Space sims with my newtonian mod fix

[Spacescifi]

 

I am not a coder (even though I have played around with game coding to modify them).

Often space sims choose atmospheric flight simulation over newtonian flight simulation.

The reasoning is that newtonian qould lead to overshooting your target and space jousting.

I have a solution where one would not have to give up newtonian.

Translation: Translate spaceship across space by moving space past the spaceship, and when you drop out of warp your speed/trajectory shifts to a relative stop in comparison to masses larger than your vessel within 3 kilometers. 3 kilometers is the radius your translation drive will mass-lock to, dropping your vessel out of warp if a larger mass than your vessel is in the radius. If no larger mass is found, original speed and trajectory are retained. From there you could burn out of the mass lock radius or do rendezvous or landing with the mass nearby. All with newtonian maneuvers. Also I would make fuel limited on the RCS thrusters, just so players are more careful about maneuvering.

 

So with my mod included, would space sims like elite dangerous be better or worse?

[Vanamonde]

Well, this isn't a science issue, so thread moved to The Lounge. 

As for games, I suspect they make the physics like moving through fluid because it's more familiar to people and easier for players to understand. 

[Spacescifi]

3 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

Well, this isn't a science issue, so thread moved to The Lounge. 

As for games, I suspect they make the physics like moving through fluid because it's more familiar to people and easier for players to understand. 

 

Yes perhaps.

But I also found newtonian more interesting.

Interestingly, warping within 3 kilometers of the sun would be a 27 g fall. 3 kilometers in milliseconds likely.

Very fast way to die.

Or warping somewhat farther away could led to a roche limit where the gravity is not equalized and the vessel is ripped apart as it is sucked toward the flaming ball of gas that is the sun.

[Shpaget]

Step 1. So you warp near (a few hundred or lightyears, whatever) a black hole, let yourself fall, warp back out, fall, warp out, fall... repeat as necessary.

Step 2. Warp to enemy planet and wipe their entire civilization out of existence.

Find the biggest black hole you can find, so tidal forces are lowest, for any given acceleration.

[kerbiloid]

27 g = 3 km in 5 seconds.

[Spacescifi]

6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Step 1. So you warp near (a few hundred or lightyears, whatever) a black hole, let yourself fall, warp back out, fall, warp out, fall... repeat as necessary.

Step 2. Warp to enemy planet and wipe their entire civilization out of existence.

Find the biggest black hole you can find, so tidal forces are lowest, for any given acceleration.

 

Why so violent? Although yeah, it is good to think of what could go wrong. Although I only think kerbal players would even have the know how to do this.

In a game, the solution would be to make blackholes rare. And guarded.

I presume that having a black hole is like automatic WMD's for this tech, putting them at the level of nuclear deterrents today.

 

The only surefire counter I could invent is insta-comms.

Instant communication: Starships in the fleet can talk to each other immediately via energy portals which transport energy, not mass. This is also how they dump waste heat, dumping it onto some powerstation on a homeworld linked to the ocean. Max range is 7 lightyears. If you have a ship in a location, those are your eyes and ears, even though ships sensors only possess normal lightspeed, their warp capacity makes up for that. Thus warp scout starships become popular.

 

EDIT: The waste heat issue also means that you need to scatter enough starships every 7 LY or at least have a power station on a planet to dump heat to, since they are all connected. It is also means that massive several kilometer ships are most valuable for their heatsink capacity, serving as a bridge through which the local fleet feeds the nearest power station waste heat.

Destroy the power station they are relying on and all the ships relying on it WILL cook. Sooner or later.

 

Suddenly old school war territory strategy is back.

 

Edited August 9, 2019 by Spacescifi
Tertitory

[Shpaget]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Why so violent?

You keep coming up with scenarios that just invite this sort of thinking.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

You keep coming up with scenarios that just invite this sort of thinking.

LOL.

Okay... I just found a really easy way to modify the drive to solve these doomsday attacks.

Translation navigation: Once a starship starts translating it must translate to something with more mass than itself, autoswitching it's speed and trajectory to match once it drops out of translation.

However if there is no suitable mass found within 3 kilometers the vessel will continue to translate, deflecting objects away in it's path harmlessly.

The problem is that a starship cannot translate forever, as sooner or later the translation drive will overheat.

7 hours of use will do this. Max translation speed is a LY per hour, slowest speed of translation is sublight at a lightsecond per minute.

 

There! No easy WMD planetkillers for you LOL.

 

You can steer your ship where you wanna go like an airplane while translating, but trying to actually hit the 3 kilometer radius of a mass larger then you while translating at a LY per hour is.... hard?

I mean you could fly to stars easier, but that is like 27g or more or slightly less, and you will plunge into a fiery doom.

Planets? Harder.

 

Can you do it? Using only lightspeed sensors while traveling at FTL?

 

As for RKV's? Still possible, but people will notice if you translate to mars and start constantly accelerating toward earth.

