Lore to explain the bad space physics

First, I played FD games since 1984 and Elite 2 was pure space. No "speed" limits, just acceleration in g, pure Newtonian physics, lasers at massive ranges, very realistic and extremely not fun, so I totally get why FD went with a "flight sim through air" model this time. So how does one roleplay/lore up an explanation? How about the law? Let's think that the tech allows for some gravity manipulation, as is evidenced by the ship layouts. They're designed like ships at sea, so there must be artificial gravity in the ships otherwise they'd be built like the ships in "The Expanse" ie: vertical with decks at 90 degrees to the thrust making artificial gravity by engine acceleration. So lets say we have materials that have a way to make gravity. The law didn't want metal flying through space forever, so they regulated it such that all space materials and energy have a damper field. This is why bullets and lasers have damage falloff at range (as if through an atmosphere), ships have maximum speeds (as if flying through air), and materials/cargo cans stop in space instead of flying away at whatever velocity they initially had. Either that or just lore that space isn't a vacuum, it's actually the aether they hypothesized about back in the 1800s. I like that answer the best :)
 
The limiters are enforced by the same safety board that controls your fsd to keep you from entering permit blocked systems is a better answer.

Even with engines disabled, there are still life support systems you can't disable to keep you within certain safety margins.


There all bases covered. No need to invoke even less believable aether nonsense
 
Let's think that the tech allows for some gravity manipulation, as is evidenced by the ship layouts. They're designed like ships at sea, so there must be artificial gravity in the ships otherwise they'd be built like the ships in "The Expanse" ie: vertical with decks at 90 degrees to the thrust making artificial gravity by engine acceleration.

Sorry, but No. Word from Above (Sir DB himself, I believe) is that the ED universe has no artificial gravity. It's why space stations and the habitat ring on Imperial capital ships rotate. As for internal design, the ships are designed with a clear up-and-down because they need to be designed to function in a gravitational field; "down" must be in the direction of the landing gear. Aligning "down" witht he main engine thrust vector would not make sense, as the main engines do not provide thrust for most of the time a ship is in space; the FSD distorts space, rather than accelerates the ship, so the ship is in zero-G the whole time it is in Supercruise.

This is why bullets and lasers have damage falloff at range (as if through an atmosphere), ships have maximum speeds (as if flying through air), and materials/cargo cans stop in space instead of flying away at whatever velocity they initially had.

You forgot one scenario: exploded spaceship debris, which eventually stops expanding, stops rotating and comes to a full stop. But they can't have placed inertial dampeners and little powerpacks scattered throughout the ship's hull, so that every major piece of debris of an exploded ship has its own self-powered intertial dampener. That'd be just silly.

The "Ships have maximum speeds" is easy to solve: the retro-thrusters automatically fire if you exceed the "maximum speed" your ship's navigation computer is programmed with. Which does of course simply move the question, to "Why do all the ship manufacturers program in such a ridiculously low flight speed?". Since the inability to infinitely accelerate away from danger is the cause of millions of ships exploding every month, I can only assume it's a conspiracy of the ship-builders.

The same simple explanation cannot, of course, apply to your other examples. Lasers are prone to the inverse-square law so damage fall-off is to be expected, but kinetic weaponry damage fall-off is, of course, ridiculous. My head-canon is that it doesn't happen. Same goes for cargo and debris magically coming to a halt, in defiance of Sir Isaac Newton. If I think I observe such phenomena actually happening, my observations must be faulty.

If one must assume that the observed phenomena are real, then another explanation must be made. The aether is both an unsatisfactory answer (if the aether exists, how come the planets don't slow down and plummet into their stars?) and prone to copyright abuse (the spaceships in Star Wars canon are steered by an "aetherial rudder"). I would postulate a more reasonable alternative:

Invisible space ghosts.

They fly around and grab hold of stuff to stop it from moving.
 
the game has always been " do game mechanic, who cares about lore"

though to be fair. ..there's a good amount of things regarding space and space travel, that would make it exceptionally boring and take far too long or be far too hard to be a game. So even with a lot of careful explaining and behavior, there's still always going to be a great deal amount of handwavium if you want a game.
 
I’m not complaining a bit, it really needs to be gamey to work. Have you seen or played Elite 2? Crazy realistic, and brutal. No max speeds, battles happen and ranges where all you see is a pixel and lasers start to hit at full force, all jousting battles.... and trying to catch a piece of blown off material from an exploding ship? Well, pick one and chase it down. Glorious, but so hard.
 
You're confusing hard with stupid. Jousting battles are boring, require no strategy and end up being nothing but a battle decided by ship stats.

