For full newtonian flight you wouldn't have any dampening at all. All movement would be controlled by thruster/throttle input.
As for the need of pinpoint accuracy etc I know people who use all different methods of FA-off control. This is purely a pilot skill and determination as to how good you get in FA-off combat.
Like I have said many times your control method do NOT dictate your ability to fly or fight with FA-off. Your determination to learn does. A good FA-off pilot with HOTAS will still kick the of an ordinary pilot using KB+M and vice versa.
Ultimately the question about FA-off piloting is down to what you want out of it. Advantage in combat? Use it selectively and learn when to switch etc. Agility for manoeuvring? Grab the stock sidey and go practice. Living the true lifestyle? Come join us on the discord and forget about whether or not you are gud enough and just enjoy being a space pilot!
You're confused between spaceflight and flight assist - all motion is "fully Newtonian", on land, sea or air, as it is in space. All it means is that a body's motion remains constant until a force is applied, at which point it either accelerates or decelerates.
"Flight assist", in the context of ED, means that some or all of these forces are applied automatically to stabilise your ship's rotation.
If ED was "fully Newtonian" then your ship would allow you, as pilot, to control your own thrusters, regardless of your speed relative to anything else, and regardless of whether flight assist was on or off.
Unless of course you'd programmed your flight assist to limit your speed - which would be perfectly acceptable, if that's what you wanted to do.
In ED however, flight assist is
always enabled - actively damping your speed whether you like it or not. You cannot switch it off. Instead, you have to spend silly money buying bigger engines and thrusters, and then the flight assist lets you accelerate to a very slightly higher speed, before cutting your engines again.
In ED, "FA-off", as explained by previous posters, merely disables angular damping. Linear damping remains stuck on.
In previous
Elites, it was the other way around - FA-off disabled linear damping, but angular damping was still applied. This was a far superior implementation. Just as a matter of basic logic, let alone fun flight. But then previous Elites were fully Newtonian - they had no space speed limits. ED is non-Newtonian because it uses network bandwidth as a function of in-game velocity; the faster you go, the higher the network load. They could've done it the other way around, using relative rather than absolute velocities, which would've reduced the network load as a function of velocity, but for whatever reason didn't, so now we're stuck with wobbly submarines and space speed limits.
Whichever way you look at it, ED's flight model and flight assist modes are just incredibly dumb and implausible. No spaceship systems would ever be designed this way. Disabling angular damping is the last thing any sane pilot would want or need to do. Upgrading engines and thrusters when the only thing limiting your speed is the "flight assist" system is just utterly hatstand.
If ED had full Newtonian flight, like the previous games, flight assist could be awesome, totally plausible and consistent...
...think about it - logically, you'd be able to adjust curves for all 3 axes and all 3 planes. Switch between mode presets. Set your flight assist to chart a course between two locations, straight-line or curved, while maintaining full manual control of rotational and linear thrusters - so you could dogfight freely, while your ship continued to follow its pre-set course, regardless of which direction you were pointing at any given moment, by coordinating all of its various thrusters to maintain that course, while still allowing you, as pilot, to make any manual thrusts you want... How cool would THAT be? But no, instead all we get is angular damping on/off, and blinkin' space speed limits.
Your confusion between "Newtonain" and "flight assist" exemplifies the dumbing-down FD have inflicted on their low-expectations user base. You think they're mutually-exclusive opposites! I expect most ED players suffer the same delusions. It's a travesty of what Elite used to be about, and what ED could've, & should've, achieved...
