Gravity Well or Slow Down?

OgreWookie

O
When "speeding" past a planet, Gravity Well is a valid reason that your ship slows down.
However
When approaching an outpost too fast that is 500 Ls from the nearest planet/moon, slow down is more appropriate.

Any chance that the difference could be implemented?
 

HRDiagram

HRDiagram
Two separate warnings would make more sense, but since I imagine it might not be as easy to implement it as one would think (I suppose it's a single check that covers every case) and considering that the "gravity well crowd" had to suffer the "slow down" for years, it's only fair that now the "slow down crowd" suffer, instead!

Gravity well?
Gravity very well, thanks!
 

Shurimal

Shurimal
BDelacroix said:
Gravity well. Slow down was taken as an instruction and confused so many people.
Click to expand...
To be fair, "Slowing down" would be the right thing to do in that situation, but if you see that warning, you most likely couldn't do it in time, so why even bother? As I wrote in that other linked discussion, "Overspeed" or maybe "FSD Overspeed" would be the best warning message. Because that's what it is--your ship going faster than it should be able to go because for whatever reason the maximum allowed FSD speed, which depends on gravity and whether you have a navigation target locked, dropped below your ship's actual speed. It can happen well away from any source of gravity if you lock to a signal source, nav beacon, station or fleet carrier too close going too fast, even if your throttle is set below 75%. It's a simple binary check--if ship speed is greater than maximum allowed FSD speed, display a warning message. The lines of code that do that probably couldn't determine the reason for overspeed, just that it is currently happening.
 

R4dioS1lence

R
Slow Down, Big Body Ahead
(Wave and Wink)​

Jokes aside, "Slow Down" sounds like an order. It doesn't reflect the feedback on why you're slowing down because of a gravity well.
"Slowing Down" would make sense, but wouldn't tell you a reason, and new players would complain because "they got caught by an NPC pirate because they got slowed down by the NPC or for some reason", or people would ask "how can I slow down an NPC like I get slowed down sometimes?".
"Gravity Well" tells you the reason why you're slowing down AND that you're near a body. It's succinct, simple, and gets the player asking "Why does a gravity well/ nearby body slow me down?" and gets them understanding that the FSD behavior is dictated by gravitational effects (effects like Mass Lock and etc).

It's hard to inform important things in as little text as necessary, but that change was a great step towards that AND it also explains the way FSD works, all in two words.
 

galahad2069

G
R4dioS1lence said:
Slow Down, Big Body Ahead
(Wave and Wink)​

Jokes aside, "Slow Down" sounds like an order. It doesn't reflect the feedback on why you're slowing down because of a gravity well.
"Slowing Down" would make sense, but wouldn't tell you a reason, and new players would complain because "they got caught by an NPC pirate because they got slowed down by the NPC or for some reason", or people would ask "how can I slow down an NPC like I get slowed down sometimes?".
"Gravity Well" tells you the reason why you're slowing down AND that you're near a body. It's succinct, simple, and gets the player asking "Why does a gravity well/ nearby body slow me down?" and gets them understanding that the FSD behavior is dictated by gravitational effects (effects like Mass Lock and etc).

It's hard to inform important things in as little text as necessary, but that change was a great step towards that AND it also explains the way FSD works, all in two words.
Click to expand...
Well, no.

It's only explanative when your destination is far away, you're still in the accelerating phase and and you accidentally happen to fly near a gravity well that slows you down temporarily.

When you get the message in the decelerating phase because your destination (for example, a station) is inside a gravity well of a planet and you are approaching it too fast, then players are not going to ask themselves "Why does a gravity well slow me down?", because their problem will be the opposite of that: "Why does NOT the gravity well slow me down? (Why am I overshooting?)"

And when their target is a signal source in the middle of nowhere, far away from planetary gravity wells, then the "Gravity well" message is outright misleading, because that has nothing to do with why they are about to overshoot the USS.
 
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CMDR ROGER

C
galahad2069 said:
Well, no.

It's only explanative when your destination is far away, you're still in the accelerating phase and and you accidentally happen to fly near a gravity well that slows you down temporarily.

When you get the message in the decelerating phase because your destination (for example, a station) is inside a gravity well of a planet and you are approaching it too fast, then players are not going to ask themselves "Why does a gravity well slow me down?", because their problem will be the opposite of that: "Why does NOT the gravity well slow me down? (Why am I overshooting?)"

And when their target is a signal source in the middle of nowhere, far away from planetary gravity wells, then the "Gravity well" message is outright misleading, because that has nothing to do with why they are about to overshoot the USS.
Click to expand...
Barring the imaginary gravity wells that materialize when you target a signal or nav beacon and disappear when untargeted, it shouldn't take long to figure out that the effects of a gravity well are not quite sufficient to slow you down if you're approaching in the 5-6 seconds range. If you want new pilots to understand this, you need the handbook and tutorials to explain it (they may do, have not checked), not a cockpit widget that's meant to immediately alert a pilot of gravitational drag without being vague or over-explanatory.

To put it another way, the job of a fighter jet's HUD is to summarize the flight state of an aircraft, not explain the numbers to someone who has never touched an aircraft before. That's a job for an instructor.
 

galahad2069

G
CMDR ROGER said:
Barring the imaginary gravity wells that materialize when you target a signal or nav beacon and disappear when untargeted,
Click to expand...
Nonsense. There are no "imaginary gravity wells" in those cases, only a misleadingly worded alarm message.

CMDR ROGER said:
effects of a gravity well are not quite sufficient to slow you down if you're approaching in the 5-6 seconds range.
Click to expand...
Yet it will magically become sufficient in many cases as soon as you've deselected the target. :)

The alarm has nothing to do with gravity wells in these cases. The notification is NOT triggered by the presence of gravity wells. It gets displayed whenever your current speed exceeds a certain limit, which is a function of two independent variables:
1. your position with respect to gravity wells
2. your position relative to your selected target.

It's basically an "overspeed" warning, and the reason why it's being displayed is not always the gravity wells, that's why the text "gravity well" can be misleading.

As an analogy: critical blood loss can lead to hypotension, but it's not the only possible reason why your blood pressure can be low. That's precisely why the hypotension alarm text on blood pressure monitors will not read "critical blood loss".
 
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Flimley

Flimley
IMG_2675.png
i see
 
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