[Discussion] Ships. Speed and Handling.

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Greetings CMDRs.

Let's have a discussion! And no, it's actually not about Newtonian Physics. For once. Lol

Anyhoo, what strikes me as odd in this game, is a ships straight line speed and acceleration.

Because of the odd boost system we have, all ships can reach their top speed pretty much in the same amount of time, regardless of if that top speed is 200m/s or 800m/s, or the ship is a T9 or iCourier.

The handling on ships is pretty much right, bigger heavier ships drift, and smaller ones don't. It's all good.

But with the new T10 coming, with 8 engines, I had a thought...

What if all ships had a similar top speed?
The main difference between ships, should be their handling, and acceleration/deceleration.
Boosting in a big heavy ship shouldn't take you up to your top speed in 1 go, but would require multiple boosts (and full power to engines).
But those light ships, could easily boost to their top speed in one go.

Bigger/heavier ships agility would also suffer more the faster they're going. A T9 at 700m/s isn't going to be able to turn very well at all. Where as an iCourier will still be able to.

Or something like that.

Not sure what that would do for gameplay. But I quite like the idea of my Anaconda going so fast, I can't stop it and face planting a station.

Discuss!

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Redan]

I actually think this is a good idea.

 

[Trafalgar Law]

You would need the top speeds to be a lot faster than they are currently, but I quite like this idea.

 

[wenkman]

well, i would like an unlimited top speed, that would feel more real.

since i don't like "flip-burns" an fsd assisted "breaking" would be nice.

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…

Anyhoo, what strikes me as odd in this game, is a ships straight line speed and acceleration.
…

Ships are strange in ED.

Some huge ships are faster than some small ships. Medium sized ships can be more agile than small ships. To be honest a lot of it doesn't make that much sense to me.
Sometimes I think that FD doesn't understand the importance of speed and acceleration (in all 6 axis) in their game.

Your idea of having a fixed top speed for all ships with differences in acceleration is interesting (non-newtonian newtonian flight model ).

But I suspect that even with such a system we would have "god ships" that break the smaller is "faster" concept.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Wow, I'm surprised anyone liked this idea... Lol

The current system is very odd, hence this suggestion.
In space, technically all ships should be able to accelerate indefinitely. But in EDs, "Syrup Space", we can't for technical reasons I think. (Rubber banding and whatnot, plus gameplay gets dull in Newtonian physics).

So a hard cap on top speed seems good, and letting all ships reach that top speed would be interesting, but it also doesn't devolve the game to jousting, or make every ship in to an iCourier.

The key factor with ships is then their acceleration, deceleration and handling a those speeds, not the top speed available.

Typical fast big ships, like the Cutter and Clipper, would still be much slower to reach their top speed than an iCourier, but faster than say, an Anaconda.

It's basically the same principle as cars, vans, and trucks. Or even trains.

They can all do similar speeds, but it'll take a heavy truck far longer to reach them than an (average) car.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[ROSS-128]

In general I do think it would be nice if ship handling could get a little more newtonian-ish. I'd also like to see a little more detail added to engine mechanics beyond the mass multiplier.

For example, having main thrusters and top/side/bottom thrusters rated separately. And having some ships be better at rolling due to their thruster geometry and mass distribution (torque is force times distance after all, but at the same time moment of inertia is mass times distance).

So I do think it would be interesting if we kept a top speed for networking reasons, but made movement within that more or less newtonian. Especially if we could standardize the performance metrics into SI units, so that anyone with a basic understanding of physics can calculate their ship's performance.

 

[Pville_Piper]

Am I just noticing this or have the Python and Anaconda have longer times to full (non boosted) speed since 2.4 dropped? They seem to have a noticeably longer acceleration curve to me.

Getting back on topic, I would agree, larger ships should not be able to boost to top speed in 1 go and have longer deceleration as well.

 

[Stealthie]

The trouble is, planetary landings have shown us that the performance of your ship is moderated by onboard systems to create consistent flight characteristics regardless of the environment.

In a nutshell, your thrusters will provide you with the same acceleration on a 0.1g planet as they do on a 1g planet.
They won't provide you with 10x greater acceleration in low g.

So (ignoring the fact that it's a game and that's just how it's made), we have to assume that our thrusters have some finite capability but they always operate well within this and their actual output is artificially scaled to provide consistent flight characteristics.

If that's the case, the same thing should apply to boosting too.

We have to assume there's some reason why the speed of our ships is capped at certain speeds and that the thrusters will only ever provide sufficient boost to attain that speed and no more.
Which, conveniently, also helps explain why they can always supply enough boost to accelerate your ship to it's maximum speed in one go.
Theoretically, the thrusters should be able to provide much more boost but it's artificially limited somehow.

Might be nice to have a way to "hot wire" your thrusters to bypass all that technical stuff, just to see how fast you could get a ship to go... until it overheats and explodes.

 

[obliterator]

It would be nice if it was possible to reach way higher top speed. It doesn't make sense that a spaceship in a vacuum doesn't go significantly faster than a fighter jet.

