Lets talk Pitch and Yaw - Thrusters do not equal main engines.

[CMDR-ss47ply]

hello commanders,
My only commplant on the flight and engeering mechanics in this game is the pitch and yaw rate. Commpard to engine speed. I feel that yaw at the least needs a buff across the board on all ships and I dont care about flight assit on and off I know how to use it and I fly pretty good but when I am on a low G planet say 0.04 there should be no way in heck that my turret on srv yaws faster then my ship or that a bell helochopter can 360 on its yaw axis faster then my space ship in space. I hope Im not alone in this and we can all come up with some kind of fix for this problem.
One thought I have is to seperate engeneering thrusters into 2 separet catagorys ! would be for main engines and boost. the other for control thrusters thrusters and main engines should not be grouped together that way we could engineer a good balance of performance
Ok my rant is over what say you

 

[60mm]

Was done purposefully to make the ships fly like WW2 fighter planes, which is how everyone still imagines spaceship combat because of stuff like Star Wars.

It isn't going to change. Accept it. Making spaceship combat remotely realistic would turn it into something no one would want to play.

 

[Jpotter]

The Yaw rate is by design, it's not going to change:

Elite Dangerous FAQ

Elite Dangerous is a massively multiplayer space epic and flight simulation game. It is the fourth in the legendary and Guinness world record making Elite series. It includes mass-multiplayer with a shared narrative and a 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy as an integral part, while still allowing...

elite-dangerous.fandom.com

Why is yaw so slow?

There is an inherent flaw with the premise of close combat space flight, leading to endless turreting and circle-strafing especially in PVP multiplayer, due to the lack of terrain features in mid space, compound that with the fact that Elite also features lightspeed pulse and beam lasers making this issue even more apparent. A fly-by-wire layer is applied on top of the Newtonian physics and it limits the yaw speed.

Elite: Dangerous deals with this by limiting the yaw rate and enforce an optimum corner speed by way of thruster placement and limits in the flight control computer, forcing to roll and then pitch to get the most efficient turn rate (less efficient, but most comfortable for a human pilot), in addition there is a G-LOC system, a preliminary version can be seen here.

 

[777Driver]

Take a look at most ships, you won't find thrusters for yaw. Sone of them use gimbals on the main thrusters, others are using the roll thrusters to provide yaw. Doesn't matter anyway, the thruster logic is based on a FBW system, that means the cmdr fly's the computer, the computer dictates the thrust output. As others have mentioned, the devs wanted a particular flight model.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

And here I thought all that fighter plane in space mechanics was just the Brits patting Roy Brown on the back, still.

 

[dm06]

I would like to have removed yaw and all side thrusters completely. Leave roll, pitch, forward, backward and boost only. As for docking - the ship must be stopped above the pad and the pad should grab it with gravity things.

 

[thistle]

I would like to have removed yaw and all side thrusters completely. Leave roll, pitch, forward, backward and boost only. As for docking - the ship must be stopped above the pad and the pad should grab it with gravity things.

Keyboard only control, like proper BBC 84 Elite, A S X < > SPACE oh yes, roll and pitch, roll and pitch.

Glorious.

 

[CMDR-ss47ply]

I all these years engineers should be able to write new software to improve these

 

[Robert Maynard]

Here's a reply by Mike Evans in a thread from some time ago on the topic:

They aren't ignoring those requests.

They are simply choosing not to act on them... for reasons they have clearly expressed on many occasions.

Indeed, a request is just that. We don't have to do anything if we don't want to but that doesn't mean we didn't read and consider the request. Suffice to say a low yaw rate is a fundamental part of our games aesthetics and a corner stone to our flight model that we at frontier like the way it is. We're not changing it, for to do so would be to compromise our own vision for what Elite: Dangerous is and what it's going to be. I don't give a damn what all the other space games have done in the past, nor do I care that our yaw rates are apparently even slower than a plane's is (though every time I've tried doing a pure yaw turn in IL-2 I've stalled my plane before I got anything that even resembled a steady and fast turn rate). Fast yaw and pitch in a space game is a video game trope of the highest order along with banner arrows sliding around the screen and compasses telling you where to fly all the time. I'm almost certain that other developers just implement those features because they've been so prevalent rather than actually reassessing whether the game needed them or could be even better without them! We found for example that the compass that pointed you towards your target at all times made combat too easy to end in stalemate of circling. As soon as we tried removing it all of a sudden it was more exciting to fight someone because they could give you the slip whilst you weren't glancing at your sensors and even if you did pay attention to the sensors the difference in the way the information is presented can still mean you don't quite stay on the target's tail perfectly, again providing more opportunities for them to turn the tide of the battle.

Suffice to say we wanted Elite to feel like star wars in terms of how the ships move by banking/rolling and pitching through manoeuvres opposed to the yaw and pitch based FPS style movement most other space games offered (where roll plays little or no part). That limitation to having to do your main directional change manoeuvring by pitching makes the flight path taken to be more cinematic and means a skilled player can predict the manoeuvres of an opponent in advanced by observing their current roll position relative to themselves only. So long as they match the roll quickly enough they can always follow through the inevitable pitch manoeuvre effectively and maintain the chase. If the target could yaw or pitch effectively then it's much harder to assess what they're going to do as they're current roll position doesn't really matter any more.

