chuck_starchaser wrote:I actually think they are too high. My initial proposal, years ago, was for sub-G accelerations; but I had support from nobody. So I finally decided to bring it up a bit, and gain the support of at least a few people.
Well that is probably because most people consider gameplay at least marginally more important than realism. If it takes even 1 minute to slow down from your chase speed in space combat or get back up to it (which you have to do to change direction) then probably most players are going to find combat unsatisfying and boring.
The real question is can any balance be found between somekind of high technology space realism and combat gameplay balance at all.
Well, I think 10G's is almost as absurd as 40 G's. Let me put it this way: The Space Shuttle does about 7 G's, or 9 G's, can't remember, going up to orbit, using gargantuous, *disposable*, chemical engines. Because stages detach, the craft doesn't have to worry about cooling them; which is the main problem in space.
You are talking about a modern technology, VS is set 1000 years in the future. Given how technology has been advancing exponentially over a long time now, there should be
alot more powerful powerplants and methods of recycling what would otherwise be waste heat energy or there won't be any waste heat in the first place.
Secondly, the engines are huge, and yet the whole structure is pushed almost to the limit of material strengths. How on Earth or in space could you have ships with little engines --not to speak of wing-tip-mounted engines-- withstanding the stress to push the whole craft at 5 or 10 G's?
Beyond our horizon materials advancements is one explanation, electromagnetic reinforcement of structures might be another.
Where engines are placed on a craft is a content issue, you can take this up with jackS, but it is an adjacent topic, it is not totally related to in game physics realism and gameplay balance.
Morover, in a chemical engine you got a fairly even stress/pressure distribution; but if we're talking about ion engines or vasimr's your whole stress stands upon a anode grid (a wire mesh) or a magnetic field containing a plasma. But also from a point of view of economics and futurology, the future of space propulsion will be towards low but steady accelerations, and ultr-high efficiency, as distances in space are so huge that there's no point in making engines that have huge, but short-term power ouputs.
Efficient in a competition-less environment maybe, but when you need to get to a system before the Aera do, or outrun them, fuel economy becomes much less important.
Then, from the point of view of space combat, which you bring up, most combat would be beyond visual range, anyways.
For capital ships that is or is almost the case anyway.
But anyway we don't know that that will be the case in 1000 years, there's alot of factors.
What if you cannot detect the exact location of something so small and far away until you are very close to it because it is using technology that evades, disrupts or distracts your sensors like you and klauss are discussing in that other thread?
Or what if you have to FTL your whole warship up close to a target to be able to fire on it without it just evading your directed energy beams or outlasting your missiles?
Well, the way we plan combat in Tadpole is using small, detachable, chemical propulsion fighters. Pirates put themselves on an intercept orbit with you, but your sensors catch them early enough that you have at least an hour to a) study them (using a telescope), b) negotiate with them and/or c) plan what you're going to do. And if you decide to fight, you got a small, chemical, light-weight fighter under the belly of your cargo ship. You get on it and fight. For efficiency, the fighter doesn't carry missiles or beam weapons. You target what you want to target, and remotely order the lauch of missiles from your cargo ship.
I don't understand why the fighter has to spot for the ship or why you have to man the fighter, it seems you should fire as soon as you see the pirate or there should be USVs in the future to do dangerous work like that fighter does. More importantly though I don't understand how the pirates actually intercept you if there is no top speed limit in space, how do they not go right past you in the blink of an eye or have enough fuel left when they do catch you to get back to anyplace.
Your fighter has liquid fuel engines, as well as a number of one-time solid fuel propulsors you use for evasive maneuvers. Plus machine guns, pretty conventional except in terms of symmetry and special cooling equipment.
This would be a good fighter model if we were 100 or maybe even 300 years out, but VS is so far in the future that technological advancement would have to have totally leveled off in the near future for folks to still be using a warship with those modern technologies.
It is like going to war with a fleet of ships-of-the-line today- your dead, I don't care if wind sales are more fuel efficient, you won't live long enough to save any money.
Look, I am not trying to bash tadpole, I know only what you have told me about it, but it is just one possible approach in a thousand for simulating future space travel and combat at somepoint in the future, since it doesn't solve the realism issues or account for not yet invented or theorized technologies and its gameplay I don't think has been balance tested yet (unless it builds off of Space Combat, but I haven't played that game either). So it might not be a good fit for VS.
Any examples of other games that might have dealt with this problem should be those that have a similar focus to VS. Like Infinity, and its "bubbles" system for space combat, where the closer you get to another ship, the more your velocities are sort of 'averaged' together until you reached a certain range or relative speed that is acceptable for combat maneuvering.
Ditto. The problem with VS is that historically it was meant to be a "better Privateer", but following the same gaming paradigm, of having dogfights, which was a totally unrealistic, typical WC universe fantasy; but then tried to make other aspects of VS more realistic; and there's a deep mismatch... A wrinkle that you you push it here and it shows up there.
Well not necessarily, in the '60s people thought that the age of dogfighting was over, with the advent of the radar guided missile and interceptor. But they were wrong, their model was flawed and unrealistic and today we still have dogfighting capable aircraft.
But less specific than dogfighting, there has always been an advantage to phyiscally maneuving yourself so that you are a harder target to hit and/or your opponent is an easier target to hit. And there probably always will be. We just need to find a form or forms of this that makes sense in a distant future space engagement.
Because if this game goes in a modern-realistic direction it will be much less fun and popular and it will have abandoned its niche between the two types of games that you are working on (PU and Tadpole).
I disagree almost completely. At the speeds we're talking about, you wouldn't see those partics. Not enough time to impact your retinas. Enough energy, instead, to make your craft explode. And there are no such particles in space.
Like I said though, they could be completely fabricated by the HUD to give you an idea of your velocity in navigation and combat especially. Thus you could have keymapping to toggle this effect on and off.
Privateer's particles are a mixed blessing. If you're seeing the particles pass at a given speed, and behind them you see asteroids going 20 times more slowly, you assume the asteroids are 20 times further away, right? But if the particls seem to be passing a meter away, then the asteroids would be 20 meters away? Well, they are supposed to be like a kilometer away, or something like that, but they actually look like they are small and 20 meters away, precisely because of the stupid particles.
Have you tried adjusting the size, frequency, speed, etc. of the particles to find a less deceptive looking effect? Like having them stand absolutely still regardless of how the player's ship is moving and then making them bigger so that they can still be seen?
But what I did propose, once, was that we had actual garbage in space; and I even started modeling garbage
But the garbage would be concentrated towards (slowly orbiting) space stations, originating from illegal disposal. It would include all kinds of junk, including dead cats and rats that made the mistake of chasing one another into airlocks
The advantage of this "Garbage Proposal" is that it put speed references where they would be,
a) logical to be found
b) where you're flying at low speeds, ready to dock or undocking
c) where you NEED speed references
The problem with that is it doesn't help you when you are navigating or fighting in orbit or deep space, only when you are close to a station. And then it might look weird and distracting seeing all of this garbage floating around that you don't see anywhere else.
there are a few other free modelling apps that you might look at Misfit 3D and K-3D come to mind at the top of the list IMHO or just persist at blender till you grok the interface at which point you wish other apps behaved the same way 
so do i have permission to split it out to a topic of it's own