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Autopilot Failure

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 5:04 am
by A Laggy Grunt
When the target is well inside a planet's gravity well (your ship would get a SPEC multiplier of 1 at the destination), the SPEC drive tries to fly *through* the planet. I figure it should try to get above the target, and drop down on it.

Also, your ship behaves semi-inertialess when using the autopilot: SPEC multiplier only applies to the portion of your velocity pointing at the destination. This number could be 1 if your current motion is away from the target.

Re: Autopilot Failure

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 5:20 am
by klauss
That is true even without autopilot. SPEC multiplier is directional.

Re: Autopilot Failure

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 6:07 am
by loki1950
That remember that SPEC is not going to work in any gravity well so the auto-pilot is trying to get you out of it asap so the vectors do not make sense if you don't take the gravity well in to account as well.Spec in not thrust it's a space-time field.

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: Autopilot Failure

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 10:04 pm
by A Laggy Grunt
I figured as much. Here's what happened:
I picked up a clean sweep mission.
I went to a planet, and got within docking/scanning range.
The target ships spawned inside the planet itself.
I flew off to another nav point, cleaned that, and came back to my first one by autopilot.
The clean sweep mission targets had flown outside the planet so they were actually killable-but well inside the gravity well, on the opposite side.
The autopilot decided the most efficient way to the target was through the planet (40,000 km without SPEC), instead of flying around to the other side above the gravity well dead-zone with SPEC and dropping down from above (~1,000km without SPEC). At least, I think it tried to fly through the planet. I didn't let it finish the flight.

Re: Autopilot Failure

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 10:20 pm
by klauss
Ah, yes. That's an AP flaw, when it has the target location within the gravity well, it assumes the target is the planet, and so there is no need to go around it.

It's not at all easy to fix, though there are ways, with so-called navigation graphs