Chasing after parts after that are moving at hundreds of m/s is equally a waste of time involving nothing but tedious chasing. No brain activity. Just long bouts of chasing...

At least the unrealistic ww1 dogfighting has an opportunity for strategy and skill. Assuming they get npc's that can fly without cheating ship stats
 
Realistically, a Laserverse (i.e. universe where powerful weapon lasers are a thing) does result in extremely lanchestrian engagements: the side with the bigger ship(s) wins. A bigger ship can carry more armour and fit bigger lasers. Bigger lasers suffer less from diffraction, hence much bigger effective ranges. A smaller ship gets the short end of the stick all around: it gets smoked by a huge laser before it can even bring its own weapon into effective range. Hence, no Fighters in a Laserverse. Hy-uge battleships with single gargantuan lasers are where it's at.

--

As or ED space physics: the best explanation I can come up with, as recently discussed in similar threads, is that even the thrusters aren't newtonian reaction engines. Must be some kind of reactionless drives that may possibly also function by space distortion, similar to FSDs. They would use energy to create a "field" of some sorts that makes the ship slip in a particular direction, and cutting that energy causes the field to bleed out quickly, bringing the ship to a stop.
These kinds of thrusters are used because they are much more energy efficient than reaction engines -- by about a factor of 1 million, in fact, allowing the ships to keep firing their thrusters for hours on end if need be. The disadvantage being that this method is very limited in effect, thus leading to top speeds on the order of 1950's fighter jets.

Of course this isn't scientific at all. It also doesn't really converge with the visuals of thrusters in ED, which totally do look like ion or plasma thrusters. But it kinda matches the observed flight mechanics.

Personally I don't understand why they didn't take a page out of Independence War's book on space flight mechanics. Those games featured Newtonian flight physics, but the ships had built-in limiters to iirc 10000m/s. So you could totally have a dogfight hurtling through the system at 5km/s or whatever. It was pretty slick. ^^
In fact, the unrealistic, non-newtonian flight model of ED was the reason why it took me five years after release to finally get the game. Had the physics been more like iWar(2), I would have gotten it years ago.
 
First, I played FD games since 1984 and Elite 2 was pure space. No "speed" limits, just acceleration in g, pure Newtonian physics, lasers at massive ranges, very realistic and extremely not fun, so I totally get why FD went with a "flight sim through air" model this time. So how does one roleplay/lore up an explanation? How about the law? Let's think that the tech allows for some gravity manipulation, as is evidenced by the ship layouts. They're designed like ships at sea, so there must be artificial gravity in the ships otherwise they'd be built like the ships in "The Expanse" ie: vertical with decks at 90 degrees to the thrust making artificial gravity by engine acceleration. So lets say we have materials that have a way to make gravity. The law didn't want metal flying through space forever, so they regulated it such that all space materials and energy have a damper field. This is why bullets and lasers have damage falloff at range (as if through an atmosphere), ships have maximum speeds (as if flying through air), and materials/cargo cans stop in space instead of flying away at whatever velocity they initially had. Either that or just lore that space isn't a vacuum, it's actually the aether they hypothesized about back in the 1800s. I like that answer the best :)
Space magic
 

Craith

Volunteer Moderator
I often wonder how we don't turn into paste like Manéo every time we arrive in a new system and immediately stop in front of a star.

Like, do Elite ships have inertial dampeners? :sneaky:
This is easy - we are arriving in supercruise, where we have our own spacetime bubble, where we don't move (if you look, you will see that your thrusters don't fire in SC). We move our relative position in space in relation to a point of reference in the system (initially the main star), but the ship does not physically move.

It is a bit like an Alcubierre drive. It does not explain why we still have space dust moving in SC, though.
 
If anyone can explain to me why my ship wobbles when facing down a planet with FA on, I can explain everything you need.
 
Yes relativity would slap in the face with a wet great white shark on entering a system
Yes i really miss the old thrust forwards, backwards and drift the tub combat ( it would REALLY separate men from boyz )
No i dont miss auto pilot mudering you into a planet, station or star when ever it felt it had not done it for a while, always when you forgot to save
nor being splatted on the "wind" shield of a panther clipper.
The other day i hit the boost button on my keel, in a roid field, immediate full decel, but it did trouble me that when i turned into the roid i got closer to it ( on full decel ) and why does my speed effect my turn rate????
Thats why all space sims since Babylon 5 have been soup for space ( its a great idea - but now leave real space to real astronaughts ) real space not fun for 95%, 5% doesnt make a profit
And we also have new questions about intersteller space, like a wall of plasma that 2 voyger probes are currently in, (prob our star system wake as its also moving)
 
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