Defaulting ship orientation

[drakmaniso]

The problem is that frame of reference. I could say that such a station is oriented so that the entry point is pointing to Galactic North.

No, you misunderstood. This is not about the stations. As you said, that would be useless (and there is already a mechanism in place to find out the orientation, through its rotation).

This is about sharing directions between pilots that are in the same place. Flying together, but not in formation (because then directions are trivial). So any frame of reference will do: galactic, system or planetary. But we need an orientation that every pilot in the group can understand, no matter which way they are flying.

To give an example, imagine a group of friends in the "federation distress signal" scenario. There is currently no way to cooperate, to say things like "I take the eagle at ...", or "I'm in trouble, come help me, I'm at ...".

This would apply to many scenarios, such as searching a wreckage, an ambush in a field of asteroids, coordinating an attack on an enemy fleet, and so on...

Note that, as I've said above, this could also be achieved by having a way to set a "ping" on the radar that others in your group could see.

The point is, IMHO we need some way to share this kind of information.

 

[Graill]

OP, you had better be careful and not let any Truthers read this. These people want the game "Hard", and like it hard. These truthers do not want some game mechanic that was hard and let it go soft on them.

Truthers enjoy handling hard things, they like the feel of hard things, this game for example is hard in many aspects and they enjoy it.

Letting something soft touch their hands would not give them enjoyment. Keep in mind also, as long as the game stays hard, we wont hear them speak...as they will be occupied. A win win for us normal gamers.

While leaving supercruise is problematic at times we must endure and adapt. Let the truthers keep their hard things, its the way they like to take it.

 

[Paulo_B27]

The station's orientation is only a minor point. The more important issue I was trying to get across was attempting to describe your position, or an enemy's position, to someone else you're flying with.

If your wingman doesn't know what way your ship is facing, how can he know what enemy you're asking him to shoot at without having to skip through every single target to find a specific name?

There are plenty of situations where knowing North from South can be very useful.

Understood - and agree to your point.

In Falcon BMS (and therefore real today's real F-16 and other fighter aircraft), you can link your computer to that of your wing men and allocate targets to them. Simple and effective.