You already knew where you were pointing. The direction lock feature is a luxury. It's possible to determine both the direction and the magnitude of your velocity relative to your current frame and your target, simultaneously. This is all the information you need. Absolutely everything else you can work out, including the mass of planets if you really like.

You knew where you were pointing but you had to point manually and correct manually. Ok, a luxury. But I cant live without it.

Perhaps I am losing something and is my fault but...

I want to make a burn or a retroburn exactly at the apoapsis, or very close and I want to know how much time left and why not, the possition in orbit. Is that info a luxury? Does it exists in game? Let me buy it in a space station!

Those things would be essential for a really effective and propellant conservative manual flight in the old XX century way... :D. At least It should be even more effective than now.

Orbiter demostrates that having those aids, the results are in any case variable. On Pioneer it is different due to speeds and powerful thrusters but Imagine we are speaking about low speeds etc...

Greetings.

You just need to look for maxima and minima in speed and altitude. Like I said, the information you need can all be worked out. If you dig out my old Youtube video where I show a (poorly executed) Hohmann transfer, you get a glimpse of the spreadsheet I threw together for that trip. All I needed were a number of distance measurements (maximum and minimum) from my ship to the bodies in question, my own speed at apo- and periapsis, and trigonometry. I could work out my orbital period, that of the destination, the timing of my burn and the target velocity of that burn, and of the second burn to bring me to rendezvous.

Alas, my calculations all assumed that the orbits were on the same plane, which they weren't quite, so it was off by a bit. Close, though. Timing can't be perfect, though - the ideal transfer orbit has instantaneous velocity changes, and since your thrusters have finite force you really ought to be firing them earlier (and for a smidge longer) than exactly on the dot.

Sure, orbital displays would be pretty, but aside from you and me I'm not sure that there are a great deal of people looking to fly these things manually. We already have more information at hand than Apollo pilots had. More information would be a luxury, but I'd rather wait for that until we have more of an actual game to play.

i can't help you much

but i appreciate your addiction to realism. even if i'm somewhere between, i like some realism but it shouldn't go to far.

i like lower specced ships, and have started already to change all for myself to something a little more realistic.

acceleration won't be 24G or higher, i chose values between 6G and 12G for "tara" (empty ship plus default drive but no cargo),

which results in far weaker ships.

fully ladden they are real "cripples" 😉 side and lateral thrust is then often at the edge (1 - 3).

some large ships you will have to really careful load them or you can't lift, i like that because you have to think a bit with how much cargo you fly to which port.

but i guess launching and docking will be to tricky for most novices.

but imo the ships shouldn't (wouldn't!) approach a starport with the nose down, no you will have to approach with the fwd thrust ahead, else...

(that's because i like the tricky reconaissance missions in FE2 on planets with a high gravitation, approach with nose up and still there is some risk to crash).

imo retro and steering thrust should be very limited, in certain cases some power will have to be added to the vertical lifting that's all.

actually i noticed the alpha20 ships have values close to the ones i chose.

on the other hand i like to wait, because i'm not sure if the fuel is calculated as mass already.

but i recognized that all ships have a lowered hull mass now by roundabout the size of the fueltank, which is a step in this and the right direction anyway (replacing some hull mass with fuel tanks, to get in the end roundabout the same total mass).

and i understand now why it has been kept to high before, simply to "replace" the missing propellant.

even when i'm pretty sure that FE2 had a fuel tank within the drives (which isn't as good as we do now) and the size was simply related to the class of drive you mounted, while the consumption simply was in a fixed relation to the brutto mass.

there is one heavy disadvantage fighting get's extremely hard if you have weak thrusters, of course the AI has the same handicap, but i guess he handles it much better as we can do (the inertia of i.e. a courier is already high, with weak thrust it's like you would fly with a tank).

but makes the game perhaps a little more interesting, fighters will have a big advantage compared to transporters.

so the "pilot" will have always the problem that a fighter isn't good for carrying goods, but a transporter can't fight.

Fuel is massive. Ignoring cargo, if you have a 10t ship with 10t fuel tank, it will start of with 20t total mass, reducing to 10t as you use up the fuel. Your ship actually performs better with less fuel in the tank.

When I set the fuel tank values, I made the spherical ships (E.Y.E and Stardust) special. They have fuel tanks which are larger than the hull mass, which gives them a late advantage. in those ships, if you're running out of fuel, you can jettison your cargo to save yourself.

It would not be hard to make a ship that behaved just like a 20th century rocket. 98% fuel mass at take-off!

Ok, i´ll uncover the dust in some trigonometry books. 🙂 . It´s not bad, on some submarine/naval sims the most funny things are the manual calculations and the possibility of navigation on charts.

One thing I disagree: Orbit display, being a very visual info and easy convention, should make people be interested in manual maneuvers and the concept. There are few newtonian sims/games out there. One option is manual flight and focusing on it is taking advantage of the virtues and strengths of a game.

Greetings

thanks brianetta, i thought so, but wasn't sure (fuel mass is calculated).

I think the interplanetary fuel is a great idea, but I gently suggest that it needs further tweaking across the months by you guys to ensure the gameplay continues to reach a wider audience

Tweak away. Github is free, and the ship data are in text files.

I love the idea of the reaction mass. Can you scoop from a gas giant or water body? Both would be great sci fi though the former would be very... Traveller.

I believe you can mine water from some asteroids, but nothing has been deliberatey done to facilitate picking up reaction mass. You can already scoop for hydrogen. I think that a water syphon on a suitable terrestrial world would be neat.

water oxygen ice and hydrogen from planet atmospheres and water would be good

I'd just like to apologise for being unable to read. Of course, there it is, the words, "Full changelog... available from the download page." This more than answers my ignorant question. Thanks for creating such a great game!

If I have any suggestions, I'll be sure to let you know. The only one, off the top of my head, I can think of is consider using the OpenSUSE build system.