Orbiting mechanics in Elite

lysan

lysan
We already got a orbiting mechanic in ED, however there are still room for improvements. I hope that we one day can place our ship in a orbital pattern around a moon or planet.

Visiting high G worlds in a large ship should be impossible due to the thrusters power to break free of the planet's gravity well.

Shuttles could then come in as a alternative to visit the planet.

Probably this is too difficult and the game play rewards would be less than the actual work to get it in the game.

Still it would be awesome as a space nerd so see it.
 
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Ignition

I
"This is not Kerbal Space Program" they said and now we have the most arcade experience! yeeeaayyy.

Its impossible to dumb more this game.
 

Matt Harpring

Matt Harpring
I'd love to park my ship in orbit around a planet. Even if it's just on sign off, it seems more natural then just leaving it in interstellar space.

As for the gravity thing, I always kinda hoped that once we got atmospheric worlds, we'd get a new class of ships between our current biggest and cap ships. Right now, they would just supercede our current big ships, but if you balance bigger ships by locking them out of atmospheric and high g worlds, our current big 3+T9 would remain relevant (similar to where the python is now).
 

Loskene

L
Lysander lysan said:
yeah, it would be nice to have a more realistic approach, however it's not that easy to do I recon.
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There are some bodies small enough that you can orbit them within the velocities our ships are capable of maintaining with FA off, but there's no official support for it. Without patched conics or apoapsis/periapsis readouts you either have to do some back of the envelope maths to work out your appropriate velocity for a circular orbit around a given body at a given altitude, or you have to just barge it and hope for the best. I've seen it done, so I know it's possible, but I doubt they'd bother making it official as it's of niche interest at best and doesn't really add anything gameplay-wise. If you want to circumnavigate a planet you just use orbital cruise, and any world with gravity high enough to prevent safely landing a large ship (which to my knowledge is none of them if you're careful) would require orbital velocities beyond what our ships are allowed to coast at. I don't know how much this changes with engineered dirty drives but even they don't make that much of a difference on large ships.
 

lysan

lysan
Loskene said:
There are some bodies small enough that you can orbit them within the velocities our ships are capable of maintaining with FA off, but there's no official support for it. Without patched conics or apoapsis/periapsis readouts you either have to do some back of the envelope maths to work out your appropriate velocity for a circular orbit around a given body at a given altitude, or you have to just barge it and hope for the best. I've seen it done, so I know it's possible, but I doubt they'd bother making it official as it's of niche interest at best and doesn't really add anything gameplay-wise. If you want to circumnavigate a planet you just use orbital cruise, and any world with gravity high enough to prevent safely landing a large ship (which to my knowledge is none of them if you're careful) would require orbital velocities beyond what our ships are allowed to coast at. I don't know how much this changes with engineered dirty drives but even they don't make that much of a difference on large ships.
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Yes, I know that this is only very few people who would appreciate it, but it would be soooo cool. Placing yourself in a geostationary orbit would be awesome for me, but I'm also a nerd...and weird...and old...HEY I got a beard does that count Michael????

boetDY9.jpg
 
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Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Well, its not like you can orbit while in SC anyway due to all that wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff that is going on when your FSD is active. Outside of it.... well, what would be the actual point. You're just going to sit there watching your ship do what exactly?

The only use i can think of this would be for timelapse videos. Unless you are the sort of player that likes just sitting watching planets for hours on end.

Otherwise, just drop out of SC while still above the planet and sit there. You will maintain altitude and relative position above the surface for as long as you want. Its not orbiting i know, its more like hovering.
 

lysan

lysan
Agony_Aunt said:
Well, its not like you can orbit while in SC anyway due to all that wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff that is going on when your FSD is active. Outside of it.... well, what would be the actual point. You're just going to sit there watching your ship do what exactly?

The only use i can think of this would be for timelapse videos. Unless you are the sort of player that likes just sitting watching planets for hours on end.

Otherwise, just drop out of SC while still above the planet and sit there. You will maintain altitude and relative position above the surface for as long as you want. Its not orbiting i know, its more like hovering.
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Again, yes it will not give enough regarding game play, however I could imagine placing my ship in geo orbit, launch a fighter and go down to a high G world and hunt some big animals :) and it would make big ships a no go on high G worlds because they can't take off due to the gravity.
 
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ArachAu

ArachAu
You do orbit, in a fashion, it's just not communicated and certainly not as robust as say KSP. In regular flight everything flies at relative velocities to the orbit point. I assume that it works the same when you just drop down from cruise, but I've never honestly sat and waited long enough to see if that's the case.

Jump into a RES site or a CZ and your location will orbit the body, if you sit and wait long enough. Rings that go into shadow are a nice place to see that quickly. I don't think it works "Deep Space" situations where you're not in the influence of a particular body.
 
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Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Lysander lysan said:
Again, yes it will not give enough regarding game play, however I could imagine placing my ship in geo orbit, launch a fighter and go down to a high G world and hunt some big animals :) and it would make big ships a no go on high G worlds because they can't take off due to the gravity.
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Except fighters can't move more than 30km from their motherships...
 

smartroad

smartroad
I posted something similar in the Horizons forum. My thought is that while in orbital cruise (could apply to normal flight as well i guess) when you point the nose of the ship at 0 degrees (or within one or two degrees), and the throttle is in the blue zone or lower, the flight computer locks on and you just zoom around the planet. Not really 'orbit' in the traditional sense, constantly falling, but at least uses existing systems :)
 

xondk

X
Lysander lysan said:
Shuttles could then come in as a alternative to visit the planet.
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A shuttle would face the exact same problems on high G?
The main reason we can do it in Elite is because we have a perfect power system, with enough power high gravity isn't a problem, that said, landing on high G is risky, especially the very high ones, possible, sure, and if you know what you are doing no major risk, but yeah..I do not see what getting a shuttle would fix in this issue?
Ignition said:
"This is not Kerbal Space Program" they said and now we have the most arcade experience! yeeeaayyy.

Its impossible to dumb more this game.
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I seriously doubt you've ever played an arcade game, especially with how you voice your opinion, please just stop.
 

lysan

lysan
xondk said:
A shuttle would face the exact same problems on high G?
The main reason we can do it in Elite is because we have a perfect power system, with enough power high gravity isn't a problem, that said, landing on high G is risky, especially the very high ones, possible, sure, and if you know what you are doing no major risk, but yeah..I do not see what getting a shuttle would fix in this issue?

I seriously doubt you've ever played an arcade game, especially with how you voice your opinion, please just stop.
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A shuttle has a lower mass thus easier to get off a high G world.
 

DLewth

DLewth
I think you can, it's just flippin' hard: in 10 years of playing FFE, I managed it twice, but I can't believe DB would would back-track on that sort of realism. The problem is doing it with no accurate ground tracking - you just have to fire yourself off and hope you got the numbers right.
 

CmdrJacks

CmdrJacks
It's something I would enjoy, I've played an ungodly amount of KSP, but it wouldn't make much sense outside a curiosity. DeltaV and V isn't really a problem in ED ships and so orbiting, transfers and the suchlike would just be slower ways of achieving what we can already brute-force. I did used to enjoy slingshotting in FE2 though, but doubt it made my journeys any quicker.
 
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