I know I never did.
That sounds ****ing boring.
Think about it: human perception is limited, and for the movement of a thruster to not be effectively instantaneous the players - all of them - need to be able to perceive it.
Running at a standard 30 animation frames per second (this is a different type of frames from rendered FPS) you need to spend at least 2 frames doing something for the human eye to be able to pick up on it, and about 6 frames if you want anyone to be able to react to it (this is a physical limitation of the human nervous system). Thatâs 67 and 200 ms, respectively.
For that amount of time to be truly insignificant in combat, you need everything else to happen at a rate 1 or 2 orders of magnitude slower - so somewhere between 2/3rds of a second for really âfastâ events to as much as 20 seconds for slower ones.
There actually exists a game that does this: EVE Online.
I mean, yeah, in EVE itâs the weapon turrets that turn rather than the thrusters, but the effect of making those turns visible yet insignificant is quite similar. And yeah, combat can actually be exciting in that game, but iirc SC arenât planning any several-thousand-player battles? (Well OK, at those numbers EVE slow down even further, so lets say several-hundred-player battles, all in visual and weapons-range of each-other?)
Take a modern ion engine, attach the focusing and deflection coils from an old TV (will probably need to be made of superconductors to handle the increased mass of ion-beams as opposed to electron-beams), jury-rig for (computer-assisted) manual control, done.
⊠actually the Hornet thruster setup makes a fair bit of sense if they used a high powered/more advanced/plasma-engine version of what I just described. I mean, visually there is no technical reason it should look the way it does, old-school TVs were quite capable of deflecting electron beams 45 degrees in any direction without moving parts, but between in-fiction aesthetic choices, technological hand-waving, and artistic freedomâŠ
Note: a CRT-like setup powerful enough to focus and significantly deflect the ions coming out of a modern ion engine would probably mass enough to overwhelm what thrust modern ion engines can produce. The above is not a current-day technologically feasible idea, but it makes more sense than Gatling guns in space.
Itâs becoming a pattern in this thread for people to say such a thing - as if ship design (and by not so long extension, design/art direction in general) should only consist of what appeals to everyone. ⊠Just saying 
And what exactly do you think I said?
As far as I know, all I said was that I had never fantasized about being in the Millennium Falconâs turrets, if not in as many words.
What exactly are you saying? Because your post makes absolutely no sense.
I would assume he is suggesting that answering rhetorical questions, just because theyâre intended to promote a point you disagree with, is ungentelmanly and in violation of the fanbro-code of âhype before empirical dataâ.
So on that note:
Most certainly not. Lukeâs too old to be as whiny as he is, and Hanâs character seems to be based on a stereotypical highschool bully.
I did imagine being myself shooting down tie fighters in the Millennium Falcon, but then I started learning about computers and internet and started wondering why the hell they were using WWII-era technology in an interstellar spaceship.
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It does make sense. But getting all obtuse and snarky is more fun apparently.
Iâm saying this back and forth about how such and such design and/or art direction is âbetterâ is way more arguable than itâs coming off as from reading posts above. Taste is not nearly as right and wrong as argued above⊠Or maybe the guys above donât mean to sound like that.
âDe coloribus et gustibus non est disputandumâ. If some dudes back in the stoneage figured it out well enough for such a saying to survive all the way to todayâŠ
Haha. The petty angst and pretentiousness on the internet sometimes⊠I really just donât get it.
sputters
but⊠but⊠HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS! Lasers! Pew Pew Pew!
All of which can be had in the cockpit of a starship.
But not WW-II tanks and planes.
Odd thing to assume. I tend to go for âmostly powered by electricity from some form of central reactor/generatorâ to babble away the need for (much) fuel. That and rocket/plasma/whatever exhaust from those manoeuvring thrusters looks like it would be incredibly⊠melty; to whatever ducting youâd need if you wanted to channel it out to manoeuvring jets. That and exhaust ducting would be a lot bigger and take up a ton more space in the ship than cables and pipes for power (and fuel).
[quote=âSaturday, post:102, topic:136â]
Go Google how to add vectored forces. A 5 unit fixed thruster firing perpendicular to a 5 unit fixed thruster doesnât yield 10 units of diagonal force.[/quote]
Facepalmed so hard at this. Thereâs no loss of force along any vector for the ship. (Silly me, for a second I thought something in a discussion on the internet could be taken as given. :)) Iâve never bothered talking about efficiency of individual manoeuvring thrusters because itâs of absolutely no consequence to how a ship flys.
