Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

General
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For Dead Space, I was talking more about the smaller ships like the Kellion FTL-capable supply shuttle. Ones that have full 1-1 scale models, internal and external, designed to be viewed up-close. They’ve got nice open feeling bridges and interiors without looking like the ships have paper-thin armour and are structurally flawed/would fall apart during takeoff from the hanger-deck. That’s a look I get from a lot of the small-crewed SC ships.

Wow… I thought it was intended as some sort of heatsink bank and weapon mounting point. That idea is even more ridiculous.

BSG gets away with it by:
1: Having far more realistic designs. (Most of the time.)
2: Being based on a 1970s show where designers didn’t have the research options available we do today.
3: Being made at a time where sci-fi on TV was pretty much dead.

Miniguns spin to cool their barrels with airflow, using them in-space is as stupid as vacuum exposed cooling fans.

Reaction control thrusters don’t need to turn along a 90 degree arc if you have 2, by varying the amount of thrust from each you get exactly the same effect, only instead of having to wait for the thruster to rotate, you can get an instant snap between one axis and another.

It’s more cluttered and less useful with a lower contrast because of it. It doesn’t just make no sense from a design point of view (and ends up looking bad as there’s nothing to offset it against), it makes no sense from a gameplay one either.

People are going to be distracted by the ships continuing to spin without thrusters, then magically stopping for no reason when they let go of the controls. You either show liquid space physics, meaning the thrusters have to fire for the duration of the roll, or have the thrusters fire for both spin-up and spin-down. You don’t use realistic physics and just not give any visual indication for half the forces being applied! That’s going to confuse the shill out of everyone as soon as they’re the one with the controls and can see the ship’s response to their input as it happens.

The BIG problem I’ve got with SC’s ships is that, yes, the models are highly detailed, and that’s about it. The designs have a ton of nonsensical and annoying features both in terms of the lore and gameplay just because they could be considered cool, superficially, by some people.

The developers are trying to show every single mechanism and ship component, where everything has it’s own specific function, but those functions haven’t been thought out at all. It all jars together like some sort of spaceship equivalent to the uncanny valley. I just can’t look at those ships without wanting to rip them apart and question everything about how they work, and the sad part is, I know the answer would be ‘they don’t, they’re not even remotely plausible’. =(

[And suddenly I’m picturing ‘The Chompers’ from the NSEA Protector in Galaxy Quest.]

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Whoever wrote that episode should die!

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I’ve never thought about it this way, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
Ostentatious “No physics here!” softest-SF design (ships looking like a boat, a plane, a giant humanoid or even a dirigible, for example) are OK because we don’t even care, as well as the harder ones where the design is based on defined principles (even if said principles are otherwise fantastic). But designs with superficial similitude to the latter happen to create an uncanny valley effect.

I don’t know for you, but my younger self always wondered, watching Star Wars, why they didn’t put lightsabres on their space fighters, given their tendencies to make grazing runs on bigger enemies and as it is established as cutting to anything.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that it was made at some point in the Gundam series, where they put a mech beamsword on a fighter and send it cut a land battleship in half this way.

Not to say that the Scythe looks any less ridiculous, as this thing doesn’t look anything like a beamsword.
And if you really go fast enough to cut space armour with such blunt piece of scrap, well, you go fast enough to make it explode, and you basically have a manned kinetic missile. But that’s a discussions for other places, which are not the most relevant for SC.

Oh, and you can add the VF-0 fighters from Macross Zero to design I remember. It’s maybe the only case where I saw a jet that can turn into a mech and think “… well, this actually does look somehow like a usable military vehicle”.
It’s kind of a cheat actually, though, as they are atmospheric fighters, whose later versions happen to have been made space-capable.
I say Macross Zero instead of the original because it was made with newer techniques (so it looks better), and for me it’s the best one of the entire franchise.

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Eww.

