Veld

Don't forget there's always hydroponics. But that would come at added expense ofc so fertile worlds would be more productive.

What do you guys think about adding fully customisable/scriptable exosuits? Let's say the exosuit follows an abstract physics system. We'll split the parts up into arms/legs/torso-head: Arms: more mass = less recoil but slower reloading/aiming/ rotation Legs: more mass= less stagger but slower movement Torso: more mass= less stagger but slower rotation In all cases more mass = more armor (taking into account the density of material used) More mass all round = hard to change inertia. Different types of jet pack could also be attached in addition to parts which alter the capabilities of the suit. Like scopes, ambulatory aids, shields, night vision, spider boots etc. As for jet packs more lift is needed for more mass. The jet pack positioning will be locked to the upper back so you don't get people flying around with rocket dicks. With LUA scripting the parts will act like those of a ship but with constraints. For example the jet packs will just be locked to basic controls as if you were a player and torquing wont apply. As for structure there will be a base form that destructible voxels will be made to conform to. They will be warped into trapezoids with spheroid tops and bottoms to flow over the surface. Since the voxels are destructible you can strategically open up weak points in the armour.

So BOO is probably gonna start out their own space skooma trade if this gets implemented. Should be interesting. Don't forget space kraken

NQ has something up their sleeve in mind for space stations. In response to the FB comment they said that the cores would be dynamic but would be a special case in building a space station. But as of now I think they're still static. Edit: and shit i should probably start using multi quote

It wont be an issue as your VTOL thrusters will be able to counter the gravitational pull. It would equivalent to landing on the planet itself. Think of the static space station as a really tall mountain with nothing but the peak. Also planets don't spin as of now so its not an issue.

If they do add CAD it would have to be done in a way that didn't exclude people that didn't know it though.

Sundies can't spawn vehicles, yes, but you can just make the portable warpgates so small only people can fit in. I was thinking of these warpgates as being mere shortrange personnel teleportation devices. Like a "beam me up Scotty" sort of thing. Likewise with the large warpgates they will cost a lot but not as much. But I have to agree with @MookMcMook on this one as I think players should be encouraged to design a vast array of ships for intra system travel. If players just use mini warp gates set up in relay routes spanning the system then that would be boring. Mini warpgates would erase the need for dropships, civilian transport, military transport and probably even resource transport because you could just stick it all in your inventory. But feasible or not, mini warpgates would just be a nice thing to have around and wouldn't enhance the game all that much.

I think sapient aliens would be difficult as making them interact with other orgs is going to be strange. For example if my org is called the "kill all space slime iniative" and I just spam gifts and compliments to the alien AI to get them to like me in an NPC manner, I canact xenophobic right in front of their face and they won't care. Such interactions between player and NPC are going to be very limited and non dynamic. A way to work around this is have an ethics system, like in stellaris, the NPC's can pick up on but it is still ultimately limiting. Being the grand exterminator heirarch of the kill all space slime iniative I could just adopt Alien friendly ethics and change them at the last minute. If you make it like in stellaris and I can't change them at the last minute and have to work with my pops then that just makes things more confusing. Everyone in the kill all space slime iniative is a real person with their own intentions. I would personally just make aliens completely apathetic hostile swarming Lovecraftian horrors from the great beyond that sought to consume all life. This makes the orgs collectively shit themselves and stop fighting to join forces and kill them. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they will fall because of their own selfishness. Only they can decide.

