Deus Siddis wrote:The only potential break from realism that was ever needed was FTL or the ability to speed up time, because space is so big. Every other magic technology or feature has either hurt gameplay or just made it go sideways and become strange.
Now you have me curious about which magic technologies you refer to. Thousands of happy gamers accept magical space ship turns, and speed limits without even thinking about it. If it works the player may not even realize that the strange devices are helping. Manoeuvre mode is on by default already, adding a purchasable motion rectifier for example would just seem like an upgrade to manoeuvre mode. Some players would not not even realize that ship turns would be outperforming the thrusters capability alone. Players who are aware would have a explanation of why. There would need to be some limitations to using it, like inability to spontaneously side slip coupled with a slow shutdown.
Deus Siddis wrote:The prime example is the extreme ship accelerations; the fighting ships accelerate at 30 gs, which is 10 times that of the space shuttle on lift off with it's towering solid and liquid fuel rockets and 30 times that of a modern fighter aircraft. There is very little chance any machine larger than a sidewinder missile, present or future can possibly manage that kind of acceleration using conventional thrusters and no human player on earth has the reflexes and coordination to fight that kind of battle.
These numbers and margins that you mentioned are a little off from what I can quickly look up. Manned rockets normally go 3.5G's so that switches can still be reached perpendicularly. The Apollo launch vehicles got up to around 7-8G's perpendicular. Fighter pilots are trained to handle up to 9G's downward sustained for a few minutes in a pressure suit. Normal people may lose vision 4.5G's. John Stapp was subjected to 15G's for 0.6 second and a peak of 22G's. Studies concluded he could been conditioned to survive 25G's for 1.1 seconds peak 46G's, while most people have severe internal injuries at around 25G. I do think non conventional thruster technologies would easily outperform the human riding inside. It would be up to the human to outsmart any drone that can move faster. If fast drones are a problem let the pilot purchase an inertial dampener to reduce inertia. The governor would then allow unhuman speeds but any failure of the device could mean instant pilot death. More unnecessary goodies to leave options open
klauss wrote:the main issue with low accelerations is that it makes maneuvering with a heavy cargo load really problematic. There's two ways around that: make ship mass a lot more significant (relative to cargo mass), or cap accelerations on the governor.
I don't know anyone opposed to slower accelerations. I would definitely vote that the governor be the device protecting the pilot. Limits in thruster technology itself seems unlikely to me. One could then continue upgrading engines past safe maximum unloaded thrust levels assuming one wants to use the extra thrust to carry more cargo closer to the maximum acceleration.
log0 wrote:Max accel limits should deal with the heavy cargo issue. I think I have been also proposing to differentiate depending on ship type. Something like high limits for fighters(6g) and lower limits for the rest(3g).
I agree with log0 for setting the governors of ships to a Max acceleration by default, I would just adjust it slightly. For fighter pilots 9G's who would be wearing pressure suits. And for free to walk around ships 4.5 G's with everyone seated. Exceptions would require special technology like buying a pressure suit for everyone on board, most others would have serious tradeoffs.