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[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
Kellion[/quote]
This is not a ship I have any desire to fly. The silhouette is indiscernible from a space-brick. It’s extremely boring.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
paper-thin armour[/quote]
If you’re referring to the Aurora and the 300 series, I have to remind you that those are civilian ships. The 300 series focuses on speed. It’s the BMW of space. The Aurora, as I said before, doesn’t focus on anything in particular. Whereas the Hornet is a civilian version of a military ship which is the difference in the armor, shield slots, and weapon slots. And if you think the Hornet doesn’t look armored, then I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to a combat fighter without making a brick. If you have an example, please let me know.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
That idea is even more ridiculous.[/quote]
Which is why it’s awesome, unique, and revolutionary (except when Planetside 2 did it already iirc).

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
3: Being made at a time where sci-fi on TV was pretty much dead.[/quote]
I feel I should point out the space sim was pretty much dead too.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
Miniguns spin to cool their barrels with airflow, using them in-space is as stupid as vacuum exposed cooling fans[/quote]
Miniguns spin afaik, to generally prevent a single barrel from overheating under high rate of fire, and spinning is the only logical way to switch to each barrel. If you have a gun design that can swap barrels without spinning them, I’d love to see it. The airflow because of the created motion is a bonus. And this principal still works in space, you just don’t get the bonus cooling of the airflow. You can then only dissipate heat through radiation, which at least because of the increased surface area, still works better than a single barrel. A 6 barrel minigun in space will be able to fire at least 6 times more projectiles than a single barrel.

But even if allll of that wasn’t true, they’re not equivalent to fans in space because fans in space don’t look as cool as miniguns. Fans are useless and ugly. While miniguns would have only been useless.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
Reaction control thrusters don’t need to turn along a 90 degree arc if you have 2, by varying the amount of thrust from each you get exactly the same effect,[/quote]
The thrusters in Star Citizen, at least on the Hornet, rotate with 2 degrees of freedom to produce 3 degrees of translational freedom. So you would need at least 3 fixed thrusters per gimbaled thruster from the placements of where I’ve seen them. If one of the thrusters even has a 180 degree arc in 2 degrees of freedom, then that would actually require 6 fixed thrusters to emulate the field of motion of one gimbaled thruster.

And in a gimbaled thruster, you can apply more powerful thrust if you’re moving in a diagonal direction holding all the other variables equal. Say a gimbaled thruster has the same sum cost, sum resources, sum efficiency, and sum power as the equivalent needed fixed thruster array. Say an array has 2 thrusters with 25 units of power and the single gimbaled thruster in the same place has 50 units of power. In the axial directions, the fixed thrusters could only produce 25 units of power. In the diagonal direction, the thrust would be less than their sum, less than 50. Whereas the 50 unit power of a gimbaled thruster can apply that impulse at the precise vector needed. This is only in 2 translational degrees of freedom. If we add a third, that means the fixed thruster array power would be divided by 3. The axial movement would be even weaker and the (3 dimensional) diagonal movement would be as well.

On a side note, it actually looks like some of the ships do have fixed thrusters on their current in-hanger models.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
You either show liquid space physics, meaning the thrusters have to fire for the duration of the roll[/quote]
This is the case…

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
those functions haven’t been thought out at all.[/quote]
That’s kind of absurd. Show me a vehicle WIP dev document from any other space sim, or even any other game, that is as in depth as the pipeline at Cloud Imperium. I don’t think CI could be accused of not thinking. And even on being suspected of sub-par game design or ship design, I don’t think you’ve come up with anything better. Which, if that’s your point, then that’s fine and we can probably leave it at that.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
It all jars together like some sort of spaceship equivalent to the uncanny valley.[/quote]
I don’t have that experience.

[quote=“Naiba, post:62, topic:136”]
look at those ships without wanting to rip them apart and question everything about how they work[/quote]
I have this experience, too… probably for different reasons. But just because something like a minigun doesn’t receive the added bonus of being air cooled, doesn’t make me dismiss the project. I mean you really have to get in there and nitpick things.

Tell me, if you applied a consistent level of scrutiny to any other game, or even any other movie, what would you come up with?

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Erhm… ok? I guess you haven’t played a lot of first-person shooters?

And,

I wonder if maybe making your entire setup spin at several hundred RPM is actually harder, heavier, more expensive and/or more likely to suffer catastrophic failure than just fitting each barrel with it’s own loading and trigger mechanisms?

