SpaceSimCentral

It's the acceleration he's referring too. In Pioneer our engines are so powerful that you can go from a standing start to 50kps very very quickly. That means combat happens at very high accelerations.If it happened slower then the relative speeds between ships would stay within the range 5 to 50 kps, and usually nearer the 5kps end of the range, instead of being a multiple of 50kps. It's like the difference between World War 1 bi-planes with a machine gunner, and modern fighter jets with missiles.

The relative speeds would actually be at the higher end after a bit of combat as the orbits changed, especially around a planet like Hercules, that's the point

It isn't just accelleration, it's the deltaV of the ships as well. The Escape Velocity of The Sun is about 617 kps, on Earth it's about 11 kps, Mars is about 5 kps and Jupiter is almost 60 kps. To keep fights orbital the DeltaV of a ship should probably be within at least the Solar Escape Velocity if not much lower.

@NeuralKernel: I was thinking about that too. The ships seem to bee obscenely overpowered. I've posted a mod specifically to nerf them, so it can be cheched if gameplay is even fun with weaker ships. (I was able to do an interplanetary delivery with the nerfed Wave, but, barely in time. I had like one day left, and took extra propellant too.)

I already had started some work on a drone [url]http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/3456-light-weapons-platform/[/url] Just needs a wee bit of work to finish it off (and of course some coding to make it actually work)

JJ doesn't really do PRs, but that's ok - when he's working on stuff we end up talking about it a lot in IRC, so it usually gets plenty of coverage. As I said, it didn't go forward because I wasn't happy with the target selection (and it never had a full review, because there wasn't much point when it wasn't finished).Have a go if you like,. I think the best way is to do it in stages. First decouple guns from ships, then introduce manually-controlled turrets (separate mountpoints, cameras and controllers), and finally work on the AI. I'm really keen to avoid any more spaghetti, and this is going to touch a lot of stuff. A big drop isn't the right way for this, I think. I've actually gotten JJ's "turrets" branch merged in by going through his changes line by line.Only took an evening interspersed with a wander to the shops and a beer  I'll probably use it as a base to expand on.

Ha! Just blasted the ctrl-F12 Kanara out of the sky! Flying a Pumpkinseed with a Shield Generator and Dual 1MW Cannon, no hyperdrive. I took a couple hits to the shields that regenerated but even without them I probably would have (barely) won.The Shot speed is changed in this version (Linux32 2013.07-12), and it's more like back when I could reliably fight. I didn't have any, but I still think missiles right now are pretty much useless.

Me too! But with an older version (i didn't wanted to risk loosing my savefile) :biggrin:After all that talking about fighting and what to change, we are learning to fight without modifications! :DThe first time I did it, was with your exact ship and equipment. The second, with the wave and a 2MW dual. This is the one I recorded and linked on the promo video thread.I think I understood some tactics to avoid hits and aim, so, the next time, I'll try with a weaker equipment.Some days ago I changed the default keys swapping the positions of thrust keys and rotation keys. Much better when using a mouse, since you don't have to move both of your hand on the keyboard when reaching the mouse, but only the right one (while the left remains on the thrusters).

However, speaking about modifications...I thought about the impressions I had while fighing. The most evident is the feeling that I'm still and the opponent buzzes around me like an angry wasp. The feeling is that I'm not in control of the situation, while he have, instead, total control. However, I know that this is an illusion, since you would have the same impression from the opponent's point of view.So, the "problem" isn't in the mechanics of combat, but, I think, in the appearance. Maybe we need more visual clues of what's going on, more feedback. When I'm pushing the thrusters and changing my direction, I need to see more clearly the results of what I'm doing.I also need more feedback of my shooting. I't hard to tell when I'm missing the target, how much I'm missing it and what I need to do to correct my aim.

I think that ship design is one of the issues, nobody seems to be designing effective Space Combat craft. I made a start at one last night, a ship covered in lateral, vertical and retro engines so it can dance around and reposition more effectively while keeping it's nose at the enemy.Unfortunately, just after I took some screenshots from a few different angles I closed Blender and immediately remembered I hadn't saved the model file! :DWhat I'd like to see is a ship that can move sideways faster than it can move forward, these aren't atmospheric fighters, after all

[url]https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-1hUK684APTZS1HSlRqSE5xVzg/edit?usp=sharing[/url] an initial crude Mockup of a kind of Cruiser in Blender[attachment=2047:Fighter.png][attachment=2048:Fighter2.png]I'm giving it overpowered retro thrust compared to the main drive because that's what I've found most useful in combat In fact I used to frequently mount my guns facing backwards to take advantage of the greater thrust in that direction. Another reason I think Weaponized Exhaust / Weapon Recoil should be included eventually... it's actually useful!In the meantime... just playing around with basic layout and shape...

