This dull guy has threads die natural deaths all of the time. This can't be true.
ED does not do what Newton's Laws say......
- Thread starter Cmdr BrinBrown
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But here we are, the forum photons propelling it forwards.
But back to the physical realm I like the physics of ED. They are just fun. While I also liked I War at the same time the hard core Newtonian motion made ordinary traversal annoying outside battle.
Yeah tell me that after trying to fly down the thrust nozzle of a Megaship, they are certainly expelling something!
All aside though, strict Newtonian Mechanics is fine in a game where combat is designed for it, Elite dangerous combat mechanics were definitely not designed for it, which is why bringing other games up and comparing them is so annoying.
Indeed even with Flight assist disabled, there are a few limitations and other physical liberties taken:
- Acceleration due to flight thrust has a speed limit.
- Other effects can cause more speed, such as a Thargoid Pulse, or speedbowling with planetary gravitation.
- Acceleration due to boosting has a higher speed limit.
- Somehow, boosting does not kill the pilot, not even the Mamba boost at 380 m/s/s ~ 38 g.
- Rotation has angular limits.
- Speed reduces itself gradually down to the thrust limit (although rotation is retained).
- Deploying Landing gear or Cargo scoop lowers the thrust and boost speed limit, and lowers the non-boost angular limit.
- Somehow, moving at half the speed limit increases acceleration and rotation.
- Even with disabled thrusters, Flight assist is still able to reduce speed.
- Even while positioned along the axis of rotation, Rotational correction reduces deceleration (or causes inertia).
- Jettisoning cargo downwards does not propel the starship upwards.
There's some exhaust of waste matter, but it's clearly not set up to generate thrust - the exit velocity is far too low.
Which is fortunate for anyone flying anywhere near the class 8 plasma beams it would generate if they were thrusters, of course.
And even then people tend to just mean Newton's First Law.
Second and Third laws, where you actually have to eject a suitable momentum in the other direction, and the mass used to generate that actually comes from somewhere? That's for realistic games like Kerbal; space-combat of any sort requires ignoring all of that.
Having put probably a thousand hours into Edge of Chaos: yes, you can. It'll take a godawful lot of time, but you could accelerate endlessly reaching ludicrously high velocities. Which made escaping from fights real funny, because NPC-s would not accelerate beyond the "flight assist speed limit" and would instead jump into LDS (Linear Displacement System, I-War 2's version of supercruise), then drop into realspace when they catched up with you, then jump back into LDS, rinse and repeat
Comparing E
to I-War 2 is very relevant, IMO, both have very similar flight, travel, combat, heat/stealth mechanics. In fact so similar that when I first started playing E: D my immediate thought was "I have played this before!". At the same time these two are sufficiently different in certain aspects that they can't be called clones of each other, which IMO makes comparing them all the more relevant.![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
i dont know what you mean.............................. btw i have been thinking... those players hiding in solo, they are kind of cheating. I wonder if frontier have ever thought of removing solo, or at least locking players in solo out of open and stopping them having an effect on the BGS?
edit... damn Mohrgan beat me to it.
Yes, and if you boost again you should go even faster.
I like to say that we fly in non-Newtonian treacle. From a physics background it can be quite immersion-breaking. On the other hand I can see that it's necessary in a P2P game: relative speed differences between player ships need to be capped.
Independence War is one of my favourite games, but the engine wouldn't work in a multiplayer environment. For example, in the EoC the mulitplayer mode, it was too easy to run away from other players.
There was a point where I was talking to the Legend of Grandpa Trout (Mod Maker extraordinaire) where we were looking at setting up a multiplayer setup with a set of interconnected mulitplayer servers, each with a unique system on each server and the trading mods. The problem was player piracy, you want to give the trading players a chance to escape, but it was too easy to run away, so thankfully we stopped that before we committing wasting years of spare time to it.
Then Elite dangerous came along anyway
I do find the immersion breaking thing interesting.
I’ve personally never been in space, so don’t have any real understanding of how it should feel. The ships, and especially people, don’t look real. We have to suspend our disbelief to play and get immersed in any game.
Personally I find ED more immersive than some of the alternatives that are often cited as it’s more internally consistent. I mean it’s not perfect, but I’m playing a game with make believe aliens and physics ignoring faster than light travel, not an actual space simulator.
I’ve personally never been in space, so don’t have any real understanding of how it should feel. The ships, and especially people, don’t look real. We have to suspend our disbelief to play and get immersed in any game.
Personally I find ED more immersive than some of the alternatives that are often cited as it’s more internally consistent. I mean it’s not perfect, but I’m playing a game with make believe aliens and physics ignoring faster than light travel, not an actual space simulator.
That is covered by Kepler's 4th law, which says:
The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major you can check out any time you like, but you can't never leave.
Especially if the effective weapon ranges are typically less than a km, especially especially if the weapons are not of one hit, one kill variety, and FSD makes real long-range engagements useless, anyway. If the weapons had realistic ranges measuring from a few thousand km to a few lightseconds, then two ships approaching each other at 0.01c relative velocities wouldn't matter. Especially if one hit means a kill. That would not make for exiting dogfights, though—more like submarine warfare of detection, launching a weapon, launching countermeasures and doing evasive maneuvers to throw off enemy's gun solution. It could be made exiting in it's own right, but probably would work much better in a single-player setting with no intrasystem FTL travel.
Can you imagine it? Space combat in niven space.
Long long bouts of doing nothing. Calculating missile trajectories and waiting years for the outcome.
Yeah because they used Newtonian mechanics, if acceleration is infinite no ship could catch a ship running away, that's why dogfighting doesn't really work, the moment an NPC was in trouble they would just point away and run, same with players.
This is related to the effect in Good Omens where music left in a car becomes Bohemian Rhapsody.
Here things tend to gravitate to an Eagles number.
Ah, Felder's Law then?
I forgot about flight assist!
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In fact, if you look at your ship from the outside you'll see that mini-thrusters will fire to stop your ship from rotating/moving when you let go of the controls. It's in this way quite explicitly visually explained in-game.
(That doesn't mean everything is fully Newtonian, though. For example there's no reason why your ship should have a maximum thruster speed. There's nothing explaining that. It's modeled as if there was some kind of drag in space, like in an atmosphere, and thus your ship has a maximum flying speed, just like an airplane in an atmosphere. I suppose they did that for practical reasons, but it's still completely non-Newtonian.)
Elite 1984 flew like a flight sim, but Frontier Elite II and Frontier First Encounters (Elite III) were Newtonian 100%.
It was freakin' difficult.
Here they made it smart, as a mix to choose.