You just described a spaceship that is entirely made of a single gimballing thruster.

If this was in any way a plausible assumption, everyone would be using Ospreys instead of helicopters.

What causes the uncanny valley to be a seemingly universal effect as pertains to animation of humans is that all humans that look at such animations know what real humans are supposed to look like.

In most cases: “Oh well, the magic system doesn’t really seem to make sense, but at least I know how much the game is going to cost me”.

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[quote=“Runiat, post:67, topic:136”]
Erhm[/quote]
cute

You could make a lot of money if you made that case to General Dynamics. Considering we have rotary cannons on all of the United State’s air superiority aircraft and on the A-10, I would guess that matter was settled and is the reason why you had to dig up a piece from the previous century to find an example that isn’t really an example of what I was asking for.

[quote=“Runiat, post:67, topic:136”]
You just described a spaceship that is entirely made of a single gimballing thruster.[/quote]
If it was in the center of mass. It could only move in a 180 degree arc opposite the side the thrust is placed. You would need two.

[quote=“Runiat, post:67, topic:136”]
If this was in any way a plausible assumption, everyone would be using Ospreys instead of helicopters.[/quote]
Ospreys are faster than helicopters… And I don’t know what kind of physics comparison you’re making because these are aerodynamic craft.

Naiba was attempting to describe why thrusters don’t need to be gimbaled to get “exactly the same effect” and I am explaining why that is not the case. You would need 3 fixed thrusters on the Hornet for every gimbaled thruster on there to get the same 90 degrees of motion in two degrees of freedom at each point. And, each thruster in each triplet would need to produce the amount of thrust in one gimbal thruster to match axial translation. Each thruster in each triplet would need to produce more than 1/3rd the thrust of a gimbaled single thruster in order to equal diagonal translation. There is no way from any point of view that that is efficient, in terms of fuel, cost, or even available space on the hull of the ship. The Hornet has 8 gimbaled maneuvering thrusters. That would mean you need 24 fixed maneuvering thrusters to replicate the same freedom of movement.

There is a reason that real space craft rockets have gimbaled thrusters and some aircraft like the harrier operate on the same principle. Otherwise you would need, what like 2 more engines in the harrier for it to hover?

[quote=“Runiat, post:67, topic:136”]
at least I know how much the game is going to cost me[/quote]
You say that as if the prices for Star Citizen aren’t on display when you’re looking at the pledges or as if there’s a gun to your head.

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It is. Rotary barrels are far more efficient for convection cooling. The thing that doesn’t happen in a vacuum, if you forgot?

Oh and rotary Gatling guns have been in use since the 1860s so the previous century is actually quite recent, relatively speaking. Guess there’s just more pictures of guns from a hundred years with 2 world-wars than 14 years with a handful of rebellions and extremely one-sided “wars on terror” (I’m including Ukraine in both).

You claimed that one gimballing thruster could provide the same coverage as 6 fixed thrusters would be required for. How many sides does a cube have?

Ways in which fixed thrusters are more efficient than gimballed ones include:

  1. Fewer moving parts means lower probability of catastrophic failure and reduced maintenance requirements.
  2. Fuel lines wont need to be flexible meaning you can provide a higher nozzle pressure without separate heating chambers increasing fuel efficiency tremendously and/or reducing mass (which would, in itself, increase efficiency).
  3. Rotational motors are a lot harder to manufacture than low-volume low-temperature rocket nozzles - my grandfather could likely make the latter in his shed* - so cost would likely be reduced.
  4. The gimballing setup on the Hornet seems to take up easily twice as much hullspace as the thruster itself, so available space on the hull would be unchanged or improved.
  5. The purpose of these thrusters is to provide rapid response translation and rotation control. Fixed thrusters respond faster, and if that didn’t matter you’d be better off with using gyroscopes** to move the main engines into position. For that matter you can even rotate a spacecraft by using 3 wire coils provided you have a magnetic field handy***.

