Why isn't yaw thrust as powerful as lateral movement thrust?

[1337ingDisorder]

In the starting ship (Sidewinder) it's impossibly slow to yaw left or right, and almost as slow to pitch up or down.

I've spent more than an hour now, poring through the various control options, and I can't find any way to increase the yaw speed or the pitch speed. I've also tried a number of things in-game that should logically do that, but don't.

I've saved up enough from missions to buy a ship that lists its manoeuvrability as almost double that of the Sidewinder, but after buying it there doesn't seem to be any difference at all in the yaw speed and very little improvement in pitch speed.

I've tried buying better thrusters, still no observable improvement in the pitch or yaw speed.

I've searched the forum and google, and everyone seems to agree that it's too slow, but there doesn't seem to be any solution put forward by Frontier.

There's also no logical explanation for why it would be like that in the game universe.

The closest explanation I've seen to reasonable is that it tries to mimic what it's actually like in space with current technology. Obviously that doesn't hold water — when moving laterally or vertically, the thrusters are powerful enough to cause reasonably fast movement, so clearly some technological advancement has been made that allows for that fast left-right and up-down thrust in space. But it seems like the same thrusters only fire at 1/10th the power when they're being used for yaw or pitch instead of lateral or vertical movement. Isn't that illogical, from a game universe perspective?

And from a gameplay perspective it just makes it frustratingly cumbersome, being forced to roll and pitch when a fast yaw would be more appropriate (which is pretty frequent). Often even roll + pitch isn't fast enough to get the job done, and certainly not fast enough to logically match the thrust output for lat + vert movement.

Yaw and pitch speed should match lateral and vertical thrust speed every step of the way. (And that doesn't mean nerfing the lateral and vertical movement speed!)

 

[Fishy]

Same reason as speed limits in space, vacuum slowing you down and weapon/sensor ranges being different shades of point blank: because the flight model aims for a WW2 look and feel. No lore behind it, that's just the way handling has been tuned to fit what they wanted combat to be like.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

It depends on the ship. The T7 yaws way better than it pitches - my entire flight style rotates 90 degrees when I climb into the cockpit

 

[777Driver]

!)

(Like it or not) Thrusters are software limited, if you pay attention to it's behaviour you'll see that thrusters often fire to slow the ships maneuvering rate automatically. FA-OFF gives a lot more freedom, however Hal9000 is still in charge of what your ship can and cannot do.

You'll also notice roll and pitch are handled by the ventral & dorsal thrusters. Few ships actually have thrusters dedicated for yaw, T9 example uses gimbles on the main thrusters to assist with yaw.

It is what is, you'll have to get used to it. This isn't a turrets in space kinda game. Personally I use roll, pitch and yaw for manoeuvring, in fact my legs do most of the work,

Works very well once you get used to it. Optimal speed and ENG PIP setting influences how much you get out of each thruster during a manoeuvre.

 

[Jimbodiah]

T9 example uses gimbles on the main thrusters to assist with yaw.

Yeah, the T9 is famous for it's maneuvrability!

 

[GraXXoR]

Gameplay reasons... David Braben didn't want turrets in space, he wanted to emulate the experience of aeroplanes in space.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

In the starting ship (Sidewinder) it's impossibly slow to yaw left or right, and almost as slow to pitch up or down.

I've spent more than an hour now, poring through the various control options, and I can't find any way to increase the yaw speed or the pitch speed. I've also tried a number of things in-game that should logically do that, but don't.

I've saved up enough from missions to buy a ship that lists its manoeuvrability as almost double that of the Sidewinder, but after buying it there doesn't seem to be any difference at all in the yaw speed and very little improvement in pitch speed.

I've tried buying better thrusters, still no observable improvement in the pitch or yaw speed.

I've searched the forum and google, and everyone seems to agree that it's too slow, but there doesn't seem to be any solution put forward by Frontier.

There's also no logical explanation for why it would be like that in the game universe.

The closest explanation I've seen to reasonable is that it tries to mimic what it's actually like in space with current technology. Obviously that doesn't hold water — when moving laterally or vertically, the thrusters are powerful enough to cause reasonably fast movement, so clearly some technological advancement has been made that allows for that fast left-right and up-down thrust in space. But it seems like the same thrusters only fire at 1/10th the power when they're being used for yaw or pitch instead of lateral or vertical movement. Isn't that illogical, from a game universe perspective?

And from a gameplay perspective it just makes it frustratingly cumbersome, being forced to roll and pitch when a fast yaw would be more appropriate (which is pretty frequent). Often even roll + pitch isn't fast enough to get the job done, and certainly not fast enough to logically match the thrust output for lat + vert movement.

Yaw and pitch speed should match lateral and vertical thrust speed every step of the way. (And that doesn't mean nerfing the lateral and vertical movement speed!)

Deliberate design decision from the start, to nerf yaw authority. See other post about making best WW 2 flight model.

 

[Siranui]

Because it follows the original game's model and it would be crazy to put a few tons of more powerful yaw thrusters when we can just roll and pitch.

No control option will increase agility Only reducing mass and getting better drives.

 

[Oss133]

Because, Video Games!

 

[Kaocraft]

Couple things:
• All of the stats you see for each ship, especially with respect to speed and turn rates, will not give you the full picture. Two ships could have the same pitch rating "on paper" but behave very differently from each other under any given set of flight conditions.

• Yaw and pitch speeds will change depending on how fast your ship is moving, and the considerable difference between yaw/pitch while flying forward with throttle in the "blue zone" vs while sitting still, vs while boosting; will also vary between ships.

• The amount of power you allocate to engines will also make a big difference.

