I would say that FDev have lost confidence in their original plan (arguably down to overhyping the upgrades which may have been released too early) and started pandering to their community (possibly favouring he who shouts or threatens loudest).
Flight Model: Has FDev Lost Their Way?
- Thread starter Frenotx
- Start date
I can actually get the pilot to start blacking or redding out in my Viper IV when I do some of my more... adventurous maneuvers. My assumption is that through years of genetic engineering, advancing medical science, and advancing flight suit technology, the G-tolerance of your average space pilot is much higher than that of pilots today.
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In the Frontier II lore they speak of special construction and materials used in the pilot seat to alleviate high G, iow a sort of inertial dampening device. The lore also mentions automated injectors for drugs and various medical treatments, though it did not (as I can recall) speak of this specifically in regards to high Gs. Sure, it might not seem technically possible, but I've seen divers go to 200 meters on saturation operations, working 8 hours shifts under pressures which would have been impossible to handle not long ago. Technology and construction advances.
And then of course you have the old sci-fi trope of "inertial dampeners", or as they should be known correctly "inertial negators". I haven't seen such a thing mentioned in lore, and it is not something that is practically possible now. But when you assume 2400 years of development, you'll often be allowed some leeway in possible tech. You could argue that it is room for such manipulation in theoretical physics, by influencing the higgs field (which is what gives matter mass). Then again, if we could do that... we don't we do more, etc etc. So this answer is probably worse than the first one. Still, we have room for suspension of disbelief.
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I would personally like the flight model to be split up between ship sizes. Smaller ships have incredible agility and dog fighting abilities.(but heat management more of a gameplay focus) Medium ships should get best top speeds and lower maneuver ability and poorer directional thrusts.(Gun and run style of play) While larger ships should be slower and more ponderous while having a large bump to hardness and a second NPC fighter pilot.(and a few more C1 turret locations.
Would be cool to have larger ships be like mini capital ships that could move. Who's armor is so tough you would be better off going for sub systems.
Would be cool to have larger ships be like mini capital ships that could move. Who's armor is so tough you would be better off going for sub systems.
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Don't care how good a pilot you are in a Vette. Small ships flown well always have the advantage
Sub system targeting is huge already in PvP.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
You mean almost like wot they haz in Star Citizen?
yeah, I said it.
I really don't understand the reluctance of FDev to implement this sort of system when it's been accepted by players without problems in almost all other space games, including Frontier II and FFE. I'm REALLY struggling to think of a space game when the players thought that having a "small fast / medium balanced / big slow" system was anything other than logical.
I don't even think this current system was asked for by the players of ED - I think this blurring of what ships get used for the various activities is entirely down to engineering, FDev design decisions and not really understanding that it's "OK" to have specific ships locked to specific roles; additionally, that engineering them should at best be an upgrade of certain stats, and not be a system to entirely change a ships role.
There's still enough weapon loadaouts and systems to give players variety and personalise a ship; but as we've seen, because when it's been engineered the Anaconda can do everything well, it's become the defacto ship of choice for players and the only reasons they choose not to fly one is "for the challenge" and there are hundreds of forum posts that state that exact reason why they are not using a conda.
Changing the rolls and mats system in engineering was only half the equation of problems with it - the other half - allowing almost all ships to be all things, still remains, and I think that's mistaken choice on FDevs part.
Rafe Zetter
Banned
But this is one of the core problems with engineering - it negates the ship role factor for the majority of the more casual gamers. Pilots who can sink time into learning FA off and the strengths of a ship will ALWAYS have an advantage, that is a given.
However engineering now allows an "average" pilot in a large ship to negate the benefits a new pilot will have in a ship designed for agility and speed, and sub system targetting is all well and good, but if the "casual joe" player can't get a bead on it, because "average john in his engineered ship" is making that more than difficult, with his increased roll, pitch & yaw rates - then the whole argument is moot.
As the OP said with the conda being able to flip end over end in just a few seconds - trying to get in the tail on an experienced conda pilot, or keep a bead on a particular sub system - FOR A NEWER PLAYER - is nigh on an impossibility because the agility of base level smaller ships doesn't match an engineered ships arc of manouvreability - remember that for any given arc (degrees per second travelled), distance required to cover that arc increases with perpendicular distance.
Here's an experiement for someone, can a baseline Viper stay in the 6 'o'clock position, 500m distance, of an engineered Ananconda when it does an 180deg flip end over end using maximum pitch rate.
