Is FA off deliberately gimped to hell?

Neutrino Sunset

N
It appears to me that FA off is deliberately gimped in at least 2 areas.

1. No rotational damping. The key advantage of FA off is translational inertia. I.e. once you are going in one direction you keep going in that direction until you counter it. This is what enables you to fire in a direction different to the one you are moving in. What is not as useful in FA off though is rotational inertia, i.e once you are rotating in one direction you have to apply opposite rotation just to stop spinning. There is a really obvious reason why this isn't useful, because even with FA on you can still preserve whatever rotation you like by simply holding the mouse/joystick away from center. Having to manually reverse every rotation in FA off is just more than doubling the effort to control the ship's facing for no benefit whatsoever.

It may be that there are marginal cases where someone might want no automatic rotational damping in FA off, in which case the obvious question is why isn't there a control binding to enable/disable this?

2. Yaw effect. How come roll and pitch can spin a ship 360 around its axis in 1 second flat whereas yaw rotation authority is at least an order of magnitude reduced even with FA off? This makes lateral strafing in FA off impossible as you are unable to effectively control your facing. Of course you can strafe, and then roll and pitch to adjust the facing, but then since you've rolled and pitched you can no longer strafe in the same direction, or to put it another way it's impossible to strafe and hold the nose on target. You can strafe vertically of course, but that's not remotely natural, after all our eyes are side by side not one above the other.

Is there any legitimate reason for either of these seemingly contrived restrictions?
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Is gameplay decision. Questionable. Is literally unplayable without input curves - which they dint bother putting in options - and I dint bother finding out how to do myself.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Neutrino Sunset said:
Is there any legitimate reason for either of these seemingly contrived restrictions?
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If you mean "is there a reason that makes sense from an in-universe perspective", then the answer is no.

There's an explanation from one of the devs a few years back (pre-1.0 release) about why they're in from an out-of-universe "it's a game" perspective, and it's basically to provide a reasonable compromise between having 6 degrees of freedom movement in space and having everyone just zoom around being glorified turrets with perfect time-on-target, and so allow for more interesting space combat and balanced flight mechanics. Blue-zone agility curves and overall speed limits likewise.

Drive engineering has flattened some of the original fun out of it by reducing the handling differences between ships and making it much easier for any ship to spin to a target, but that's no reason to make it even easier.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Neutrino Sunset said:
2. Yaw effect. How come roll and pitch can spin a ship 360 around its axis in 1 second flat whereas yaw rotation authority is at least an order of magnitude reduced even with FA off? This makes lateral strafing in FA off impossible as you are unable to effectively control your facing. Of course you can strafe, and then roll and pitch to adjust the facing, but then since you've rolled and pitched you can no longer strafe in the same direction, or to put it another way it's impossible to strafe and hold the nose on target. You can strafe vertically of course, but that's not remotely natural, after all our eyes are side by side not one above the other.
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Get a screenshot of a ship and draw a circle around the thrusters that provide lateral thrust.

I might be mistaken but I don't think any of the ships in ED have dedicated lateral thrusters.
Instead, they all rely on vertical thrusters being angled slightly to provide lateral thrust.

That's why yaw authority is much lower than pitch or roll.
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
Neutrino Sunset said:
It appears to me that FA off is deliberately gimped in at least 2 areas.

1. No rotational damping. The key advantage of FA off is translational inertia. I.e. once you are going in one direction you keep going in that direction until you counter it. This is what enables you to fire in a direction different to the one you are moving in. What is not as useful in FA off though is rotational inertia, i.e once you are rotating in one direction you have to apply opposite rotation just to stop spinning. There is a really obvious reason why this isn't useful, because even with FA on you can still preserve whatever rotation you like by simply holding the mouse/joystick away from center. Having to manually reverse every rotation in FA off is just more than doubling the effort to control the ship's facing for no benefit whatsoever.

It may be that there are marginal cases where someone might want no automatic rotational damping in FA off, in which case the obvious question is why isn't there a control binding to enable/disable this?

2. Yaw effect. How come roll and pitch can spin a ship 360 around its axis in 1 second flat whereas yaw rotation authority is at least an order of magnitude reduced even with FA off? This makes lateral strafing in FA off impossible as you are unable to effectively control your facing. Of course you can strafe, and then roll and pitch to adjust the facing, but then since you've rolled and pitched you can no longer strafe in the same direction, or to put it another way it's impossible to strafe and hold the nose on target. You can strafe vertically of course, but that's not remotely natural, after all our eyes are side by side not one above the other.

Is there any legitimate reason for either of these seemingly contrived restrictions?
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The reason is balance, making both flight modes viable.
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
Also it's the lack of damping that allows it to turn faster than fa on.

Think of it like this, your thrusters act against momentum, you essentially have a gimbal keeping your ship going the way its pointing and damping inputs when they're released. Doing this auto correction steals engine power, constantly, so when you turn fa off, all thrusters are deactivated and activated only on input. Giving you all available engine power in only the direction you choose. Hence it is possible with practice to maneuver faster with fa off.

Note that a computer can manage 16 or whatever thrust nozzles better than even the best human, which is why the fastest method to fly straight and true and come out of whatever maneuver you are performing, is to turn fa on. In the simplest form the ship 'stops' faster with fa on, but almost any other maneuver can be performed more efficiently (sic :faster) with fa off.

So, official answer, maneuver efficiency requires you to personally activate all thrusters all the time,none are fired automatically, hence no auto correction or damping.
 

777Driver

777Driver
Nope, I personally wouldn't like any form of automated dampening, bad enough that acceleration curves are still limited even with FA-OFF disabled. A huge number of us have learnt to fly these ships pure FA-OFF, I use the lack of dampening to my advantage (much higher accel rates into a manoeuvre) highly unlikely the devs are going to start messing around with assist because a small minority struggle with manually stabilizing the ship in the roll and pitch axis.



Yaw was limited for gameplay reasons, personally hate turrets in space. If you actually take a look at thruster placement, limited yaw makes sense.. You'll have to take it up with the ship manufacturers.

With all that being said, if the devs decided to make a sub mode that assists with dampening, more power to them, however that wouldn't be FA-OFF.
 

Morbad

Morbad
If I had my way, the only thing FA would do would be a rotational dampener; there wouldn't even be FA On with regard to zeroing transnational movement.

The combination we have now...

FA Off, mostly working as I'd expect, except for a deliberate lack of rotational dampening added as a balance afterthought in Beta 2 or 3.
or
FA On, where negative acceleration (relative to an arbitrary frame of reference) is somehow dramatically amplified, and speed limits imposed on some movement vectors to balance things.

...is perhaps the most bizarre setup I could have imagined. Well, except for the blue zone stuff, which is even worse.

Of course, that armada sailed even before I started playing.

Ultimately, it is what it is. Better get used to it.
 

Morbad

Morbad
picommander said:
I really have no idea for what rotational damping should be good for, once you've mastered flying without assist. I'm flying FA Off with a truly rickety joystick (sidewinder ff2, at least 20 years old) with a huge deadzone. Don't tell me that a missing damping is a true obstacle for decent FA Off piloting.
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I think I'm going to tell you that missing damping is an obstacle. Not an insurmountable one, and certainly not as large an obstacle as needing a huge deadzone, but having to manually correct with counter thrust definitely harms speed and accuracy. If it didn't it never would have been an issue, or a point of balance.

picommander said:
I wouldn't like any damping and prefer the way it is. As a side note, why is everyone referring to "dampening", shouldn't it be "damping" instead in this context?
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I like things moist.
 
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