I love flying flight assist off, but I would love even more to be able to whizz past planets and suns sideways. It would allow for much more pleasant sightseeing during long supercruise trips. It would be so cool to orbit suns and larger planets, too (we can only do this around v. small moons right now).
It would also be great to be able to use one's manoeuvring thrusters in supercruise, whether flight assist is enabled or not.
Hey Scott, we used to have FA-OFF in supercruise during testing, waay before the game was released. It was removed for the reasons below. Personally I'd like a more relaxed stability in super cruise, doesn't have to be pure FA-OFF, give a bit more feeling of inertia, it is already ingame if you fly deep inside a gravity well of a Supergiant like 'Canis Majoris' whilst in SC, feels very nice, perhaps even Betelgeuse, have not seen the drift occur near to any other stars. Don't hold your breath though, highly unlikely they will make any changes now.
Dev comments
Mike Evens
flight assist off works in normal flight because you have access to thrusters in all axes of your ship. In super cruise you have access to just one axis and in one direction. To make flight assist off truly work as a feature and not as a bug would require us to completely re-design and re-implement the way the flight model works in super cruise to enable you to use it properly. It also doesn't mesh with the context for interdiction dropping players out by causing their ship to orientate perpendicular to the direction of travel
The reason interdictions have a "behind target" requirement is to prevent them from being too easy to initiate. The act of circling around/manoeuvring into position also sometimes allows observant pilots the chance to work out that they are in danger.
There's some amount of sci-fi magic context in that the act of interdiction attempts to force the vessels to face away from the direction of travel, disrupting the frame shift space compression (which also fits in with our technical requirement of not allowing backwards travel).
I think it's perhaps a bit of a non-sequitur to suggest that because FAO combat at standard speeds is deep (assuming you mean EFAO combat in Elite, of course, apologies if you did not) then FAO travel in super cruise is equally deep.
The truth is that FAO in super cruise wasn't ever supported for the game. It got into a live build more or less by mistake, and introduced some technical headaches into the bargain. Because we never intended to support it for super cruise, there was no mechanical benefit to doing it, whilst on the flip side it made dropping out at the correct place unnecessarily difficult.
Sandro
However, I'm not going to say that people could not possibly enjoy FAO super cruise, or that it took away from the ambience. Sliding past a stellar body at superluminal speeds - ya, I can see that's pretty cool.
Right now though, we're at a stage where to put it back in, in a way that doesn't break the tech and make the coders club us senseless in anger, means three things: some decent time spent on making it worthwhile, in concordance with our other game mechanics, such as interdiction, and the acceptance that it would have to be limited (no more than around 90 degrees angle from direction of travel.)
Like I said before, we've got some ideas that I think might be pretty cool, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait, we've simply got bigger fish to fry at the moment.
I hope this at least helps to explain our position a bit, though I'm not saying that you should automatically agree with it, of course
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