You could start by using physics to determine how a ship performs due to it's weight and how much thrust it can generate to accelerate it. Having internal modules that made sense with their weights/size all calculated using a set algorithm based on the ships weight and where it's thrust ports are and what type of thruster is there.
That would at least reign in the stupidness of large ships outturning small ships.
Children of a Dead Earth. I didn't have to think long.
The idea of small single seat fighters kind of falls apart when you throw real physics at it. Big ships will always do almost everything better - and whatever the small fighter is good at can be more efficiently done by a drone or a missile.
That's of course, only if you value realism over gameplay or preserving the popular sci-fi mythos of human-piloted fighter planes and carriers in space.
Not that I'm saying this should be relevant for ED, but just saying.
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The trouble with bringing physics into it all is that large ships don't really have any worse total/thruster mass ratios. A 'Vette has its thrusters weighing in at about 1/19th of its total mass, while an Eagle is about 1/16th. The Anaconda, with its stupid hull mass, actually has its thrusters weighing in at about 1/13th of its total mass when loaded for combat, which would logically make it the most maneuverable ship in the game assuming that all thrusters have equal mass efficiency.
In order to bring reality into the game they would have to pretty much go back to the drawing board and put a healthy dose of logic into every step of the way, reworking all values from the very ground up.
You are the mis-informed one...
First off, this is a sci-fi context and some things will not gel precisely with real world physics.
Secondly, there is obviously some form of heat dissipation technology in ED that involves radiating heat into space - just look at some of the ship designs to see that - prominently the Asp Explorer is a simple and visible example of this class of technology. There are obvious limits to this technology which is why we have heat sinks in ED. As for radiation requiring air, actually no - that would be via convection and/or conduction. I suggest you go back and relearn physics.
Thirdly, I know exactly what water/liquid cooling is and is not and your second statement essentially contradicts what you were arguing against, and reinforcing my overall point. The whys and hows are a bit moot, but larger ships will have more surface area to accommodate heat dissipation technologies and more internal space to accommodate heat transference technologies using a mix of conduction, convection, and possibly radiation. This is relevant when considering relative heat accumulation and dissipation factors of different ships. Fundamentally in ED, the net heat dissipation model is probably extremely simplified but the rationale of larger ships being able to dissipate more heat energy more effectively is sound.
Finally, where ship momentum is concerned greater mass achieves a higher momentum which in turn needs a greater force to stop with-in the same time frame. In the context of ED, there is a momentum bleed off factor between boost speed and whatever the natural speed is of a ship in a given direction. This rate seems to be related to the relevant acceleration and deceleration curves for the given ship, therefore larger ships which typically have less steep curves than with the smaller craft will naturally be able to perma-boost more easily.
As for it not being relevant, in the context of the discussion at hand it is quite relevant. The flight mechanics and apparent associated fictional technologies are currently consistent with-in themselves and what you and some others are arguing for is essentially a massive rewrite of the status quo. There have been similar or comparable discussions to this over the life of the forum and IMO what you are arguing for should never be done.
The PvE combat in ED is currently "balanced and well designed", it is consistent with the flight models used in many space flight games.
As for challenge and variety, what you are asking for goes against that IMO especially in the PvE context. In the PvP context, it may be mostly due to what happens to be popular but if it is not one tactic or build it is likely to be another in the main - such is the nature of the meta-crowd.
It may appear to pitch and roll rather extremely but on balance it is probably not as bad as it seems.
Where earth based boats, ships and aircraft are concerned, radical and oscillating changes in direction are more problematic due to a common reference point for gravity and a visual reference that corresponds to that (the horizon).
In space, such concerns would be less problematic but if you perform lots of hard acceleration manoeuvres with frequent changes in direction I would expect at least some of your passengers to loose their lunch if they happen to be in a strapped in and seated position or gain bumps/bruises if they happen to be free floating. Different people may be affected differently though, if from the cockpit you don't feel like you are likely to throw up then the odds are any passengers/crew would not either - though it is far from a guarantee.
Where planetary flight is concerned, blackouts and redouts do seem to be modelled. Whether they are at an appropriate level for the manoeuvres or environment is perhaps debatable.
As a VR user, I am aware of the degree of manoeuvrability achievable with the larger craft and from a cockpit view the manoeuvres do not even get close to making me feel sick. The SRV on the other hand can make me feel sick in VR if I go over undulating terrain and do not enable head orientation locking relative to the planetary body.