If itâs long enough to be perceptible, itâll make a big difference to combat and trying to dodge enemy fire.
[quote=âSaturday, post:102, topic:136â]
You watched A New Hope[/quote]
Yes
Nope.
Not saying you shouldnât be able to control turrets, I just donât think you should need to be sitting in the turret itself while you do it. Especially if turrets can get blasted by other players. Loosing a big chunk of your shipâs defence seems punishment enough, without killing your character and having you respawn somewhere not on the ship.
That or the turret is just disabled when shot out, which wouldnât look nearly as cool.
[quote=âNaiba, post:112, topic:136â]
Odd thing to assume. I tend to go for âmostly powered by electricity from some form of central reactor/generatorâ to babble away the need for (much) fuel. That and rocket/plasma/whatever exhaust from those manoeuvring thrusters looks like it would be incredibly⊠melty[/quote]
Well the ships in Star Citizen seem to use actual âthrustersâ. Maybe if this was Star Trek, where they mostly use energy field manipulation for combat maneuvers, sub-light, and warp speeds, I would agree. (although there are some cases where traditional thrusters were used for precision translation like docking). Otherwise, for most sci-fi universes, matter and energy is used for all types of ship propulsion. You make it sound unusual when itâs the most common form of thruster power. What a thruster is, is using newtonian laws to create movement in the desired direction like conventional rockets. In other words, you expel mass/energy from a ship, and then the ship moves opposite the direction that the mass/energy was expelled from. As far as being âmeltyâ, we currently have rockets that donât melt under great temperature and Star Citizen takes place in the 30th centuryâŠ
[quote=âNaiba, post:112, topic:136â]
Thereâs no loss of force along any vector for the ship.[/quote]
What exactly do you mean by this? Give an example. I really donât want to misinterpret what youâre saying or respond to something you didnât say.
[quote=âNaiba, post:112, topic:136â]
Iâve never bothered talking about efficiency of individual manoeuvring thrusters because itâs of absolutely no consequence to how a ship flys.[/quote]
Youâre right, fuel efficiency isnât really a factor in flight performance but youâre making the claim, that there is no reasonable sci-fi universe or fiction in which a flex thruster is useful compared to fixed thruster arrays because there are no advantages and only disadvantages by using the former relative to the latter (if youâre not, please correct me). If that is your claim, then fuel efficiency is one of the many possible valid factors.
[quote=âNaiba, post:112, topic:136â]
If itâs long enough to be perceptible, itâll make a big difference to combat and trying to dodge enemy fire.[/quote]
Does it make a difference in lag time? Yes, I agree with you it does (unless the time it takes to position the thruster is equal to the time it takes to open the regulator, then it isnât). Either way, is that difference âbigâ? I think thatâs debatable, and is ultimately decided by whoever is piloting the ship. Which is why Star Citizen gives you multiple options of ships with both options (and I think more in the future).
[quote=âNaiba, post:112, topic:136â]
Not saying you shouldnât be able to control turrets, I just donât think you should need to be sitting in the turret itself while you do it. Especially if turrets can get blasted by other players.[/quote]
Turrets can indeed be blasted by other players. Not sure if youâll insta-die from it, they havenât explained how that will work yet. A lot of people think itâs cooler and more immersive to actually have to sit in the turret and be exposed to the danger in that way, see the combat unfold around you as your helm maneuvers through battle, instead of watching this all on a screen.
I suspect Naiba is talking about Newtonian thrusters, just ones with really high specific impulse achieved by using lots of power and a small amount of mass. Plasma thrusters, ion engines, continuous-fire kinetic railguns, these can all make you go places in space.
For that matter a high enough energy-density can be used to produce mass from energy, though there are other disadvantages to equipping your ship with CERN-like particle accelerators, and electron/positron pairs (which can be created from sufficiently short gamma photons) just donât have enough mass to really be of use as a propellant.
We sort of donât, actually. Laws of physics makes it pretty damn hard to come up with a material that wont melt if itâs temperature reaches higher than 3422Âșc, and the way this Universe seems to work hotter exhaust = higher efficiency.
This is why thereâs a lot of research being done in alternatives to rockets such as ion engines and plasma thrusters (using the recoil of a railgun to provide propulsion was meant facetiously). To learn more, Google âengine rich exhaustâ.
Itâs basic physics. If the 2 thrusters firing are angled no more than 90Âș relative to one another, their thrusts donât oppose each-other in any way except possibly through relativistic effects (which can be ignored in the CryEngine) and so the ship will receive the full benefit from each of them.