1 asterisk) In all fairness, my grandfather’s shed contains a industrial lathe and he has decades of experience using it to make things like hydraulics components.
2 asterisks) This would take a lot longer, sure, but it’d be supremely efficient if they were powered with solar energy.
3 asterisks) This would take even longer, but I know of at least 1 satellite being launched within the next month which uses this as it’s only form of attitude control. Would not recommend building a spaceship using this, however.

Please give an example of a real space craft rocket that gimbals any but it’s main engine, or an example of a real space craft rocket that gimbals said main engine more than 5 degrees.

For hovering, the Harrier locks it’s 4 nozzles in their vertical position and varies the thrust between them. All 4 nozzles are fed by the same engine and adding a single, larger, exhaust port to the back of that engine would render rotation unnecessary - except as a way to streamline the aircraft to reduce atmospheric drag. Guess what doesn’t happen in a vacuum?

It’s actually an excellent example of how having a single engine feeding multiple nozzles is a highly efficient way to do things.

They aren’t. Oh sure I can see how much it’ll cost me to get a given ship, but short of obtaining a job working for CIG I have no way to predict what that will actually be worth or how big an investment the game will be designed to “encourage” me to make.

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Dammit, I’m getting Harrier nostalgia again. :cry:

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Hi. Cue wisdom from centuries ago -
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum

C.F. C.Roberts: [paraphrase] True real time thruster activity won’t be shown by default because it just looks weird.

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[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
Rotary barrels are far more efficient for convection cooling. The thing that doesn’t happen in a vacuum, if you forgot?[/quote]
I already said this above and I don’t care. There are other advantages to a rotary design that are more important. Even if for some reason, there was no air on Earth and we were adapted to that environment, the rotary design is still a superior design to multiple guns and is the only design I’ve seen so far to put multiple barrels into one gun (as an automatic weapon, before you throw up another picture of a shotgun).

Again, the lack of conduction doesn’t matter because you still have thermal radiative cooling in a vacuum. And you still have the benefit of 6 barrels to spread the rate of fire and heat generation. So the only alternative to multiple barrels in one gun is having one barrel in one gun, and unless I missed something, the most efficient design for the former is a rotary. I’m not looking for 4 separate guns. If I was, I could have done you one better and showed you a picture of a modern day Shilka or 2 gun Tunguska. Both of which have lower firing rates and time-to-target than a rotary Vulcan, and in the case of the Shilka, a much smaller caliber round that can’t even pierce some aircraft armors. The primary point of a rotary design is that there are multiple barrels to absorb the heat generated from fire. This is true in a vacuum or not. The second point of a rotary barrel is that the barrels, can be loaded while the gun is firing simultaneously. These two factors together allow for the high rate of fire. Then there are the weight advantages over having multiple entire guns. The ability to convection cool in an atmosphere is the least of the advantages to using a rotary design.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
How many sides does a cube have?[/quote]
6… so?

So here is what you would have as far as moving parts, a gimbal joint and motor to power it, and something to regulate thrust from the engine(s). For the fixed, it would only be the regulator for the thrust. On the other hand, it is now 3 regulators. That’s 3 times the failure rate on that component. You’re right, it has a lower chance of catastrophic failure but a high chance of partial failure. I think it’s at best, debatable, which would have a higher failure rate or if the failure rate of future mechanisms is so negligible that a higher failure rate in one component means an increase from .001% to .003%.

Sure, I agree with this principle generally. But I do think the thrusters are tied to the main engine, so they are not their own engines that require reaction chambers. SC ships are not chemically powered as far as thrust. There could be fixed lines all the way up to a single point at the gimbal joint. At that point, either the bleed would be so negligible that sealing it wouldn’t be necessary (like in the harrier jet) or they could be using a flexible material we currently don’t have that could withstand that temperature and pressure (we are just talking about a maneuvering thruster, not the main engine anyway). In the latter situation, I think you’re still right, that a fixed thruster could have the capacity for greater thrust, but since it’s not a primary engine, I don’t think it matters as the primary engine wouldn’t be able to apply that much thrust to a maneuvering thruster anyway. The Hornet’s thrusters seem to be this latter scenario as the material that seems to rotate looks malleable.

