People might call the stellar forge a simulation but approximation is more accurate. Newtonian physics? Maybe if the objective is to simulate fast submarines moving through a viscous substance. Remind me why kinetic weapons have no recoil or momentum? The BGS is called a simulation but I have to ask, what exactly is it simulating? It's just a complex program with no real world analogues.
Missile speed
- Thread starter npcole
- Start date
Almost all simulations are approximations.
Ship motion within the speed limits imposed, is almost wholly governed by Newtonian physics. The reason it appears otherwise is because of the arbitrary speed caps overlaid on top of the physics engine. If you stay below those caps, things behave as largely as you'd expect.
Probably because projectiles are barely simulated at all, likely for performance reasons. They aren't treated as physical objects in game.
Its decent for a game, but on your supposedly Newtonian physics, have you ever gone into a combat aftermath USS or thargoid USS? Did you notice how the broken ships are immovable and placed there as if glued into a matrix? How about the nav beacons? Or the floating billboard projector s at stations? Opening the cargo catch slows you down even with FA off right? It's very gamey and not very simulated. Total sim would be boring, you'd be spending 30 hours on physics equations just plotting how to lift off. As for the stellar forge, it's a decent approximation. If you want to call it an astronomy simulation that's ok. We agree in a roundabout way on the kinetics. They are massless and without inertia "because game" .
I've filed a bug report because it is something that I never used to notice, but something that I am noticing on the Beta much more. The Mamba means that many more people are flying very fast ships.
Boosting towards a retreating Mamba, only to see your missiles fly along next to you, making no effort to close the gap, and then exploding, just seems a little silly. It's something that they should definitely look at, IMHO. They might decide for reasons of balance not to touch it, but I do think it is worth flagging up as an issue now that straight line speeds have got so much faster.
Boosting towards a retreating Mamba, only to see your missiles fly along next to you, making no effort to close the gap, and then exploding, just seems a little silly. It's something that they should definitely look at, IMHO. They might decide for reasons of balance not to touch it, but I do think it is worth flagging up as an issue now that straight line speeds have got so much faster.
I think you're right, but given the state of most fights with the AI (barring a huge advantage in agility), it's massively ironic.
I wish FD had made flight in real-space a lot more accurate. I think it's one of the big letdowns of a game that loves to praise its own scientific accuracy. I know they really wanted the "WW2 dogfights in space" feel of Star Wars, but then they added just enough real-world - directional thrusters, reverse flight, and some Newtonian physics - to make that not really work either.
As a result, we have the most boring aspect of WW2-style combat - endless looping turnfights - mixed with the most boring aspect of theoretical real-world space-combat - ships that are basically just turrets.
Going either full Newtonian or full make-believe would have made combat a lot more interesting. Instead, it's the worst of both worlds. It's frustrating because it could easily be far better, but it's hobbled specifically by design.
FA is never fully off for ships. Speed limits of some sort are always present, but within them, your ship, NPC ships, and actual movable objects (debris, materials, cargo canisters, etc) obey Newtons laws of motion.
That that some objects are static and that static objects are static doesn't change this, nor does the fact that not all things that would be objects are modelled. A Newtonian physics engine is still the basis for the motion of almost all non-static objects.
We'd probably have a computer for that, the same way modern autos do for traction control or how some modern air superiority fighters are built with intrinsic instability and physical performance factors that would make them difficult or impossible to fly with direct physical control linkages and able to kill their pilots before the airframe it it's limits.
You could make a pure sim where the only player interaction was pressing a red 'go' button, which would be just as boring as the other extreme.
I'm not so entirely pessimistic about ED flight model, but I do agree it's compromised in the worse sense of the term.
I'd have preferred a more overt and less limited Newtonian model with more computer assistance. Some of the old ideas from pre-release discussion would likely have been pretty awesome...like giving all ships the same relative velocity cap and making only acceleration different. Removing FA On and Off and replacing them with dampened rotationals while having to manually counter all translational movement, with the exception of using a 'break' key, a la Jumpgate, would have been my preference there as well. Having structural g limits would have been nice as well...we'd still be able to manuver our big ships light fighters, but only at the risk of damaging them.
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But they reduced speed due to friction with the water, in space the speeds should add, as no friction there
Honestly it's a decent framework but every time Frontier have a design challenge they lean a little harder on the crutch of "let's arbitrarily and magically force that thing to slow down for no reason". Whether it's ships in FA-off, missiles and torpedos decceleating as soon as they come out of the tube, reboot/repairing your shields, or the new scanner mechanics; the answer always seems to be to institute a counterintuitive suspension to the way things normally and naturally work, and to bring any moving objects to a halt.
This kind of stuff can't be justified on the basis of "because game". It's not intuitive, empowering, or fun. Fast, dangerous missile systems are intuitive, empowering, and fun. Boosting your ship to accelerate a torpedo fired from it would also be intuitive, empowering, and fun. Slow, weak missiles which are quickly outpaced BY THE SHIP THAT LAUNCHED THEM are not game design, they are simulation failure.
Play Star Fox or Afterburner or Strike Suit Zero and you'll notice that they don't try to simulate ANYTHING, but they all try to honor the player's sense of intuition about movement, kineticism, momentum and impact. None of them have any of the goofy anticlimactic, limp weapon and flight behaviors as Elite has, and that's precisely "Because Game".