• Yaw is slow in almost every ship. Part of this is a "just because" game design decision, and part of it is down to the way your flight computer works. It will always try to ensure that your ship is moving in the same direction it is pointing, which means that as you yaw or pitch, the ship is both limiting your turn rate and employing other thrusters (not directly under your control) to keep your ship from drifting. So pitch and yaw is actually requiring more thrusters than you would be using for lateral thrust alone, and since power between thrusters is shared, this results in "weaker" pitch/yaw than lateral thrust.

• If you turn flight assist off, you'll be able to regain some of this pitch/yaw speed, at the cost of having to make continuous manual course corrects to your rotation *and* direction of movement.

• Again though, it's mostly a design decision. If ships had greater freedom and it were easier to stay oriented towards your target, you wouldn't have airplane-style dogfights, and maneuvering skill would be a lot less important in general. There's usually no "cover" to hide behind, so in most fights, the combatants would be continuously hitting each other and it would be almost purely a game of stats; DPS vs HP, MMORPG style.

 

[Sapyx]

Two things, both of which have been touched on already.

In the original 1984 Elite, there was no yaw. You were forced to learn to point your ship at your targets using only pitch and roll. All later versions of ELite have had a yaw option, but the maneuverability while pitching and rolling has always been better than yawing, as a homage to that original game concept.

You may have noticed, but most of the ship designs are flying wedges, with practically no vertical surfaces. The maneuvering thrusters are always mounted flush to the edges of the hull. So very few ships have been designed with thrusters that point directly sideways. So in that sense, the ships have been designed to yaw poorly. Watch an external view of a ship while rolling and pitching, and all the thrusters are pointing in the right directions for those. But for yawing, you have thrusters pointing at odd angles on the top and bottom of the ship, trying to do all the work.

There are exceptions. Notably, the few ships that have been designed to be taller than they are wide: the T7 and the Orca (not sure about the Dolphin, never flown one yet). Though the Orca is so long and thin, perhaps it is more "poor pitching" rather than "good yawing". Prior to Engineering, if you flew and Orca, you'd better hope you were already pointing in the direction you wanted to go, because you'd be waiting a while if you needed to change course.

 

[Kilostream]

You think the yaw control on ships is bad....wait until you get airborne in the SRV! You gotta do it all with roll and pitch in that badboy!

 

[Ian Skippy]

In sci-fi games you either get turrets-in-space or planes-in-spaces as starting point. ED has the latter, thank the Lord.

 

[Genus]

Yaw and pitch speed should match lateral and vertical thrust speed every step of the way. (And that doesn't mean nerfing the lateral and vertical movement speed!)

The flight model in ED follows physics enacting on an air frame in atmospheric flight.

Although when flying with FA off, you get to pivot around the central point of your ship, using the same model.

Still not full vector flight though, where yaw behaves as you outline in your OP

 

[who?]

One upside to the limited yaw-thrusters: it makes rudder pedals far more accurate when using fixed weapons. You just line up on the target using pitch and roll, then jaw back and forth to strafe it.

 

[Stealthie]

It's not strictly true to say it's purely the result of gameplay reasons.

I don't think any of the ships have dedicated lateral thrusters.

They all have thrusters mounted on the top and bottom of the hull which, primarily, provide pitch and roll authority.
Yaw authority is simply the result of the hulls usually being curved, which means the thrusters also generate some side-thrust when they fire.

Course, it was obviously the dev's decision to omit lateral thrusters from the ships so it's a "gameplay" decision in that respect but the physics is consistent with the components visible on the ships.

 

[LeetNoob]

I seem to remember in the early days yaw was as strong as pitch, then they nerfed yaw. Am I miss remembering that?

 

[Oss133]

I seem to remember in the early days yaw was as strong as pitch, then they nerfed yaw. Am I miss remembering that?

Yes

 

[insanephoton]

I seem to remember in the early days yaw was as strong as pitch, then they nerfed yaw. Am I miss remembering that?

It depends. Were you working for FD before the Alpha? If you were, then maybe your memory is fine. Otherwise you are mistaken.

 

[Bounder]

Two things, both of which have been touched on already.

In the original 1984 Elite, there was no yaw. You were forced to learn to point your ship at your targets using only pitch and roll. All later versions of ELite have had a yaw option, but the maneuverability while pitching and rolling has always been better than yawing, as a homage to that original game concept.

Nonsense, in the previous games there were no nerfs and players has full freedom of movement and piloting control over their ship. ED does not play anything like any of the previous games, it's an entirely unrelated style of gaming designed to emulate ultra-linear planes-in-space arcade RNG-grind-fest for the ADHD console generation.

Acorn Elite only had two axis controls because that's all that was possible. The game used every last byte of system memory, and the keyboard controller wasn't able to handle more than 3 or 4 keys at once anyway. The Acorn machines did not have a mouse (until the release of the AMX package IIRC around 87 - 88), and if you wanted a joystick you went to Radio Shack, brought the pots, cabling and RS232 plug and built it yourself using a circuit diagram. I still have mine (and the build instructions). I also built a HOTAS stick for it, with a 24-pin din connector mounted to the top of the BBC case, and wired directly to the 'Elite' keys on the underside of the keyboard, which i also still have. But i digress - the design brief for Elite was full piloting freedom, as far as was possible, and it was of course unprecedented for its time.

Elite 2 and 3 came out on the next-gen 16-bit machines, with full 3-degrees of rotational motion and no nerfs on all three axes, asides from angular inertia as a function of ship mass and angular inertia in the respective axes.

All three previous games remain vastly superior - for what they are - compared to anything ED offers. You were genuinely free to 'blaze your own trail' back then.


FD have betrayed the whole franchise with the restrictive, linear and pathetic sell-out that is ED. Comparing it in any way to the previous games is just baiting us lifelong fans of the series..