Orbit button

[Detonator]

Surely by the date of Elite your ship would have the ability to be put into orbit around a planet or sun instead of flying manually. You get to a distance and direction your happy with from a planet or sun and select an feature that would keep you at the same distance and on the same heading.

I jumped to a star that had nothing in it (by mistake). The next jump was on the far side of the sun. I could have put it in orbit around the sun and gone and made a cup of tea and by the time I came back I might have been nearly there.

 

[NatoNine]

I agree with your title more then your statements. I don't understand how the problem you're talking about would be solved by a orbit button... If you are talking about a navigational orbit in supercruise it's hardly needed because you can circumnavigate a star in just a few seconds, if you are talking about a Newtonian orbit in normal space then it would take somewhere between hours and weeks to orbit a star even at a close distance... Generally speeking you should never leave your ship in supercruise unintended because it could be interdicted and attacked and a orbit button would make fuel scooping too easy. Yes it would be great if Newtonian orbits were implemented, and it is a personal bugbear of mine that they are not in a post KSP world, but it would not solve the problem you had. By the way you only need to have line of sight for a jump so you only need to move far enough to peek around the edge at your next destination.

 

[Toumal]

Orbit button?

View attachment 5164

But on topic, the ships in elite have such a ridiculous amount of thrust and fuel available that they can just sustain constant distance to a planet without the need to orbit. That, and Elite was never big on the whole orbital mechanics thing.

Our current space travel technology is basically just "do one or two small thrusts and coast the rest of the way", hence the need for fancy orbital maneuvers. In elite you just take off and go. No need for that stuff IMHO

 

[NatoNine]

But on topic, the ships in elite have such a ridiculous amount of thrust and fuel available that they can just sustain constant distance to a planet without the need to orbit. That, and Elite was never big on the whole orbital mechanics thing.

Actually stars have so much gravity that if we were to do that as close to a star as we can get in this game the gravity would be lethal (the sun has about 28 Gs of surface gravity) . However if you orbit a star you would be in free fall and not effected by its gravity.