Finally realism has played no part whatsoever in any of our design discussions about the flight model. We don't care what would be realistic as we only care what the game play experience is when flying these ships and so far we feel we're hitting the right notes for the majority of our audience.

 

[60mm]

I would like to have removed yaw and all side thrusters completely. Leave roll, pitch, forward, backward and boost only.

"Non-HOTAS user signature detected"

 

[War Eagle]

I totally disagree with the premise completely, if you look at the main engines of any ship they are far greater than the "Thrusters", example look at the AspX.

Note much room for thrusters on those thin angles, now look at the FAS - it has plenty of room on those flat sides for all the thrusters you would want and it has a much higher yaw rate than the AspX. This makes perfect sense to me.


Now look at the main engines on this T9, do you really think thrusters are going to produce thrust like that? NO they are not.

We are talking about thrusters and not engines, also the turret on the SRV would be an electric motor system and not thrusters.
Or did I misunderstand the OP?

 

[photomankc]

I would like to have removed yaw and all side thrusters completely. Leave roll, pitch, forward, backward and boost only. As for docking - the ship must be stopped above the pad and the pad should grab it with gravity things.

Good grief. What is wrong with people?

“Cars should not have steering wheels. Just a rudder and they should be powered by running like in the Flintstone’s.”

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I would like to have removed yaw and all side thrusters completely. Leave roll, pitch, forward, backward and boost only. As for docking - the ship must be stopped above the pad and the pad should grab it with gravity things.

Gravity things? What in hades are those?

 

[photomankc]

Gravity things? What in hades are those?

You know..... THINGS..... with gravity. Jeeeezzzeeee.

 

[CMDR-ss47ply]

rolling in space just makes no sense unless you are doging faster then light blaster fire lol, there is no air flow to induce a roll turn let alone stall a ship I know i need to let it go it just seems lame the reason why

 

[60mm]

rolling in space just makes no sense...

Space combat happening within visual range makes no sense either, nor does FTL, but we do need a game worth playing right? You are choosing little bits and pieces to apply 'but muh realism' to and ignoring the entire game which is pure fantasy.

 

[photomankc]

Space combat happening within visual range makes no sense either, nor does FTL, but we do need a game worth playing right? You are choosing little bits and pieces to apply 'but muh realism' to and ignoring the entire game which is pure fantasy.

Exactly. Almost no combat would actually take place with guns or pew pews. It would be similar to "The Expanse". One BVR blip launches missiles against another BVR blip and the ships try to shoot down as many of those as possible, but it's likely that longest range and first shot wins. No shields either.

With enough acceleration the impact of even a tiny missile would be catastrophic.


That said I think yaw is nerfed to oblivion in this game and I don't love that. Planet-side, where rolling is a no-no it's just freaking painful.

 

[60mm]

That said I think yaw is nerfed to oblivion in this game and I don't love that.

Give the Chieftain a whirl. It's Yaw is particularly excellent.

 

[hundergrn]

Theory crafting mechanics of a made up space ship sim here....

The thruster module generates thrust through using the stored waste product of the power plant. It seems to act more like a vehicle transmission and drive train. The thrusters are basically just drivers to direct the propulsion given to them, aka space wheels.

In atmosphere these ships would behave very differently, if at all, compared to how they function in space due to how they fly. With airplanes and helicopters, friction with air creates lift and allows them to be maneuverable (also quite agile depending on design) by essentially pulling/pushing themselves through atmosphere. Space ships have to function with very little to no friction and can not rely on it for lift, they have to have something to eject to move.

The larger an object is the harder it is to move in a singular direction and more so when changing the direction of momentum. These ships are massive! The small ship sized Viper is the equivalent size of a Boeing 737. The bigger an object is, the harder it is to turn. IRL a Boeing 737 would rip itself apart trying to do what a Viper can do.

In game, ships have set placement for their drivers (thrusters) and even with their sheer size, most are not (can not be?) placed at the furthest point from the ships center axis to maximize yaw and roll rates. Separating maneuvering thrust from the main thruster module have to invite space magic (thargoid/guardian tech?) into your space ship to have noticeable difference in yaw/roll performance without sizing the maneuvering thrusters to the main driver size or changing the placement on the ship. Unless they are horribly inefficient by design of course. Round tires do work better than square tires.

 

[photomankc]

I do think there is logic to the roll/pitch high-G mechanism vs just yaw. Assuming that we are not doing magic with “inertial dampening” anyway. These ships would pull massive Gs with how they “fly”. Think of the force when going around a tight turn-off on the road at high speed. That uncomfortable pull to the side. That almost never approaches 1G. Now consider doing that at several times 1G. No bueno. Our bodies are not meant to be loaded like that. (Then again reality suggests we don’t need to be in the cockpit at all really. Then Gs are limited only by structure.)

But..... a snap-roll and then pitching up hard is FAR more tolerable for a pilot in a chair. Negative Gs are really bad too. Your head doesn’t like having all your blood crammed into it. Things start to pop.

So it makes sense to limit the yaw in high-speed manuever. Where it makes none is when descending to the surface and trying to orient and land. I could pop popcorn before the ship can turn 180 degrees.