 What I'd like to see is a ship that can move sideways faster than it can move forward, these aren't atmospheric fighters, after all Then sideways becomes forward and backwards, because it wouldn't make much sense to not use the more powerful thrusters for traveling, now would it? You are, however, raising a very interesting point I haven't really thought about so far: Forward in a spaceship is only defined by the direction of most powerful thrust. But what direction of that thrust relative to the gun is the most effective in a dogfight? That is a pretty out-of-the-box thinking question. I like it. It would require some analysis and testing to come to a conclusion, I think. There's one general problem I can foretell in advance, of course: Having the main thrust sideways to the gun either leads to an asymetric behavior if the Main and Retros (which in combat would become left and right or up and down) are not equally powerful. This setup would require extreme skill to handle. Having an assymetric behavior in forward/backward acceleration is much more intuitive than having asymetric sideways aceleration. If you equal the thrusters out to have the same power, you will either have sub-par main acceleration to an opponent of equal mass, or you will need to reserve a lot more mass for the thrusters (requiring two thrusters equally powerful as the opponents one main) and sacrifice loadout. All in all, It would be a major excercise to learn to actually exploit the advantages... but it might be interesting, though potentially futile.

Long range flight, especially long enough to warrant time compression, is more about the Delta-V than the acceleration. As long as the specific impulse is good then the main drive can be relatively feeble and that's the same no matter which engine or what it's output is on ships in Pioneer. In my "real life" version of my designs the main drive is a very high specific impulse rocket with relatively low thrust while the retro and lateral thrusters are much less efficient but higher output.

 In my "real life" version of my designs the main drive is a very high specific impulse rocket with relatively low thrust In the "real life" versions of my spacecrafts I'm used to acceleration in the 0.005 G range, so I know pretty well what you're talking about.  But as far as I know ISP for thrusters in Pioneer is uniform... or has that changed? In that case, it would indeed make a lot of sense if the main thruster were not the one with the most thrust, but the highest ISP. Though given Pioneers ridiculous techlevel, I guess a shiftable drive would not be too much to ask for...

I've suggested it in a way, and I've got the source code to dig through to figure out a solution...Multiple types of Reaction Mass... hydrogen for standard transit drive (aim for 0.25G to land / take off from airless worlds), water for high thrust applications (extreme orbital burns, tactical encounters, atmospheric flight, high G landing / take off), and maybe even something stronger (Carbon? Metals? Radioactives?) for weaponizing the exhaust and providing extremely powerful acceleration (think Orion Drive or Interplanetary Particle Cannon...) but that seems like something civilized folk would frown on...I can tweak ships and modify scripts a bit but I'm not even sure where to start with the source code

 Multiple types of Reaction Mass... Well, that would have to be quite a mother of all engines... and maybe even something stronger (Carbon? Metals? Radioactives?) for weaponizing the exhaust If the performance is anywhere near the current ships, you've already weaponized the exhaust to the level modern WMDs can only dream of reaching...

OK, I'm looking at the Lua file for the Kanara, I figure I'll tweak that to get a feel for the various thruster strengths and exhaust velocities and how they work for combat.One minor question... what are the units? I see forward_thrust = 65e5, reverse_thrust = 12e5, up_thrust = 18e5, down_thrust = 18e5,... and so on...Is it Newtons?I can make tweaks without knowing... but I'd rather have a clear idea of what the numbers are before I mix things up too much

e5 mean five zero ^^ 65e5 = 6500000 or you can make 650e4 it's the same ^^

Is it Newtons?Yes, newtons.

OK, so I evened everything out to 18e5 newtons, except for reverse thrusters and the RCS which I set to 24e5.My first fight I loaded up completely with tactical gear, including a 2MW rapid fire cannon and cooler. I got blasted, I was just too damn heavy to move :DI wised up and ditched some of the other gear, kept the shield and only took a dual 1MW cannon. This time it was a good fight and I just barely came out on top! I think he had the same cannon, but no shields, because he was generally able to outpace me. I was able to dodge most of his shots and could only hit occasionally. If I didn't have shields he probably would have won, but it was close.I feel like using the engines at full power should come at a price of some kind. Poor fuel efficiency, increased heat, exponentially rising odds of catastrophic engine failure...Still, this is a tiny Starfighter, the Kanara.Setting up tactically and strategically beneficial trajectories with the minimum use of propellant and energy is what Space Flight, and by extension Space Combat, is all about!