Whether the flight attributes are realistic or not is rather moot, FD chose not to go for a fully realistic flight model and seem to have opted for a classic space flight gaming flight model instead. That is not a bad nor unprecedented decision, but it does seem to be unpopular with at least some in these forums.
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So well balanced that any moderately competent Player can stop all over almost every NPC...only finding a challenge by flying a ship multiple classes down and against NPC wings?
If its so WELL BALANCED tell m how many times out of 100 would a moderately competent pilot in an un-engineered Viper 3 lose to EG: a Dangerous pilot in a FAS or a Python or an Anaconda?
Wouldn't well balanced be something approaching 50/50...
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That sounds really good to me
I realize my writing style is rather dense and.... verbose, but if you're going to take the time to reply to one of my posts, I'd appreciate it if you also took the time to actually read it thoroughly. Allow me to address the components of your post:
The post of yours I was responding to was exclusively making an argument based on physics, and real life. Your real life and physics-based arguments were based on incorrect assumptions, an I was explaining why. For instance, you said, "take heat sinks on a CPU as an example their size and surface area allow for heat to be radiated and dissipated more easily". Since heatsinks of that variety work via heat transfer methods that don't work in space, I explained why that's not a good justification for larger ships having better heat dissipation.
The entire first part of my post was explaining that convection and conduction require air, and that radiation is the only heat transfer method that doesn't require a medium. The first three sentences of that post: "It is extremely cut and dry. In space, there is no air. No air means the only way to transfer heat is via radiation."
I'm honestly not even sure what you're saying, here. A ship's ability to get heat out of it will ultimately be limited by its outward-facing surface area. It doesn't matter if the ship is completely stuffed full of water cooling, induction cooling, and convection cooling equipment. All that can do is shift the heat around within the ship. The only way to get it out of the ship (with the exception of throwing physical matter out, like firing a heatsink) is via radiation. Because of how math works, if you double the size of an object, its volume increases by more than its surface area. If said volume is presumably filled with heat-generating stuff (like all of the ship components), then the ratio of heat generation to heat radiation goes down as ships get bigger.
Perma-boosting isn't about the speed you get (so how much speed bleeds off isn't really an issue), it's about the big blue-zone-independent maneuverability buff you get while you're boosting that's the problem. Trying to use real-life physics to explain the way the ships move doesn't work very well in E: D though, since they behave almost as though they were in a fluid that somehow dosn't care about hydrodynamics. There isn't really a real-life equivalent that's close enough to form a good parallel.
I agree that how things work is not terribly relevant. That's why at the bottom of the post you're replying too, the one that explains all the real-life stuff, I say, "This stuff isn't terribly relevant, but it just irks me when someone is so misinformed, but seem to think they're not."
I don't want the flight model to be realistic. The devs (at least originally) didn't want that either. That's why all the artificial limitations like slow pitch, very slow yaw, blue zone, etc. were put into the game- they were all deliberate concessions from real life made for the sake of the game being more fun. That's literally the entire point of this thread.
I appreciate that this stupid back and forth with you has kept what I consider an important thread on the front page, but for my own sanity I'm going to have to put you on my ignore list. Congratulations. You have the honor of being the first and only person I have ever added to my ignore list since I joined this forum in 2014.
You are the one who is making the wrong assumptions especially where my assumptions are concerned.
As for reading your posts, I have and you are blind to your own ignorance.
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OP, I think they lost it a long time ago, and engineers only added to the mayhem. When a small fast ship can utterly destroy a large ship as easy as it could another small vessel, then something is badly wrong.
Think on it as a gunboat armed to the teeth with explosives (like has been used irl) trying to take out even a med range vessel like a frigate, yes, it may get near enough to ram it (another ED thorn-in-side) but the damage should be slight, IF (and a big if) it even got near as the heavier ship "should" have more, larger and better weapons.
Only in ED can a mouse kill a elephant by circling it.
Larger vessels need more weapons, or faster training/targetting weapons. But that would be too much like realism or common sense. It's like the market board and/or comms in game, they have the range of my wifi it would seem!
Think on it as a gunboat armed to the teeth with explosives (like has been used irl) trying to take out even a med range vessel like a frigate, yes, it may get near enough to ram it (another ED thorn-in-side) but the damage should be slight, IF (and a big if) it even got near as the heavier ship "should" have more, larger and better weapons.
Only in ED can a mouse kill a elephant by circling it.
Larger vessels need more weapons, or faster training/targetting weapons. But that would be too much like realism or common sense. It's like the market board and/or comms in game, they have the range of my wifi it would seem!