Artificial Horizon

[CMDR Mr S]

Aaaaaand everybody will go: There no such thing as "up" and "down" in space.

Yes, thank you.

Nevertheless, I have been contemplating getting the next level of wing fighting trying to introduce formation flying. One of the essential requisite to be able to do that is having some reference to use. In real world (aviation) bearing/speed are used, and altitude is maintained by visual reference. Now we're good with speed in E but we have no reference as for the direction (nose up/down and lateral).

May I suggest that there might be something in the HUD that indicated an horizontal plane, initially sitting level with the mean axis of the system/planet/station? Such system could also be "slaved" to one of the other wingmen so when flying in a wing, in formation, all could slave to their wingleader and share the same artificial horizon.

Likewise there could be an indicator to the centre of the galaxy on the overall horizontal plane. Think a compass ribbon on top of your hud, but orientated to the galaxy centre instead of the north. This could work locally and enable wings in giving/following orders such as "left turn, 90 deg bank, max nose up".

Food for thought, gentlemen.

PS still waiting for droppable doughnuts container to slow police down...

 

[CMDR Pantsu]

I've been wanting this too. Elite lacks some instruments that would add to the situational awareness like HUD instruments. And yes, there is no up or down in space, but as far as we know, there's a preferred orientation in todays station, ISS. An artificial horizon would then be the plane of planets orbiting the star, if no stars are oround the computer could use the galactic plane. And there is an preferred orientation in Elite since most ships I've seen is oriented relatively the same when traveling between planets.
A thin orange line, with a gap in the middle would do just fine so that the reticle is free of clutter.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

tbh, the only suitable horizon would be one at the wingcommander.

If you add any fixed horizon, like lets say biggest celestial body creates a Horizon at it's equator, I don't know if that will still help when being at the end of the system far above said equator.
Or imagien said horizon is now in a weird angle to the systemsand how the planets turn around it's star(s) in that case the entire horizon won't help much.
The best may probably be be adding a dynamically horizon to the selected target?

 

[CMDR Pantsu]

tbh, the only suitable horizon would be one at the wingcommander.

If you add any fixed horizon, like lets say biggest celestial body creates a Horizon at it's equator, I don't know if that will still help when being at the end of the system far above said equator.
Or imagien said horizon is now in a weird angle to the systemsand how the planets turn around it's star(s) in that case the entire horizon won't help much.
The best may probably be be adding a dynamically horizon to the selected target?

Following the target would be a great idea too. Maybe like this?
Edit: You could even have the two small lines move sideways depending where the target is. If your target is to your right the lines could slide to the left, where when they reach the middle gap at the end of the horizon line your target is behind you.

 

[Magic Man]

As above. Don't really see any point in setting a horizon to anything other than another ship (setting it based on a planet etc. is going to extremely limit your flight pattern and leave you limited to 2d flight in 3d space).
Simplest would be to present an attitude dependent on the target and form on that - a fainter overlay of the galactic plain might be useful for reference.

 

[dementia]

ED:Horizons might introduce this as it would be useful in that scenario/

 

[Uueerdo]

Simplest would be to present an attitude dependent on the target and form on that

I am fairly certain the current target display already shows relative orientation.

 

[okfoxtrot]

This is the kind of thing I would like to see more of. I also think flight control could benefit from speed of any trajectory you might have.

 

[Winterwalker]

Interesting idea but a HUD addition is not how I'd go about defining a heading. For me it's quite simplistic in terms of gameplay and a lot over ambitious, in terms of development (for something not useful to most people most of the time, and a testing piece of code). It's also going to be a complex HUD item, because you do need to define "up" and even the galaxy map is defined in an arbitrary way (we could be looking at the GalMap from the bottom each time, easily).

If you define a couple of navigation points (three) you can define a convention for communicating with wingmen for formations flying. In any given system, the main star is (1). Set a destination lock for hyperspace, gives you (2). Being able to "soft" lock (green) on one of the local planets, would give a third. The soft lock wouldn't so anything except show up on the compass. Perhaps ideally you could soft lock (red) on the man star too, so you'd now have three dots on compass which lined up, to all be in front of you, form a triangle, the cente of which gives a common heading. (You can, I think get a second softlock off the main orbital "plane", which works with a hyperspace lock and the main star, identified from orbit lines).

Because one of the soft locks is on a planet, which moves in orbit, the heading will drfit (slowly) but for me that, being watery, is more satisfactory than having a metallic (there's galactic centre, end of story). The galactic map might be the wrong way up anyway but I don't think things benefit from being over defined, there is a risk of cluttery in HUD and I like that there is no up (or down). Reason being, it's impossible for the devs to simulate player weightlessness in the game, so the lack of defined direction, I think goes well towards communicating, that despite the galaxy being a spiral disc, basically all directions up or down are equal.

 

[Fullmental]

I'd be content with as much as a center reticle or even just a center dot so I can point the damn ship with some accuracy for once. It's even worse when you frequently change ships and there's no standard method to find the center of the view. If you could toss target tracking on it too that'd be awesome.

 

[CMDR Mr S]

I'd be content with as much as a center reticle or even just a center dot so I can point the damn ship with some accuracy for once. It's even worse when you frequently change ships and there's no standard method to find the center of the view. If you could toss target tracking on it too that'd be awesome.

Sorry to necro this but I solved the issue by enabling the mouse as a controller, showing the mouse widget, and then bringing mouse axes sensitivity all the way to 0 and dead zone to the max. Doing so you will have a little square indicating where your ship's nose is pointing at all times.