Quote Originally Posted by Mokoi View Post
I'm not sure how I feel about the game, I found that even my "fast" ships had really clunky movement in space, and it felt liek I was always just trying to move my barge through the quicksand, instead of a nimble starship in a zero-friction environment.

/geekrant

I understand the Physics in space, and I understand that ships still have mass and so require energy to influence their movements just like in a gravity environment, but some of the things, like braking port and full speed starboard do not exist, and they should, this is how spacecraft move and maneuver, not like a powerboat or a ferry, which is what the spaceships feel like. Asteroids got it right with a simple uni-directional movement system in 1979. Why can't my star ship continue at full power forward (inertia) whiile I put full power in reverse on one side and full power forward on my opposite side, or a perpendicular vector to create some great spin-maneuvers while you are still heading in the direction you first were traveling, Cryptic? This is not new theory and no other form of mathematics has been so thoroughly explored as those involved with space-flight.

/geekrantoff
I have a theory. I don't believe we are very good at piloting vessels that have truly arbitrary force vectors applied to arbitrary positions on the hull of the vehicle. Normally, even when such a thing tries to exist in the atmosphere, the intense amount of friction of the air (or water) will tend to right the vehicle to a certain orientation. Boats aren't the shape they are just for minimization of hull friction, it also help us "face forward" when we are driving them.

A vehicle in space has no such (or very little) "corrector", and what usually happens when a human tries to pilot such a vehicle is that some minor off-axis inertia confuses the hell out of us and we can't figure out how to correct. IOW, the spaceship start travelling off in weird directions with crazy spins.

Maybe someday, when space flight is a common reality, we'll all be accustomed to it, but for now, we aren't. And I'm guessing people don't want to play a video game where they can't figure out how to pilot the craft, so the creators put some grounding rules to make it more palatable to us.

That's just my theory from having play around with some inertial simulators in the past.