It makes sense For smaller scale projects where a gigantic warp gate is not needed a shorter range, less powerful one is a more logical decision. As for the problems with combat and such. I will use the spawn rooms in planetside 2 as an example: In PS2 the way you spawn at an enemy base is via a sunderer which is a portable spawn unit you drive up there. These are vulnerable so it's wise to have many at once. They the enemy spawns is via their spawn room. You can't actually take an enemy base if it's not in an adjacent territory tile to yours. When the base is overun with your troops the enemy is effectively confined to their spawn room if you have set up an adequate blockade. The way this can apply in game is you roll out a portable warp gate with limited range - you too can respawn on this point. It would be wise to have multiple portable warpgates at once. You can feed reinforcements through the warpgate via concealed warpgate just like the enemy. Whoever gains dominance of the base then simply blocks out the spawn points or destroys them. One can also cut off the feed of reinforcements at the bases. By allowing portable warpgates with the same range the gameplay is more dynamic but not equalised. The thing is in war the playing field is never level. Hence the need for multiple warpgates. Forced equality in combat ultimately makes things stale and encourages people to think inside the box. In an FPS game I can see why personal preference of playstyle should be upheld and game balance be enforced on weapons and such. But in large scale warfare this will just make things too complicated

So like a fillet tool? A bevel tool would also be cool. Most basic CAD tools would be cool thinking about it. Like a hole wizard or an extrude tool for example.

Also new information with regards to thrusters: (source) This indicates you can still use vertical boosters to negate the effects of gravity but now we have a (implicitly) more powerful rocket booster to reach orbital delta-v. However, to quote the first sentence, it is quite implicit that vertical boosters are not needed in space. But ultimately inconclusive. Just realised something major I overlooked. The jet doesn't have any fuel in it. The fuel is cheated so that he can fly without it. That means the gradual changes in acceleration are in fact due to gravity So gravity has to exist during flight. No doubt about it. Updating the posts. We can code lua scripts to make fuel efficient trajectories which will be very useful if you have shuttles constantly relaying resources from one point to another. But first we need to test the gravity equation and make a rework of classical orbital mechanics around it.

I agree with this but one thing you have forgot to mention is the cross sectional area of the vessel (IRL equation) It doesn't make sense for NQ to make borg cubes just as aerodynamic as a fighter jet imo. I have begun an investigation into the atmosphere and so far evidence points to density not coming into play as a value on its own - as it does with regards to the planets (will talk about it more in depth in separate post). So I suspect C(d), rho and 1/2 are merged to a single coefficient specific to the atmosphere. I say atmosphere since I sincerely doubt NQ has the time to calculate friction coefficients specific to every single possible interaction between vessel surface and atmosphere. So they will probably just say D = C(d)Av^2 Adding this to separate hypothesis Makes sense. If they use terminal velocity as an equilibrium in velocity due to atmospheric drag in the atmosphere it makes sense for them to use a similar model for space. This would mean that the second anomalous reading was due to a combination of reaching a high point on the exponential curve of the graph of the 'space drag equation' and the instantaneously increasing atmospheric density. Mostly the atmosphere though. It the atmospheric flight video you can actually see that your atm thrust is proportional to your peak engine thrust by a factor of the atm density itself. So if I have 100 kN thrust and i move up to say 0.84 atm I get 84kN thrust. The atmosphere seems to thin out faster with altitude in the actual planet which hints at there being some form of atmospheric layering system. As the decreasing of space thrust is not a linear relationship throughout and seems to cut off at a certain layer.

Nice idea. You could make it so that you choose a frequency to broadcast on (all if you want) to add immersion. It is mandatory every message is encoded with a certain signature; a random signature descriptive of the block owner to prevent multiple troll signals. If you get trolls spamming the entire bee movie script you can just ignore that signature. Messages can be encrypted by making the signals frequency alternate due to a lua scripted formula. For example I can be in a mission and have one receiver take signals from control whereas the other is open to all frequencies. With this, however, arises an issue that if all frequencies are being used by multiple trolls then how the hell are you going to single out non troll frequencies trying to make contact? I suppose you could police the signatures and ban the spammers. But wouldn't such trolls be like the pirate radio stations in real life? Wouldn't it be fun bounty hunting a guy who was broadcasting copypasta into the galaxy? Another thing is you can just use discord for guaranteed security so encryption is more of an RP thing and a fun coding project.