They take about as much hull space as the thruster. Even if that scaled linearly, that would call for a 33% increase in hull space for the thruster locations on the hull.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
The purpose of these thrusters is to provide rapid response translation and rotation control. Fixed thrusters respond faster[/quote]
Sure, no arguing with that. But you do so at a decreased power and all the other things I said above. On the Hornet, they designed it to sacrifice lag time to get a more consistent thrust power. My 350r for example does actually have some fixed thrusters if not all fixed thrusters. It has more straightline speed and less maneuverability than the Hornet.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
For hovering, the Harrier locks it’s 4 nozzles in their vertical position and varies the thrust between them.[/quote]

For hovering in one place. However, the craft can fly backwards quickly by rotating the nozzles past 90 degrees. And can fly forward at stall speed but still stay in the air by rotating them less than 90 degrees. And how do you get to the hover in the first place? In other words, the fact that the nozzles have 1 degree of freedom and the ability to select any angle between 0 degrees and 98 degrees are absolutely crucial to the functioning of the aircraft in getting into a hover and then leaving the hover as well as performing other maneuvers.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
It’s actually an excellent example of how having a single engine feeding multiple nozzles is a highly efficient way to do things.[/quote]
I agree, and this is the way all the ships in SC function as far as I know.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
“encourage” me to make[/quote]
Nobody holds a gun to anyone’s head.

[quote=“Runiat, post:69, topic:136”]
I have no way to predict what that will actually be worth[/quote]
Really? “no way”? Did you like the Wing Commander games/Starlancer or Freelancer?

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I’d like to see this fabled ‘space brick’ you speak of, it must look awesome.

I was talking about the small crewed ships, the ones with multiple turrets, they’re about the same size as the Kellion, ones you get to walk around it, so were useful for direct comparison. The issue seems to be from the developers not being able to reconcile internal space for gameplay functionality and external design for looks on a ship that small. The Kellion didn’t look compromised one way or the other. (That concept image you linked was also a WiP design.)

I personally like the ‘solid/can take a beating’ look for ships, my issue with the beefier, fighter class ships where the developers don’t need to bother with full internals, specificaly the Hornet, was that the frame around the cockpit was far too bulky and obstructed way too much of the view.

The 30 other indi space-sim developers that had games in the works at the time of SC’s kickstarter would disagree.

Almost all of the cooling is from airflow. It just wouldn’t work in space.

5 fixed thrusters nozzles per bank. Unless your gimballed thruster can point downward through the ship…

But those 5 would be able to respond instantly to imput rather than need to wait for the thruster to turn. Isn’t that sort of instant-response capability somewhat vital for, say, dodging out the way of shooty-explody-murder-death-killy stuff in spaceship combat?

Even ignoring that crippling design flaw; there’s also the issue of much higher redundancy. Loosing 1/4 of all your manoeuvring thrusters from a single well placed shot has got to sting.

A hard sci-fi, set in the rings of Saturn between rival mining corporations a year or so after loosing contact with earth and no longer getting supply shipments. Heavily modular designs, near(ish)-future (still heavily current-space-tech influenced, plus a bit grubby and battered looking with how long they’ve been out there) accurate physics, needing to design ships to take account of power, heat dissipation, life support, fuel, all that good stuff. Wouldn’t be armoured, so kills would be fast. Lots of hiding and running. Think survival horror, but with spaceships most of the time.

But now you’ve got me dreaming about something that hasn’t and probably wont ever be done. Sigh.

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Funny that, I had a very similar setup in mind, but for a Shattered Horizon-like game instead. Though it was in another system where a generation ship had arrived, to allow for a bit more schyzo-tech and setting freedom.

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Must…not…

[ocd]It’s spelled Hellion, actually[/ocd]

…DAMMIT!!!

Now you’ve got me wanting the same thing.

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[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
I’d like to see this fabled ‘space brick’ you speak of, it must look awesome.[/quote]
As was said before, there’s no accounting for taste =)

Do you believe that modern day tanks have enough armor? Because the armor plating on the Constellation in the thinnest areas looks thicker than the 4.7 inches on tanks. It’s more like 6in-12in in places like doors and turret covers and more than a foot along the sides. I personally think this is enough in a game universe that has energy shield technology. I mean, it’s probably about as armored as ships were in the Star Trek universe.

