Divide Flight Assist into two new modes: rotation rate damping on/off and station-keeping on/off

[Reticuli]

Divide Flight Assist into two new modes: rotation rate damping on/off and station-keeping on/off

This way people can keep one on and the other off. For instance, with manual docking, you could, for instance, have station-keeping on but rotation rate damping off so that you can manually match the docking port's rotation but still better manage distance. For gliding/drifting, you could have rotation rate damping on and station-keeping off.

It also wouldn't be a terrible idea to get rid of rotation rate absolute limits and instead just use differing acceleration rates. The faster you build up a rotation, the longer it would take for rate damping to fire the opposite thrusters to fully stop the rotation. If you get really carried away, blackout/redout.

Props on using airplane-style rates (or acceleration) of roll > pitch > yaw. Really gets rid of the goofy 'turrets in space' point & shoot whack-o-mole of other space combat flying games and allows actual dogfighting. Wish FSO and HotDS did it this way.

 

[ebbrell]

you already have rotation on/off
just press the key

 

[Reticuli]

you already have rotation on/off
just press the key

I thought that only worked for docking. Is there also a way to get rotational rate damping on and station-keeping off to do FSO-style drift/glide?

 

[eqinox]

This. Flight assist off with rotation rate damping on would be so much fun, and not require so much skill for flying with flight assist off. No harm in getting more commanders to fly flight assist off, it doesn't have to be only for the most skilled ones.

 

[Reticuli]

This. Flight assist off with rotation rate damping on would be so much fun, and not require so much skill for flying with flight assist off. No harm in getting more commanders to fly flight assist off, it doesn't have to be only for the most skilled ones.

Though it's worth noting that the current arrangement does lend more towards less use of drift/glide and more normal dogfighting. My whole point of getting ED this last week was to find a space combat flying game that wasn't whack-o-mole point & shoot turrets in space. So maybe this is a bad idea, after all, for long term gameplay, now that I think of it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Though it's worth noting that the current arrangement does lend more towards less use of drift/glide and more normal dogfighting. My whole point of getting ED this last week was to find a space combat flying game that wasn't whack-o-mole point & shoot turrets in space. So maybe this is a bad idea, after all, for long term gameplay, now that I think of it.

Yes, it's this - the current arrangement is intentional, to encourage dogfighting. Rotation assist but translation manual would be just far better than either of the other modes in combat - whereas at the moment the price of being able to manage your own translation is that you also need to keep your rotation controlled.

 

[Reticuli]

Yes, it's this - the current arrangement is intentional, to encourage dogfighting. Rotation assist but translation manual would be just far better than either of the other modes in combat - whereas at the moment the price of being able to manage your own translation is that you also need to keep your rotation controlled.

Perhaps the solution is to make high-G combat turning the result of thrust vectoring in pitch and differential vectoring of the two engines for roll, which would prevent much use for drift/glide with flight assist off. Then make the maneuvering thrusters simply very weak with no max rate cap. So you could still use the thrusters for gentle maneuvering, or doing a thruster rotation long enough causing a very high rotational rate that you then have to spend a while countering (or turn flight assist on and let it spend a while countering). If what you've caused is in the pitch or roll, you could alternatively just quickly tune the pitch rate out with the main engine & auto thrust vector either manually or with flight assist. With no speed or rotation rate limits, though, then you end up needing much better g-force physiological effects simulated, as well as a g-meter. For max forward speed limits, having high-velocity hydrogen atoms and solar wind degrade your shields and then hull would be reason enough not to go too crazy on the velocity without activating the frame shift hyper drive thing. With this arrangement, I suspect you wouldn't really be able to use drift/glide in dogfights much, which will keep the ED fighter ship combat interesting and not whack-o-mole point & shoot turrets in space, but might be useful to strafe a non-maneuvering target with enough planning. And you'd still be able to manually maneuver when launching and docking, with or without flight assist damping with counter-inputs automatically. If it's hard to find the right universal thrusters powers to dial in for the devs, they might even try half power available with these two proposed flight assists off and full power available with them both on. I might be able to test this in X-Plane to see if it'd work in orbit. I can't remember if Orbiter has thrust vectoring available in it. I believe it's feasible, though, because thrusters don't work that fast in real life that you could dog fight with them, and the F-22 only has much pitch authority above the tropopause as a result of thrust vectoring because the atmosphere is so thin. Using vectoring for the pitch in the thick atmosphere low down is problematic due to the way it bleeds speed rapidly... neat for airshows, but of limited use in a dog fight. In thin or no atmosphere, though, thrust vectoring makes more sense.