"Honey, you live on a spaceship." - realism in ED

[Captain N]

The problem is not us not being able to visualise the scenario.

Your understanding of the physics involved is accurate, it's just that you're underestimating the magnitude of the forces involved and what it means in the practical situation.

Let me get this straight: The Coriolis force is not some little thing that gently pushes you and waits for you to counter it with a slight thrust to the side. It's something that will grab you by the neck and throw you around. You will have to fight it. Things change more rapidly and unpredictably than you think.

I'm not just imagining things in my mind here, or trying to solve things with mathematics, I tested this in Orbiter and I know what's it like go through this in practice.

 

[RAMJB]

Your understanding of the physics involved is accurate, it's just that you're underestimating the magnitude of the forces involved and what it means in the practical situation.

Might very well be the case. Then again remember that orbiter spaceships might not have the same ammount of vectorial thrust available to them as you might have in MMM millenia spaceships . Also coriolis forces are not unpredictable...they are perfectly predictable. After all they follow laws of phisics and are nothing but side-effects of relative movements.

But yes it might be me underestimating the problem, that I already admitted before. It's also a case of me being a particular hardheaded individual, which I also freely admit .


In any case this is mostly debating about scenarios and configurations - computers would be able to get hold of all that and make things as easy as "move forward and land" by compensating those effects on their own .

 

[Captain N]

You can adjust the power of RCS thrusters in Orbiter in the ship config files.

The default Delta-Glider couldn't keep up with the Coriolis force at all.

I had to increase the RCS specific impulse to something like fifty times of what it was at default...

And this was with a custom Cobra MkIII addon that had pretty strong sci-fi thrusters to begin with.

The Coriolis force only sounds like something predictable, in practice you will find that trying to counter it affects your rotation and movement on other axes as well, and then you'll be countering these motions while still having to fight the Coriolis and creating even more aberration and so and so on. It all starts piling up and gets chaotic pretty quickly.