. fly back and forth whilst overshooting and slowing, then smack you into a planet occasionally) as much as the Frontier one, I'll be happy.
..yet this is one of the main reasons many of us were hoping seamless interstellar travel would finally be possible this time.
That, and the nagging sense of enclosure (ie. rooms in space, invisible walls etc.) as the hyperspace effect begins to feel like a theater curtain between scenes.. or a magician's smoke bomb; 'distract & obscure' only works for so long, especially in a sandbox..
An active skybox and hyperspace alignment can alleviate this somewhat, and fuel-dependent FSD justifies it reasonably well.. still, it's one more keenly hoped-for feature dashed by the wayside..
Rooms in space was what we had before supercruise... the lack of supercruise between star systems is a tiny, tiny sacrifice in comparison. While it would have been nice, for completeness, we can fly anywhere in any star system, and insta-travel between any star system and another... Really, compared to the original plan of a few POIs in each system that you jumped between, what we have now is incredible! If you feel boxed in with that much space I'd hate to see the size of your house!