For example, if you have 2 thrusters (âUPâ and âLEFTâ) able to accelerate you at 1m/s^2 and you fire both for 1 second, youâll now be moving âdownâ at 1m/s and ârightâ at 1m/s - if a relativistic kinetic impactor was about to take out the ceiling of the top-left floor of your ship, that just might be enough to move you out of the way in time.
Not at all! At least, the way I read it what Naiba is saying is simply this:
Itâs more fuel efficient to use fixed thrusters than to have your fuel tank blown up because you couldnât dodge fast enough. Other advantages include the entire rest of your ship not being blown up, either.
I think itâs ultimately decided by whether or not your ship gets blown up, and more importantly, if avoiding having your ship get blown up will have an impact on game enjoyment.
âŠ
ErhmâŠ
You do realize this is a computer-game weâre talking about? I mean, at best youâd be watching it on 2 screens (which, btw, I figure theyâll still have the technology for in the future).
With regards to whether you would die from having the compartment of the ship you were sitting in first get blown up and then be exposed to a hard vacuum⊠well, I guess a space suit thatâd let you survive it is more realistic than Gatling guns in space.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
We sort of donât, actually.[/quote]
Actually, the rockets donât melt. If they did, we wouldnât be going into space would we? Metals lose their structural integrity well below their melting point anyway. You probably wouldnât see something melt before it broke off first. Having something have a high melting point isnât the only way to prevent something from melting. Rocket nozzles have an ablative coating for example.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
I suspect Naiba is talking aboutâŠ[/quote]
I certainly hope so.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
If the 2 thrusters firing are angled no more than 90Âș relative to one another, their thrusts donât oppose each-other in any way[/quote]
Yes
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
if you have 2 thrusters (âUPâ and âLEFTâ) able to accelerate you at 1m/s^2 and you fire both for 1 second, youâll now be moving âdownâ at 1m/s and ârightâ at 1m/s[/quote]
Correct, now what is the new velocity of your ship relative to the starting point in the new âdownrightâ direction? ie, from a stationary observer standing where your ship started from before the impulse, how fast is the ship moving away from that observer? ie, what is the diagonal velocity?
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
Itâs more fuel efficient to use fixed thrusters than to have your fuel tank blown up because you couldnât dodge fast enough.[/quote]
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
I think itâs ultimately decided by whether or not your ship gets blown up, and more importantly, if avoiding having your ship get blown up will have an impact on game enjoyment.[/quote]
The only hits that matter for the sake of this situation, are hits that occur between the .01 seconds of a regulator activating and the .05 seconds of a flex thruster moving into position. Any hit that happens before .01 seconds is going to happen with either configuration and hits that would have happened after .05 seconds have the ability to be dodged by both configurations. So basically, the advantage to having a fixed thruster array lies only in hits that land between those two times. I think you are hard pressed to prove that is significant compared to other factors like efficiency (of which would be something like 30 or 40% less in diagonal vectors), or added mass, surface area(which increases the likelihood of being damaged in combat), ect.
So yes, if you sustain all of your combat damage between that .01 seconds and .05 seconds, you will blow up, and youâll blow up because you didnât have a fixed thruster array. And my position, is that this is unlikely.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
You do realize this is a computer-game weâre talking about? I mean, at best youâd be watching it on 2 screens[/quote]
Yes, itâs already difficult enough to create that immersion in someoneâs bedroom or office. And it would be even more difficult to create that sense of immersion through another screen after a screen.
Also, Oculus will help.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
With regards to whether you would die from having the compartment of the ship you were sitting in first get blown up and then be exposed to a hard vacuum[/quote]
Well what I was thinking is that you would roughly know how much damage your turret is taking. So for example, it starts getting pretty damaged and then a small breach appears, a computer letâs you know that it is losing structural integrity, and then you leave the turret before it loses oxygen.
[quote=âRuniat, post:114, topic:136â]
more realistic than Gatling guns in space.[/quote]
Itâs interesting that youâre still quipping about this after refusing to talk about it or bringing anything to the table that actually addressed my points.
I sometime wonder if you simply live in a different universeâŠ
Technically speaking, what I said wasnât accurate: some rockets donât melt, they burn/oxidise instead. Specifically, this tends to happen a lot with really high melting point rocket nozzle materials such as tungsten and graphite (aka. pencil lead, turns out carbon has some amazing allotropes), as well as firework rockets made of cardboard.