Plus it wouldn't really affect dogfighting, as going really fast would take too long and make your ship way less maneuverable.

 

[The Replicated Man]

I like the idea of speed being capped at 2500. That is when you are in a glide. I wish there was some way of achieving that speed.

 

[ROSS-128]

Well, as far as the fighter jet thing goes the speed of sound is 343m/s so we do have ships that can break mach 1 when boosting. A highly engineered ship can probably get pretty close to mach 2.

It just doesn't feel very fast because all the points of reference we have are typically huge. Though it is also entirely dwarfed by the hilarious velocities achievable in space, especially when you can put out double digit Gs for hours on end. 2500m/s would be close to mach 8, and currently would also be enough to outrun a cannon shot. Though I don't really have any problem with the top speed being "as high as the game can handle".

 

[Bounder]

The trouble is, planetary landings have shown us that the performance of your ship is moderated by onboard systems to create consistent flight characteristics regardless of the environment.

In a nutshell, your thrusters will provide you with the same acceleration on a 0.1g planet as they do on a 1g planet.
They won't provide you with 10x greater acceleration in low g.

So (ignoring the fact that it's a game and that's just how it's made), we have to assume that our thrusters have some finite capability but they always operate well within this and their actual output is artificially scaled to provide consistent flight characteristics.

If that's the case, the same thing should apply to boosting too.

We have to assume there's some reason why the speed of our ships is capped at certain speeds and that the thrusters will only ever provide sufficient boost to attain that speed and no more.
Which, conveniently, also helps explain why they can always supply enough boost to accelerate your ship to it's maximum speed in one go.
Theoretically, the thrusters should be able to provide much more boost but it's artificially limited somehow.

Might be nice to have a way to "hot wire" your thrusters to bypass all that technical stuff, just to see how fast you could get a ship to go... until it overheats and explodes.

Aha - but why use your existing, perfectly-good engines and thrusters to go slightly faster by cutting out slightly later, when you could just rip them all out and upgrade them at a cost of millions, and carry on cutting thrust slightly earlier?

It's just basic logic man.

Similarly, it seems perfectly obvious that all things that are able to move will, in the fullness of time, incorporate FD-style "flight assist" computers; so, in the future, if you burst say a fire extinguisher or can of beer in space, it would accelerate up to its maximum allotted speed, before the FA activates and seals the canister to prevent further thrust, and conserve precious fluids.

Besides, i always say if you leave in good time there's no need to speed. Twenty's plenty. That whole, vast swathe of velocity between the few hundred meters / sec allowed in "normal space" and supercruise - the range in which pretty much everything fun and rewarding about spaceflight actually occurs - we don't need that! We have moonbuggies to be driven, and alien cutscenes to trigger! Docking and mining and docking and trading and docking.. who needs fun spaceflight? Not us, that's for sure!

 

[Bounder]

Well, as far as the fighter jet thing goes the speed of sound is 343m/s so we do have ships that can break mach 1 when boosting. A highly engineered ship can probably get pretty close to mach 2.

It just doesn't feel very fast because all the points of reference we have are typically huge. Though it is also entirely dwarfed by the hilarious velocities achievable in space, especially when you can put out double digit Gs for hours on end. 2500m/s would be close to mach 8, and currently would also be enough to outrun a cannon shot. Though I don't really have any problem with the top speed being "as high as the game can handle".

The tantalising, frustrating thing though is that in principle, you could re-zero your "blue zone" envelope instantly at the touch of a button, since velocity is purely relative to some arbitrary reference frame, which can be anything - including your current vector at the moment you hit that button; so whatever it is relative to anything else, it's now your new "zero" against which all further accelerations are measured relative to.

So you can always be a button-press away from centered in your "blue zone", just by arbitrarily re-calibrating your ship's frame of reference.

But then there's the troubling question of why axial manoeuverability would be affected at all by linear velocity, let alone attenuated by both increasing and decreasing velocity around some low happy medium - axial accelerations are a function of angular inertia (mass times radius squared) divided by thruster power - linear velocity has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Similarly, in so-called "FA-off" mode, angular velocities should rise the longer torque is applied in a given axis. Ships would naturally have limiters to restrict dangerous inertial forces, but this only widens the opportunity for more in-depth, engaging spaceflight - imagine if ED's ships had tensile structural limits and disintegration damage modeling? So ships could naturally incur structural damage by exceeding load limits, like we had in 1980's flight sims... a damaged or jammed thruster could result in an inadvertent spin-out or spool-up culminating in spectacular catastrophic failures..

But yeah nah we just got speed limits. Agonisingly slow ones, in all three planes and all three axes. Inelastic collisions, no conservation of energy or momentum... immovable asteroids, gun platforms and beacons. "Critical attack angles". "Glide mode". "Orbital cruise". You may move this way.. you may not move that way. Now off you go, blaze your own trail, albeit in ED's tightly-choreographed, stars-repeatedly-smashed-in-your-face, worse = better kind of way..