As I said with regards to underground bastions being accused of being OP: There is almost always a strategy to defeat stuff like this. Personally I would just throw a dummy made of very tough material right into the crossfire of all of the defenses causing the auto targeting to freak out and the whole thing to waste their energy and potentially break down. How they counter that is up to them and how I reciprocate in response to their counter is up to me. That's all if I absolutely had to take it out which isn't the case most of the time. I really hope NQ does not start hand holding the players as it only encourages reptilian, one dimensional thinking and creates more instances of people saying "but wait this is also OP because I can't kill it"

A 3 dimensional vector, yes, but I would say the pilot maintains his acceleration in one plane within the realms of uncertainty in the context of how gravity is acting on him. I.e. even if he veered way off to the right or down he still shouldn't have got that negative acceleration at the second anomaly Speaking of negative acceleration, acceleration is given as a magnitude and not a vector but you can tell it's negative as the given speed is decreasing at these times. I took the values of accelerations only from times he was moving straight. The graph does not describe the journey as a whole. Should have made that clearer thinking about it. This means the only things that could have been altering his acceleration were the changing gravity vectors due to his changing position in the field, changing mass from fuel depletion and the impulse from the boosters to get his velocity vector to change. The changing acceleration due to changing position in the field is there because he is full throttle all the time and will be unable to compensate fully with forward thrust to achieve the maximum acceleration he would get if he set off on the shortest path. I cannot use this data to draw conclusions as I am unable to isolate the variable of gravity. I'm just using it to try and probe at what might be going on and discover which variable I might have to control in future tests. As a sidenote one thing I actually missed was when he hits about 5k km/h his thrust goes down. Perhaps the velocity cap but couldn't spot a distinct pattern. I'll maybe analyse it later making a velocity time graph. Also I apologize if my scientific language is inaccurate. I'm not used to writing research notes like this. And thinking about it there are a lot of things I can stand to make clearer here as this is a pretty multilayered problem.

Also I think there are some flaws in my reasoning I overlooked. I need to reevaluate my hypotheses again. EDIT: updated both gravity and orbital mechanics posts. Gravity still exists dw

It's not the engines. It's the fuel. In real life I could make a craft with a VTOL thruster on the bottom to cancel out the acceleration due to gravity and make me go in a straight line. But such practice in real life would be very high on fuel consumption as we have primitive fuel sources compared to that of the game. Perhaps you're right. I don't know much about scripting in games and it's limitations. You're right. Moving voxels won't go down well. I'll have to change my post on gravity. This is already confirmed in the atmospheric flight video tutorial Can I get a source?

Interesting. But JC said that they would add planet spin. I'll look into it. But may I ask how do you know that anti gravity generators will be applied in this way? Source please?

GAS GAS GAAAAASSSS GONNA STEP ON THE GAAASSS

Ok hypotheses are now in check. Gravity exists it seems. Will get back to your replies in the morning.

Ahhhh I need to rework these hypotheses a bit. If you are reading this please gimme a sec

