General Orbital mechanics in normal flight

[Neveon]

Implement orbital mechanics in sub-light flight mode. Remove ship speed limit (or increase it to the point where it's boring to achieve it) and implement acceleration limitations.
For combat, the ship will indeed have to limit the speed for the most efficient turning rate. To keep an opponent engaged a field could be generated that limits engine performance.

By adding the above modifications you will attract also the hard sci-fi player base. This doesn't sound much, but let me give you my example. I played Elite dangerous quite a bit (even went 37000 ly away from the bobble and came back) until I found full Newtonian flight model games (Hellion, KSP, Juno new origins). Since them, I simply cannot play Elite dangerous like I use to.

 

[varonica]

Already there, just target a planet or moon using SCA and when you arrive your ship will go into orbit!

 

[Neveon]

Thank you for the answer, but that is not Newtonian orbital mechanics, that is supercruising around an object. I'm referring to staying around an object held between the gravitational force and the centrifugal force. I'm referring that in normal flight you are always falling towards something, falling over the horizon (orbiting) or falling towards a moon, planet, sun, your speed is always in reference to something. And regarding the speed limit, it's absurd to limit the speed of a ship, (you can go over the limit if you fall, but not if you want). Have an option to limit for increased maneuverability. As for the ships capabilities, the acceleration should make the difference.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

SRVs have no speed limit, just acceleration limitations, so they have been put into stable orbits around moons.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xngCJEgXoKs

(The catch, if trying this yourself, is that you have to keep the orbit entirely within the "drop radius" - so it has to be quite a bit faster and lower)

People have managed to get ships into stable Newtonian orbits too, though obviously with the speed limiters it takes fairly careful selection of the body and orbit parameters to do so.

And regarding the speed limit, it's absurd to limit the speed of a ship

If we started listing all the physical absurdities of ships we wouldn't have time to play the game. Conservation of energy and mass are broken more often than they're kept to, ship masses seem to increase with roughly the square rather than the cube of their length, the implied sizes of the larger internals don't make sense, there are some very weird aspects to how Coriolis station rotate implying a huge force is constantly being applied, physical weapon rounds lose energy but not speed as they travel. Finding things which do follow expected physical laws is the much shorter list.

As for the ships capabilities, the acceleration should make the difference.

Conveniently one of the many things the game ignores is just how little acceleration the tiny amount of propellant being used by our ships should generate. If our ships aren't being accelerated by Newtonian mechanics in the first place (there is no action-reaction causing them to move) there's no particular reason that their deceleration should be governed by Newtonian mechanics either.

 

[varonica]

Look, this is a game, the physics are modeled in a basic way to give the most realistic feeling without requiring a supercomputer to just run it. There is no actual gravity in the game, the simulated gravity of an object just.....stops at a certain distance from said object, be it moon, planet or whatever. You will find this demonstrated quite clearly if you approach a really fast moving moon or planet, take a visit to Mitterand Hollow, you will understand then. While it's possible to do so as stated by Ian, there are limitations on how far out you can orbit due to the gravity just stopping.

 

[Markov Chaney]

If FDev implemented classical orbital mechanics it would still not play anything like KSP, because the ships simply aren't designed for orbital manoeuvring (indeed, they are not designed in that sense at all!); none of the off-axis thrusts make sense, so you'd have to fix that, and also fix some extremely hideous polar moments on some ships; and the maximum thrust, the reaction time to build that thrust, and the apparent SI available mean you can override any motion of the ship at pretty much any time. The limit on that is already implemented pretty accurately if you try it out with some stopping distances you'd expect.

FDev already does partially implement Galilean inertia, and the response to that from everyone is "hey, why does my ship jiggle a bit when I lift off a landing pad that's rotating in a station?" and nobody likes it.

 

[varonica]

FDev already does partially implement Galilean inertia, and the response to that from everyone is "hey, why does my ship jiggle a bit when I lift off a landing pad that's rotating in a station?" and nobody likes it.

Yeah, in the end the basis on which any decision about implementing physics is concerned is, will the players like it, will it work as a game play feature or will it just annoy a huge number of players. It's a game, it's not a full on simulation, that would be.....bad for the sort of game play we like I suspect.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

You are asking for a major physics and mechanics overhaul in a 10 year old game. Not going to happen. Maybe in a sequel, should there ever be one. But ED will stay as it is until the end of it's lifetime.

 

[Ameeleean2]

While it would be nice not to have speed limit or at last for it to be capped at fraction of speed light, there are certain drawbacks for objects moving with higher speed.
If someone is interested just take a look at difficulty of intercepting missile with another smaller missile- things get really difficult when speed goes up even to 10s of thousands of km/h (and that is slow when compared to what ED ship in supercruise mode can do). While I do not know how many "ticks" per second game client can handle (well it can be approximated by fps in some way) I'm quite sure handling speeds that already are in game is beyond hardware limitations of my own PC even if it is restricted to gravitational interactions only.
Edit: One of those drawbacks would be how combat looks like. Right now it resembles WWII dogfight and that is something that average player can still handle (speed and bullet speed included). Combat at high speeds with normal physics would be either impossible or really hard to do since game prohibits automation and latter one would be required to issue orders to onboard computer to handle combat.