Flight model?

[Anaximander]

simple and easy are not bad things, it's what you get if something is well build and though out, complicating thing for the sake of complications is the reverse of all that is good. Maybe i misunderstand but would you prefer to press shift w+e over just pressing s.

 

I think, we in general agree. But differ on the solution we consider the best. basically we are moving around in circles.

Sure, as I said, there's no one way of doing a cruise control scheme.

 

Mind you, being able to control each thruster individually, means a far more precise control over the ship. Just pressing S means you just reduce accelrations. Half W @ 90% and E @ 100% though, means my ship can turn left, at a steady rate. I can then focus on other things as a pilot on a ship - an essential thing for people who fly ships like cruisers or frigates, that are three or ten manned constructs (at least by what I would build), then, as a frigate driver, you'd need to be able to set up a manual intercept like that, let alone a fleet beign able to coordinate by stating precise degress of approach, i.e. "dive 5 degres down, then at time 10 pivot 20 degrees" in order to avoid a possible mine field right out of an FTL jump.

 

Remember, your scheme can apply on starfighters, who are agile enough to pull deccelerations. A battleship doesn ot have the same courtesy, so a person can use a mouse to turn a ship, not to mention, inertia would cuase your ship to wiggle around like cray as it's NOT precise at all to turn a ship of such masses with drag motion of the hand.

 

But, that's semantics, different schools of thought I guess. I see a spaceship as a boat, you see it as a jet-plane. Both are right.

[Ripper]

Allow "control units" to accept input from the KB, Mouse, and analog devices such as joysticks and rudder pedals.

 

Provide us with a "programmable DPU"

 

Give us seudo-newtonian physics, such as what was seen in the latest DevDiary.

 

And let us run with it.

 

That's all I'm asking for.

[Kurosawa]

you see it as a jet-plane. Both are right.

 

Never said such a think, so that is on your own account

 

Remember, your scheme can apply on starfighters, who are agile enough to pull deccelerations. A battleship doesn ot have the same courtesy, so a person can use a mouse to turn a ship, not to mention, inertia would cuase your ship to wiggle around like cray as it's NOT precise at all to turn a ship of such masses with drag motion of the hand.

 

To me, there is no difference between large and small space ships in regards to thrust and maneuvering, the difference is in energy required and time consumed. With that in mind you can use the same layout for both small and large crafts.

 

De-acceleration and directional thrust is already a big part of large ocean ships,of cause there are other factors on the ocean but it works as an example of large crafts with multi directional thrust.

 

Mind you, being able to control each thruster individually, means a far more precise control over the ship. Just pressing S means you just reduce accelrations. Half W @ 90% and E @ 100% though, means my ship can turn left, at a steady rate. I can then focus on other things as a pilot on a ship - an essential thing for people who fly ships like cruisers or frigates, that are three or ten manned constructs (at least by what I would build), then, as a frigate driver, you'd need to be able to set up a manual intercept like that, let alone a fleet beign able to coordinate by stating precise degress of approach, i.e. "dive 5 degres down, then at time 10 pivot 20 degrees" in order to avoid a possible mine field right out of an FTL jump.

 

I been thinking on how you want to factor in ships with engines center around the spine of the ship or ships with 1 engine ?

I mean a centrally mounted engine would be more likely to push you forward then turn the ship.

 

 

W, E = Forward thrust, W left main propulsion, E right main propulsion. Let go for W, you yaw left, likewise for E..

A, F = A is for left side maneuvering thrusters, F for the right side.

S, D = S is rolling left, D is rolling right.

C = Dive.

 

Spacebar = Pivot. 

 

Talk about some precision cruise controls. And this doesn't even cover the ACTUAL clutch idea I have for tuning the rate of the controls.

 

dive/pivot do you mean pitch and yaw?

you are missing climb and yaw L/R

[Ripper]

Rereading the LUA scripting guide, I see I was wrong.

 

It appears "Control Units" house the user programmable DPU.

 

"System Units" are the interface between the players peripherials (KB, mouse, joystick) and the gameworld.

 

You would plug the "system unit" and a handful of thrusters into your custom programmed "control unit", in order to manipulate the thrusters with your computer peripherials.  You would also want to add a few sensors such as a "gyro element" in order to monitor and compensate for pitch, roll, and yaw.

[Anaximander]

 

 

dive/pivot do you mean pitch and yaw?

you are missing climb and yaw L/R

Yaw is steering left or right.

 

Left Engine at 75% and Right Engine at 100% == yawing to the left - and with precision.

 

Pivoting and Diving works by shuting down the vertical thrust on the back in order to orientate the ship towards  certain direction with precisino.

 

And there's a differnence between a carrier and a star-fighter. It's called inertia. Your mouse and "strafe" won't work on a carrier. Capital ships, once on the move, simply align towards another direction, they don't brake and turn, cause inertia says a big no-no to quick deccelerations of massive objects.

 

And if you were to use a mouse for that, you would only end up steering the ship too much or not accurately, wasting fuel in the process. Once a carrier is out of warp and starts moving and get into engagement range, that mouse movement will only cause harm to your gun's tracking, whiele a steady trajectory will only keep the tracking accurate on your end, as your transversal wil lbe fixed.

 

And liking it or not, DU follows the EVE model of combat, and EVE is about figuring out math quickly, by keeping track of the enemy's trajcetories, align in parallel with them fast, so your ship can be at rest with the enemy and you start getting accurate shots on them. That's just a fact of geometrical combat in a vacuum. And in EVE, you can't dance around on a battleship, so you gonna know what you'ere doing with it. Settign up the wrong transversal may actualyl get you in between multiple enemies overlapping fields of fire and you end up respawining back home - which is why such complex controls I mention, will be needed for ships and why good pilots will eventually make excellent ship drivers.

 

Small crafts can benefit of your design, larger ships can benefit from my design. That's how I see it. And your designs apply most for jet-fighters, ala harriers, that can actually "air brake" very fast and hover in place. Your controls could easily make a very agile craft hover so close to a slow tracking turret and destroying it while hovering around it faster than the turret can track the craft, while my designs are more for setting up orbits around planets - and yes, with my design you can set engines firing at certain percentages and they would just orbit a planet, not braking their speed, but not burning a lot of fuel either, very useful when you want to orbit over a place on a planet, while you orbitally strike, something that would require the aforementioned rules of loss of accuracy on a formula, for your ship to be at rest with the target.

 

Unless you think you can manually orbit a planet for 5 hours, while a fleet operation may be going on with a mouse. You know, those Lua scripts? Things like that precision controls i mentioned is what they are here for.

[Anaximander]

Rereading the LUA scripting guide, I see I was wrong.

 

It appears "Control Units" house the user programmable DPU.

 

"System Units" are the interface between the players peripherials (KB, mouse, joystick) and the gameworld.

 

You would plug the "system unit" and a handful of thrusters into your custom programmed "control unit", in order to manipulate the thrusters with your computer peripherials.  You would also want to add a few sensors such as a "gyro element" in order to monitor and compensate for pitch, roll, and yaw.

 

Quote from the Lua scripts Devblog "

 

"To be more precise, I have to refine this picture a little bit: I talked about customizing a DPU, but exactly what DPU are we talking about? Where is it? In fact, the DPU you want to customize is stored inside a special Element called a "Control Unit". The DPU is started when you activate the Control Unit (go next to it and press the activation key). Notice that there is no problem with having several Control Units (hence, DPUs) inside the same construct, potentially all activated at the same time."

 

Prepare for some intense piloting with multiple screens around you - and yes, screens are Control Units, they have conceptual art of them on their website.