2: Investigating orbital mechanics What we know from our gravity analysis Judging by the velocities and fuel time of the spacecraft in the videos, the delta-v supplied by the specific impulse must be huge. So huge it is plausible to simply make for the moon in a perfectly straight line. It is also important to note the planet, alioth, and its moon a very small in relation to our earth/moon pair and the distance between them is also very small in comparison. When all the engines on a craft are turned off, standard Newtonian mechanics apply to it causing it to orbit around the planet. This is only in this context. For all we know the gravity field of the planet could become ineffective as soon as you start moving your craft around. The sun and the planets do not move. Planets may spin in future but will never orbit their stars. It is a possibility an antigravity ring is encapsulating every celestial body. Deducing the nature of external forces on a vessel Predictions: If the vessel was under no external force the acceleration should be constant (due to constant mass). There is no uncertainty to take into consideration here. No air resistance, constant mass and constant force in a straight line should give the same mass every time. Alternatively if there are no external forces on the craft but its mass is changing due to fuel depletion we should observe a more or less constant increase in acceleration If the vessel is under the external force of gravitational pull, acceleration should vary with respect to the path of the vessel. Take a look at this diagram of a simplified situation (not to scale): The vessel is at point A. The red vector is the acceleration of the ship, the blue vectors are the gravitational accelerations of the planet and moon (big one=moon, small one=planet) on the ship. The difference between them is the resultant acceleration due to gravity. On the left, the ship is making a bee line from the centre of the moon to the centre of the planet. Vector of resultant acceleration on it in green. On the right the ship has adjusted its course but still has the same magnitude of throttle. Vector of resultant acceleration on it in orange. We can see the further one deviates their flight path from the shortest path the lesser the magnitude of acceleration. This only applies to when the gravity is acting in the opposite direction to flight path. When you get closer to the planet you should get more acceleration. If the vessel is at full throttle, the red vector will be unable to be any larger. So we are guaranteed to have less acceleration. In the context of moving from moon to planet, since the field strength diminishes with distance, we should see greater accelerations of the vessel closer to the planet as the gravity will act as a ‘booster’. Method: Using this pre-alpha footage, I took the acceleration of the vessel at discrete, arbitrary points at times when the craft was going straight forwards at full throttle (600 kN) and put them on a graph to illustrate the data. It is important to note these are arbitrary values and the graph is roughly showing how the acceleration varies throughout the journey. Results: Looking at the purple ‘SetAvg’ graph, we can clearly see the case is that prediction 1 is does not apply as the acceleration varies between points. This means predictions 2 and 3 may hold. But there is no fuel in the vessel. We can see the gauges are 0% meaning the fuel is cheated. So prediction 2 does not hold. Up to point 10 we observe a relatively steady rise in acceleration, the vessel is moving toward equator of moon in the vertical direction. However, there are some anomalous readings. At points 4 and 11 we see a decrease in acceleration – negative acceleration at point 11 even. At point 11 it is also important to not the ‘space thrust’ is decreasing My theories as to what the graph as whole represents, ranked in order of feasibility, are as follows: A: Gravity exists with engines on. The gradual change in acceleration is due to the deviation of the flight path towards the equator. We observe a deviation toward the equator as the ship starts at one of the poles of the moon and moves to the equator of the planet. The first anomalous reading represents the vessel’s diminished acceleration after change in trajectory due to velocity change needed (see theory B for velocity change explanation). The second is due to braking, atmospheric drag and larger velocity change needed. It can be argued that if the gravity of the two bodies was remotely significant, considering the pilot starts from the one of the poles of the moon, that he would veer way off course. But the ship is scripted so that when the pilot moves the vessel to a different point in the field, the auxiliary thrusters act accordingly to keep it going straight. He clearly has a vertical booster and RCS. This would mean he would be accelerating downwards but the booster/RCS could easily compensate for the downward component of his acceleration. This is backed up by pre-alpha footage where you can see a ship’s VTOL thruster and main thruster acting in conjunction with one another. As per prediction 3, gravity would cause smaller accelerations for changes in flight path. However, this only warrants a dip in acceleration. Not a plummet into negative acceleration as we see with the second reading. To add to the deviant appearance of this anomaly from the first, at the point in the video where it is observed the acceleration due to gravity should be going towards the planet. This means the pilot should gain more acceleration for changes in trajectory toward the equator and not slow down. It is suspected that the pilot entered an upper atmospheric layer of the planet here. This is backed up by the fact his space thrust is decreasing. When the pilot entered the layer he was relatively nose down to the surface so their drag force wasn’t enough to slow them to terminal velocity. But just before the spike in negative acceleration the craft