Disabling drives to stop ships

To me the problem is that ED uses two different yard sticks.
An normal ship without thrust reduces speed and stops. A ship with destroyed engines keeps its movement vector - and in some cases that was full speed out of the combat zone.

no, that's consistent. if you throttle to zero flight assist is still active and brings you to a stop. if your engine blows up there's no propulsion and no flight assist either anymore, so you drift away with the exact momentum you had at that point.
 
That's what the current piracy meta is though. Bumping the ship is just a crude method of getting them to stop.
The current meta at least requires some kind of skill. Having deceleration limpets of any kind would mean that the pilots skill required to do the bumb stop would simply disappear, turning piracy again into something bland. Fighting NPCs is already so easy, especially trade ships, that you can do it without any skills at all. So why remove actual pilot skill from the one way of making money, which does require it?
The netcode should be improved though, the cloning is a stupid bug.
 
no, that's consistent. if you throttle to zero flight assist is still active and brings you to a stop. if your engine blows up there's no propulsion and no flight assist either anymore, so you drift away with the exact momentum you had at that point.
I still wonder why people don't understand this.
No drives & no friction --> no thrust --> no stop shrugs
 
Skill, yeah... It's so janky that it's an equivalent of a videogame with laggy controls requiring skill. Technically true, but so frustrating that it's not really a fun learning experience. However, this is a decent point:

This would actually be harmful to piracy. As it stands now I can disable a ships drive, let it drift away from the point of the crime while going into silent running myself. Since the disabled ship as well as my own now have an extremely low heat signature the cops up to medium sec usually don't find me. If the ship would simply stay, the only way to pirate in non anarchy systems would be by tanking the cops. Piracy would also be again a boring thing of sitting somewhere and draining another ship without any work on the pirates part....
The first part is especially a good point and speaks against automatic stopping. As for the second part, well there is the work of disabling the target in the first place, but then just sitting there watching the limpets dance is not awfully exciting. I mainly wish there was a less clumsy way of stopping the victim racing out of view while I'm collecting the first batch of loot. I guess memorizing which way he drifted is a skill as well.
 
Depends on your approach, I earn 90% of my credits this way and can easily do it in a Corvette as well as a Vulture. The thing is, that if you are only able to fly in strait lines it's frustratingly difficult, as soon as you have good control over your lateral movements and can read the radar, it is very easy. Its probably way easier in ships with good lateral thrusters.
 
Got fully analog 6 DoF movement and head tracking so I can see it coming. I don't know how good lateral thrust the Clipper has in grand scheme of things, but I am capable of putting it on the path of a drifting ship. The problem is that it often just bounces off to some new direction still moving fast. I also once got it tumbling so fast that the hatch breaker limpet couldn't align with the hatch.
 
no, that's consistent. if you throttle to zero flight assist is still active and brings you to a stop. if your engine blows up there's no propulsion and no flight assist either anymore, so you drift away with the exact momentum you had at that point.

There are still inconsistences. For example, if you shut engines off, or have them disabled/rebooted by ion disruptors, rather than have them destroyed, the ship comes to a stop, if FA is enabled. Even with FA Off, the ship will still bleed off all boost speed.

Destroyed drives result in the ship drifting at previous velocity, irrespective of setting, even if it's higher than maximum non-boost velocity, but even destroyed drives do not allow one to cross an exclusion zone.
 
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I don't know how good lateral thrust the Clipper has in grand scheme of things, but I am capable of putting it on the path of a drifting ship. The problem is that it often just bounces off to some new direction still moving fast. I also once got it tumbling so fast that the hatch breaker limpet couldn't align with the hatch.

Yeah, I see. Its not done by simply moving in front of the ship, but by moving in front of the ship with nearly the same speed and slowly decelerating, so that the bumb only imparts little velocity, add to that the flattest part of your ship for the collision, so they don't start tumbling. I never have them just crashing into me, but make sure they are slowly and carefully decelerating. They still start to tumble sometimes, but never very strongly.
 
Destroying power plant stops them, which also makes no sense, so why not drives too? It would certainly make piracy more fun, especially against players.

Alternatively, a grapple or drag beam or tow limpet or something would be sweet.
 
Another option is to speed up collector limpets, as well as make them so that they don't blow up the damn cargo on your hull when dropping it off, if you go more than 0 speed!!!

Lets us fly and have collectors grab things as we go, it'd be so much more fun, fighting the cops while grabbing cargo.
 
There are still inconsistences. For example, if you shut engines off, or have them disabled/rebooted by ion disruptors, rather than have them destroyed, the ship comes to a stop, if FA is enabled. Even with FA Off, the ship will still bleed off all boost speed.

Destroyed drives result in the ship drifting at previous velocity, irrespective of setting, even if it's higher than maximum non-boost velocity,
good to know these inconsistencies.

but even destroyed drives do not allow one to cross an exclusion zone.

if you mean planet exclusion zone ... that's metaphysics! :ROFLMAO:[/QUOTE]
 
There are still inconsistences.
They may seem like inconsistencies but...

For example, if you shut engines off, or have them disabled/rebooted by ion disruptors, rather than have them destroyed, the ship comes to a stop, if FA is enabled. Even with FA Off, the ship will still bleed off all boost speed.
That is because the engines are effectively being subject to a notionally controlled shutdown/reboot - they have not been destroyed and an element of control is still there.

Destroyed drives result in the ship drifting at previous velocity, irrespective of setting, even if it's higher than maximum non-boost velocity, but even destroyed drives do not allow one to cross an exclusion zone.
That is because the engines have been destroyed - no element of the control or drive system remains to regulate speed one way or another.

In comparable modern computer terms, it is the difference between a computer detecting a fault and pre-emptively shutting-down/rebooting and the same computer crashing (e.g. Windows BSOD or Linux/UNIX Kernel Core Dump) because of fundamental unrecoverable fault.

Exclusion zones are nothing to do with drive operation though, that is to do with the system modelling.

Overall, what you are referring to as inconsistencies are actually quite logically explainable and arguably not inconsistent because of that - what the OP is proposing is not.
 
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Destroying power plant stops them, which also makes no sense, so why not drives too?
Destroying or deactivating the power plant can be considered a bit like pulling the plug on a collection of UPS protected systems - with the power removed, a controlled shutdown of the systems would probably happen almost instantly with a limited reserve that is available to each module.

I believe the explanation as to why destroying the drives does not have the same effect has been given a few times already.
 
Yeah, I see. Its not done by simply moving in front of the ship, but by moving in front of the ship with nearly the same speed and slowly decelerating, so that the bumb only imparts little velocity, add to that the flattest part of your ship for the collision, so they don't start tumbling. I never have them just crashing into me, but make sure they are slowly and carefully decelerating. They still start to tumble sometimes, but never very strongly.
Hmm, that explains why I was more successful early on. I did it slow at first, but then started to be worried about getting hit from the side by the tumbling motion and increased the pace.
 
The current meta at least requires some kind of skill. Having deceleration limpets of any kind would mean that the pilots skill required to do the bumb stop would simply disappear, turning piracy again into something bland. Fighting NPCs is already so easy, especially trade ships, that you can do it without any skills at all. So why remove actual pilot skill from the one way of making money, which does require it?
The netcode should be improved though, the cloning is a stupid bug.
You would think that since we have limpets that refuel, repair, research, fetch, and break hatches, a limpet to bring a disabled ship to a standstill wouldn't be too far fetched. Using the bump stop method to slow a disabled ship down isn't about skill. It is there because there isn't any other method.
 
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