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
frame around the cockpit was far too bulky and obstructed way too much of the view.[/quote]
I actually don’t think it is but this is probably a personal taste thing. The Freelancer did have that problem but after the community spoke up about it, they changed it so if a lot of other people don’t like it in the future, it’s not set in stone.

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
The 30 other indi space-sim developers[/quote]
I call that dead relative to what it was. During the 90’s, multiple large developers like Origin, Lucasarts, and David Braben working with Gametek, were pushing the genre forward with each release.

And if there were 30 in that year, I’d never heard of most of them. Which even if there were actually near 30, is a massive problem. Even if you were solely an fpser in the 90’s with Quake and Doom, you knew what Wing Commander was. Wing Commander used to push the limits of computer technology every year it was released. Did any of the indie games do that?

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
Almost all of the cooling is from airflow. It just wouldn’t work in space.[/quote]
Please reread my posts above about the primary advantages that are not airflow.

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
5 fixed thrusters nozzles per bank.[/quote]
The 6 was calculated for fixed thrusters taking advantage of their second most advantageous attribute, being integrated and flush with the hull (first being instantaneous thrust). You would need 6 for that arrangement. If you’re thinking about doing a ksp-style popped-up module, you can do 5 all on that module. Then it has the same weakness for failure or combat damage as the equivalent gimbaled thruster.

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
Isn’t that sort of instant-response capability somewhat vital for, say, dodging out the way of shooty-explody-murder-death-killy stuff in spaceship combat?[/quote]
Unless the motors can orient the thruster quick enough that the difference is miniscule. Which seems to be the case in Star Citizen. Once that latency gets down to a certain point, other factors become more important, like not having 3 thrusters per every one, and maintaining a higher maximum thrust, particularly along diagonal vectors.

To match the diagonal thrust of an articulated thruster, a bank of 3 fixed thrusters would need to output at least 41% more thrust total to match the same velocity at 45 degrees. This means that not only are you expending more fuel for the same speed, you need to increase the strength of the lines running from the engine to the thruster bank to cope with that which again adds more weight to the total system.

[quote=“Naiba, post:73, topic:136”]
A hard sci-fi, set in the rings of Saturn between rival mining corporations a year or so after loosing contact with earth and no longer getting supply shipments. Heavily modular designs, near(ish)-future (still heavily current-space-tech influenced, plus a bit grubby and battered looking with how long they’ve been out there) accurate physics, needing to design ships to take account of power, heat dissipation, life support, fuel, all that good stuff. Wouldn’t be armoured, so kills would be fast. Lots of hiding and running. Think survival horror, but with spaceships most of the time.[/quote]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5HOt0ZOcYk

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I guess you must’ve missed it the first time I posted it:

And as we all know, spinning really fast will make you shine more. Wait, what?

See above picture. It works for non-rotating setups, too, and they have the added advantage that there might be several loading mechanisms so that those wouldn’t overheat either.

…

See those multiple metal bands keeping the barrels from being ripped apart by centrifugal force? Imagine how much weight those might add in a design large enough to compare to the destructive force of random micrometeorites and orbital debris?

Gatling guns are heavy.

So the only way you’d need 6 fixed thrusters is if you had one on each side of a cube-like geometric shape. In other words at least 1 would be firing into the ship and thus be redundant if indeed there was a ship attached to the thruster in question.

Unless, ye know, struck by a bullet or something else intended to break stuff.

Speaking of future mechanisms, those regulators could quite easily be magnetic in nature (if for example the thrusters were using magnetically contained plasma for maximum efficiency) meaning no moving parts at all. This is not actually that far ahead of what technology exists today. On the bright side, the engine would almost certainly not have any moving parts, either, except for the gimbal.

Oh and again, for 2 degrees of freedom on the gimbal you would have to have flexible fuel lines which would add 1-2 moving components to each rotating thruster depending on the propulsive used.

Option 1 is impossible for providing 2 degrees of freedom with a single moving component. The Harrier jet offers only 1 degree of freedom letting the thrust enter though the axis.