rotates, exposing its underbelly to the ‘airflow’. This meant a sharp increase in drag force occurred and the vessel was slowed to terminal velocity until the velocity vector straightened out with the nose of the vessel making the drag force in that new direction inadequate to cancel out the acceleration again An alternate idea is the pilot applied their brakes here to slow themselves down and thus give negative acceleration. They did this as they were nearing the planet at 12000km/h which would make them burn up at such a steep ascent. The problem with this theory is there are some factors you can't isolate. B: Gravity does not exist with engines on. Both anomalous readings represent the vessel after rather significant changes in trajectory at points where velocity was low and high. At the lower velocity closer to the starting point at the moon the vessel made a change in course which required little acceleration because of the small velocity. Conversely, at the higher velocity close to the planet the vessel made a change in course which required a larger acceleration due to its higher velocity: In the diagram above we see a ship with velocity vector in black. To get the ship on the red velocity vector to change path we need to have velocity vector in blue acting on the ship. To get the blue vector, an acceleration over a certain time needs to be produced to get velocity components in purple (one braking and one lifting). A problem with this theory is that you can't actually tell whether you're still accelerating up and back after you've straighten out without a close point of reference. The main problem is how can it explain non constant acceleration in a straight line? C: Gravity does not exist with engines on. Both anomalous readings represent some sort of ‘anti-gravity ring’ that encapsulates all celestial bodies and the second one was larger due to braking and atmospheric drag. This could be the space station ‘static orbit ring’ previously discussed. brake the vessel if coming in at break neck speeds. This is because the ships in game have potential for massive delta-v and could accelerate to very high velocities. This would make braking incredibly hard and frustrating for players. You would have to start braking your craft ages before you even arrived, travel very slowly or have the velocity of vessels capped. The first issue with this theory is that the brakes could just be made more powerful and the velocity could be capped. In the atmospheric flight video we see a small braking force in the spec. But for a space vessel that could be a different case. This is probably the reason they chose different fuels for atmosphere and vacuum as everyone would just use space brakes in the atmosphere to stop almost instantly; which would be completely ridiculous to watch and potentially harmful to game balance. Secondly, what if I have a slow moving vessel? I wouldn't be able to penetrate the field. It makes more sense to just have the antigravity generator as part of the space station rather than the planet so you don’t enforce your anti-gravity on anyone else. Thirdly, the tweet where JC was working on antigravity is dated to early 2018 whereas the moon flight video is dated to late 2017. So it is unlikely antigravity was developed by this point. Especially for effective use in orbit. Finally the major issue is that, like theory B, this cannot explain the changing acceleration in a straight line. The bottom line is this theory is too far-fetched and illogical from a design point of view. Conclusion Confident orbital mechanics still apply with engines on. Don’t really need to test for myself, the evidence is here. No fuel depletion means there must be constant acceleration in a straight line unless an external force of gravity is acting on it. It is possible an outer atmospheric layer exists rather high above the planet. I believe the velocity will be capped to stop people from performing the following: If you’re being chased you could accelerate to an incredibly high velocity then brake. Your assailant would be miles ahead of you before he could react and you would have escaped. What is likely is a combination of more brake force and capped velocity in space vessels. A sweet spot between the two, so to speak, to make stopping easier but not exploitable. Also too high velocities would be impossible to compute. Inconclusive as to if fuel has mass or not since it is not present but cheated in.

Speaking of testing I am actually only able to get into alpha 2. It may be a bit early to ask this but if anyone has access to alpha 1 and is willing to help me do tests that would be awesome. Can't do anything with pre-alpha guys right now because of NDA.

Agreed. Not a force but an acceleration. NQ seems to like describing forces in terms of accelerations. From your analysis , this part of the function makes a sense to me now but the other half is beyond my mathematical ability but is unimportant to me as of now. is the equation for the acceleration in real life (G=gravitational constant, M=mass of planet, r=radius from core). But at NQ they don't have time to be thinking about the average density of a planet for it's mass or the gravitational constant. What they do is simplify the right hand side of the expression (GM/r^2) to other values to make it have the same dimension. Instead of GM the constant of proportionality is gr0^2. Which gives the same dimension of ms^-2. This is actually highly suggestive this is the function they use for gravitational fields in game. This is highly valuable information so thank you for bringing this up. I will be able to test this function later. I will add this to the antigravity section. Your english is perfect as far as I've observed.

It's definitely plausible. Simply create virtual 'sculptures' made from miniature voxels, add some form of rigging function and output to hologram. Looks like we'll have full on blade runner/ ghost in the shell holo advertisement if that is the case.