Funnily enough, oxidization tends to produce heat so it would actually be better if they melted first, as in that case the rocket nozzle itself would act as an ablative material. Other examples of ablative rocket nozzle construction seems to be limited to space-only as the lack of convection and cost/difficulty of internal duct cooling makes it economically viable if rather inefficient.
In case you missed it, one of the main points of Relativity is that this does not exist.
Factually incorrect.
The hits that matter are the ones that are within X seconds of hitting your ship, X being a humanly perceptible amount of time if the flexing of the flex thrusters is to be visible. Some of them youâll need to thrust for more than 0.00 seconds to dodge, in fact, unless your thrusters are based on quantum teleportation that would be all of them.
And I donât need to prove anything, I simply need to tell you that, to me, a game is more fun when it provides me with the chance to dodge death by the skin of my teeth.
The screen within the screen would almost certainly be higher resolution and FOV, meaning it would be effectively invisible.
That would be the 2 screens.
This is perfectly realistic if the turret is located in a fortified position inside a bunker inside a mountain, or if space battles are fought by firing orbital-velocity paintchips at each other (which, to be fair, would do more damage than your average Gatling gun).
Personally I would prefer a faster-paced game.
[quote=âRuniat, post:116, topic:136â]
In case you missed it, one of the main points of Relativity is that this does not exist.[/quote]
The concept of relativity isnât that a stationary observer doesnât exist, itâs that you can view either yourself as stationary and the other thing moving or you can view the other thing stationary and you moving. The concept is that itâs valid and for practical purposes, the same, to accept either position, not that one position doesnât exist. I just chose the one that is easiest to understand for this example.
And, you are dodging my question. Whichever of the two frames of reference you want to use, from the point in space that the ship was in before the burn as stationary or the ship itself as stationary and the point in space as moving. It doesnât matter because the answer is the same. But I want that answer. Whatâs the new velocity in the âdownrightâ direction between the starting point in space and the ship?
You guys might be interested in the last CIG technical post about how Star Citizen is tackling physics and flight control-
Iâm totally stepping into this as a fluke, since I didnât even mean to open this thread, and Iâm only touching on something of a tangential discussion, I know, but I really couldnât help myselfâŠ
Those are functionally the same thing, though. If either can be treated as the stationary observer, then neither actually is a stationary observer. Believe it or not, this was a revolutionary concept a hundred years ago. The philosophical underpinnings of classical physics were built on top of an absolutist world view.
This may not seem like such a big thing in this context, but itâs, fundamentally, the exact same discussion we continue to have today over the âcentreâ of the universe. According to observation, everywhere is the centre of the universe. This means that nowhere is the centre of the universe. People struggle with this idea to such a degree that the only thing laypeople trip over more in cosmological discussions is the concept that there is no âoutsideâ to the universe.
I agree on a cosmic scale, I should have added the caveat of a specific reference frame, of which for practical reasons we have many. If you define a specific point in space with artificial boundaries and say this is the part of space weâre looking at, then within the cube, there are absolute changes in direction that are also measurable. I chose to do that because it simpler to talk about it that way.
[quote=âKichae, post:119, topic:136â]
According to observation, everywhere is the centre of the universe. This means that nowhere is the centre of the universe.[/quote]
The following is my own armchair thoughts on this and I am aware we donât yet have the experiments to confirm or deny- of course I heard youâre a scientist or engineer or something so I look forward to an education if you have any conflicting ideas =) â
Observation had also arrived at the current conclusion the universe is open and flat. In order for nowhere to be the center of the universe in this situation, it must be infinite. It must have an infinite amount of energy. I find it hard to believe that anything more than a finite amount of energy could result in the structures we have today, ie the tiny imperfections at the big bang to create a universe where matter won over antimatter and where all particles would be perfectly evenly distributed, resulting in no galaxies or stars. I mean, if an infinite amount of energy is distributed over an infinite area, each point, no matter how small in that area will also still have infinite energy. That isnât what we observe.
It had?
I mean, Iâve heard about the discovery that the Earth was flat, a while back, but this observation of the entirety of the shape of the universe is news to me, as I didnât realize all the light had arrived yet.
It has. In fact, the universe is freakishly flat, according to observations. This is the whole reason inflationary cosmology was introduced back in the 80s. Depending on how those polarization observations from a few months back stand up over time, inflationary cosmology may now also have rather good, independent observational support of its own.
This is where your logic fails, Saturday.
Imagine a swimming pool with infinite length and width, filled with water up to a depth of 2 inches. How much water is in the pool? How much water is there per square inch of the pool?