Option 2 is impossible for very high pressure differentials; this is why astronauts have to pre-breathe pure oxygen before going on EVA missions, it lets them maintain a suit pressure of about 20% atmospheric pressure making them merely hard to move in rather than concrete-like personal prisons. It’s also why balloons stop being easy to bend once they’re blown up, and that’s a pressure differential of perhaps a few percent.

Lower nozzle pressure = lower ejection velocity = lower specific impulse. By a lot.

For example, if you can hit a golf-ball at 120mph you’d need a bag 100 billion miles (more than half-way to Alpha Centauri) in diameter filled with golfballs (and somehow magically unable to collapse into a black hole) to get from Low Earth Orbit to a Moon encounter (on a 200kg ship, including your mass). Tiger Woods (187mph shots, less than 56% faster) would be able to make the same trip with a bag of golf-balls approximately twice the diameter of the sun (more than 99.999% less in each of 3 dimensions).

No, I didn’t just do the math on all that, this guy did it for me.

Except for the extra nozzle pressure increasing your power significantly.

No, it can’t.

Apart from the bit where everything I’ve read agrees the RR Pegasus 11 engine can’t rotate past 90 degrees, there’s the small issue of overheating due to insufficient convection that arises from even hovering the Harrier - depending on ambient temperature you get maybe 2 minutes of hover before you run out of distilled water and have to either start moving to gain airflow or land.

Flying backwards would further reduce airflow and thus increase heating, in short it would be a bad idea™, although you could probably do it by convincing the flight computer to angle your nose up a bit.

No.

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Wikipedia kinda suggests otherwise.

Hovering can be achieved for a sustained period by facing into the wind, which keeps the airflow high. Similarly, viffing is likely a combination of turning into the wind and slamming the vectoring nozzles forwards, killing airspeed whilst maintaining airflow. You’d probably have to ask a Harrier pilot about this, but unusually heavy braking has been demonstrated on British TV by a Harrier on at least one and probably many more occasions.

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This is, amongst pilots, known as “flying”. Airspeed is a great deal more important than ground-speed, except when your ground-speed is unable to remain positive in the direction of the nearest runway (I’ve seen this happen to gliders that reached high altitudes on slightly windy days, fortunately the wind is usually slower closer to the ground and there were a lot of ordinary fields around our airfield).

If you are basing this description on anything but the wikipedia article you linked, please let me know as it sounds interesting.

If the wikipedia article you linked is your only source, please allow me to point out that the section you link to shows a severe shortage of citations, and that according to basic physics the action of turning nozzles to 90º would provide an aerodynamic breaking force equal to 100% the thrust of the engines used to maintain the previous velocity. The extra 8º wouldn’t make a significant difference except at low speeds, say before landing, where flaring (nosing up often more than 8º) is the standard approach for most if not all aircraft.

I’m not saying it can’t be true, just that my citation needed-meter is way up with regards to that article.

80

I get what you’re saying. Unfortunately, the only alternative “citation” I could possibly give is a TV programme I remember watching that demonstrated some fairly significant braking effect of a Harrier previously in normal forward flight from the perspective of another Harrier (or it might have been the other way round). That being said, I can’t remember which programme it was, nor when it was or how detailed an explanation they provided. There are citations for the viffing claims in Wikipedia, but it seems that it may be non-trivial to verify the data about them.

/me shrugs

Also, apologies if this post makes no sense, I’m going to sleep now.

81

I’d pay 60. Without a second thought.

Look, we get it. That kind of kind of game is a niche product in an already niche genre. It has no ‘mass market’ appeal. But there IS a market for it and that market is getting more and more frustrated that there isn’t a game, one… single… game, to cater to it.

What we want, what Naiba described, is a game that combines the hardcore accuracy of Orbiter and the sort of high-stakes, high-freedom sandbox gameplay the likes of which you don’t see outside of EVE. I’d buy the exact game that Naiba described in a heartbeat; I’d MAKE it if I had the coding skills.

All we want is our Star Citizen. Our Elite. Our Infinity.

It doesn’t have to be triple-A (though that would be nice), it just has to be.