So... Whatever happened to traffic control?

[rekurzion]

At minimum, there should be a traffic pattern for stations, and especially the letterbox, to reduce congestion, blockage, and people zooming in and out at will.

there is. follow the green on entering and follow the green on exiting. stay below 100m/s. concede the right of way and approach the slot in order.

human commanders and the rare NPC are the only ones who don't follow these long established rules.

fly dangerous o7

 

[Tarman]

"Attention HTV-01, you have entered a speed restriction zone. For your own safety, and ours, your COVAS unit will adjust your maximum speed and disable boosting. Thank you for your visit and please, enjoy your stay."

We know it would happen in a real world scenario because humans can't be trusted to be adults. We would "boomtube" all the time; so governments would make it illegal to not have COVAS (as it is now), and would then install an override in COVAS to prevent us from speeding/boosting.

Whilst I personally don't mind that, as it would feel more realistic to me, I know it would infuriate a lot of players who are very time-sensitive and like to be able to decide how fast they're going - it would, however, make for a much better traffic flow I believe.

A thru-slot would also make more sense from an design perspective; not only for traffic flow, but for safety purposes as well. A single entrance/exit is just ... mind-blowingly daft when it comes to safety. Unfortunately Frontier didn't want to deviate too much from the original (which is a pity since a lot can change in over a century.. just not in the Elite universe it seems), so they had to stay with the one-slot design.

I could go into the whole "easier to keep an atmo with one small door" thing but meh, it's all fake science really.

It honestly doesn't bother me to have a single toaster. The last time I had any type of real issues with traffic was back in the day when you'd go belowdecks for a while and your framerate would bottom out from all the NPC death debris floating in the station. These days I only get a bit annoyed over the NPC pad-hogging at outposts.