What's happened with Elite is they built a little bit of simulation, and are unwilling to build any more. Unfortunately the world and systems they have built are such that problems come up, and the solutions demand further elaboration of the simulation to fix, or improve, or at lease make them less contradictory. Frontier are unable (or unwilling) to develop their simulation any further, and they don't seem to have any interest in action game design; only mobile and social style games; so they try to make the problem "go away" by cutting off the legs of their simulation and cauterizing the stumps.
These are stopgap measures used as permanent "solutions". Placeholders tend to hold their place forever, here; occasionally replaced by a whole new system which is itself a placeholder, as we're seeing with the new exploration mechanics.
Actually our ships completely DEFY Newtonian physics, in much the same way as they do in most sci fi movies etc.
For a comparison, play Kerbal for a bit. THAT is Newtonian physics.
Newtonian physics is what you have when objects obey Newton's laws of motion...and our ships do, quite well, with FA Off, as long as certain relative velocities are not reached. You will accelerate correctly based on the forces applied, whether they come from thrusters, impacts, or gravity, until you reach those limits.
Unfortunately not, because our ships appear to expel essentially no mass. From this point onwards it all falls apart.
F=MA
While ED almost certainly is not modeling the reaction mass, it does model the forces thrusters apply to ships.
Regardless, ships consume fuel and that fuel can be assumed to go somewhere. With a high enough specific impulse, the mass of fuel consumed by our ships would be way more than enough reaction mass to produce the forces we see.
Even if the sources of those forces aren't specified, newton's laws of motion will generally accurately predict how non-static objects in ED move when forces are applied to them, until you hit the speed cap.
Point is, the physics engine is fundamentally Newtonian and has a bunch of hacks and arbitrary limiters stacked on top of it to achieve the gameplay effects we see, not the other way around.
I'm sorry fella, but as soon as you start with "not modelling the reaction mass", you can't claim to be following Newtonian physics.
Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Ships move in space because they throw mass out behind them.
By ignoring that, one is pulling out the the foundation stones, and arguing that the tower still stands.
What the game engine does is model things that one will find familiar such as a sense of momentum, but it does that by breaking the laws of physics, not by following them.
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to be honest
i am not sure how much different your "full newtonian combat" would look like.
except if you are talking about making the thrust powers on the ships more realistic:
fact is that the ships reverse thrusters are visually tiny,
compared to the main thruster, and translating that into physics would mean that for everytime you hit the afterburner into one direction,
you would need to turn your ship 180° and do the same into the other direction, or make it take 10 times longer.
and thats just the two extremes, since all RCS thrusters would more or less just be there to turn your ship to face the main thruster into the right direction.
i don't find that a very compelling fight mode, but certainly it sounds like it would lead even more into a jousting battle then what the current "FA-Off" mode allows
When you say the Viper 4 has strong lateral thrusters, do you mean just the sideways thrusters or are you talking about the vertical thrusters too?
It would require some updates to the ship sensor design and long-range targeting to work properly, but essentially, aside from velocities, everything would behave as if it had a long-range mod on it and combat could take place at much more extreme ranges than they do today.
If ED did model the reaction mass, nothing would change. There is enough mass that leaves the ship via fuel consumption to account for any amount of thrust any ship in the game can produce with exhaust velocities below the speed of light. That they chose to abstract this a little more heavily than Kerbal (which absolutely does abstract things past a certain level of detail) is neither here nor there.
This is exactly backwards.
The laws of physics are the foundation, the stuff that breaks them for gameplay purposes is what's bolted on top.
thats apples and oranges
the combat distance is dictated by the weapons range.
if you go any further then the few km we have ingame, you will never hit the target with anything but hitscan weapons
the question is, how the manouvering in close combat would be different - and "more fun" when you remove the artifical "drag" and speed limit out of the equation, and make the reverse and RCS thrusters have realistic relative thrust levels
i mean there is the popular belief that the so called "jousting" is a result of the atmospherical flight model.
Weird thing is, of you drop a canister into orbit it does fall into the gravity well. Why not apply these physics to at LEAST the aftermath part?
...and weapon range is increased by an absurd amount if weapons followed Newtonian physics.
A more realistic physics model would require a full redesign of sensors and targeting (not even to sci-fi levels really, either) because things like lasers, railguns, missiles, and torpedoes would be effective at ranges that are currently absurd to consider fighting at. Combat would be dramatically different as a lot of combat would take place at beyond visual range - as it really should be for space combat anyway. I could see a lot more emphasis being placed on sensor accuracy, heat reduction mechanics, and things like chaff, point defense, and ECM.
"Legacy" kinetic weapons like cannons, multicannons, and frag-cannons would be more niche-use close-range tools.
Basically, combat would be a lot less "Star Wars" and a lot more "The Expanse". Imagine combat that used less of the pilot-centered system we have now, but instead used a weapons & targeting interface similar to the new exploration system, but geared for BVR ship-to-ship combat. Like I said, it would require a radical departure from what we have now, but could totally be fun in its own way, if that was what they designed for.
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