In this scifi verse, constant acceleration of 1g past an hour is considered an act of war or hostility unless you have cleared it with local government. Since such acceleration rates are unnecessary due to translation drives.

 

This also means small ships become popular for in situ asteroid mining, as big ships would dwarf asteroids and woud have to use constant acceleration to reach them, so it would be more time efficient to send a fleet of smaller vessels to translate to it and mine it in situ, or just extract and send back.

 

Edited August 9, 2019 by Spacescifi
Lightspeed sensor nav FTL

[kerbiloid]

26 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

The problem is that a starship cannot translate forever

No problem. Perform Oberth maneuver next to the event horizon heading to the destination planet.
The beam of rays and particles produced from your former ship will reach the target without any translator. Just aim accurately.

10 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Step 2. Warp to enemy planet and wipe their entire civilization out of existence.

And don't hit it like everybody would do.
Just pass by next to its surface, causing its tidal destruction due to your ship relativistic mass.
Or pull it from their sun with relativistic mass gravity.
Guru level: tidally make it rotate and get destroyed by centrifugal forces.

P.S.
Oops, this is about Newtonian physics.
Ok, then hit.

Edited August 9, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

No problem. Perform Oberth maneuver next to the event horizon heading to the destination planet.
The beam of rays and particles produced from your former ship will reach the target without any translator. Just aim accurately.

And don't hit it like everybody would do.
Just pass by next to its surface, causing its tidal destruction due to your ship relativistic mass.
Or pull it from their sun with relativistic mass gravity.
Guru level: tidally make it rotate and get destroyed by centrifugal forces.

P.S.
Oops, this is about Newtonian physics.
Ok, then hit.

 

What is an oberth maneuver?

And you have lost me in understanding?

How would use a black hole? Or are you using the OP or my mod to prevent RKV's?

Neither did I know relativistc mass had any tidal forces of it's own.

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

What is an oberth maneuver?

Blasphemy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect

9 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Neither did I know relativistc mass had any tidal forces of it's own.

In one sci-fi book the crew members were even dying because their blood got relativistically heavy, so the heart couldn't push it.
Sci! Sic!

Edited August 9, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

i did a quasi-functional mod for freespace 2 a very long time ago that allowed newtonian flight, atmospherics and even some orbital mechanics. granted the thing would crash if you tried to orbit anything bigger than tethys. i started my own engine to get around those limitations, many years later and it still isnt done, i havent even ported my physics code over yet. i do recall doing a video of me flying around in mars atmosphere. this is planar terrain (1d gravity model) so this does not show the orbital mechanics. but the script does support spherical terrain/gravity.

Spoiler

 

it was a great little novelty in what was becoming a stale game for me and ksp pretty much stole my attention away from the fs modding scene. 

Edited August 13, 2019 by Nuke

[KSK]

On 8/9/2019 at 12:08 AM, Spacescifi said:

 

I am not a coder (even though I have played around with game coding to modify them).

Often space sims choose atmospheric flight simulation over newtonian flight simulation.

The reasoning is that newtonian qould lead to overshooting your target and space jousting.

I have a solution where one would not have to give up newtonian.

Translation: Translate spaceship across space by moving space past the spaceship, and when you drop out of warp your speed/trajectory shifts to a relative stop in comparison to masses larger than your vessel within 3 kilometers. 3 kilometers is the radius your translation drive will mass-lock to, dropping your vessel out of warp if a larger mass than your vessel is in the radius. If no larger mass is found, original speed and trajectory are retained. From there you could burn out of the mass lock radius or do rendezvous or landing with the mass nearby. All with newtonian maneuvers. Also I would make fuel limited on the RCS thrusters, just so players are more careful about maneuvering.

So with my mod included, would space sims like elite dangerous be better or worse?

It wouldn’t make a lot of difference to Elite Dangerous depending on how you implement your mass-locking.

Incidentally, Elite Dangerous includes pseudo Newtonian flight (Flight Assist Off mode) in which your maximum speed is restricted but Newton’s 1st law still applies. I rarely used it myself but as I recall, learning to do without Flight Assist  was pretty much essential for the serious PvPer.

As a final point, I don’t see how your solution solves the jousting in space problem and from a gameplay perspective, I think limited RCS fuel would be a terrible idea for most space sims. In most space sims, flying through space is a means to an end, rather than the main point of the game. Having to be too careful about maneuvers would place an undue emphasis on the flying. Make it optional and some players might enjoy it occasionally, make it compulsory and it would be tedious and frustrating.

Using Elite Dangerous as an example, plenty of players complained about the level of flying currently required (docking with spinning space stations etc) and players fall foul of the relatively lenient rules around spacecraft fuel as it is, to the extent that one group of players (the Fuel Rats) specialise in rescuing stranded players who ran out of gas. 

I can imagine the uproar if limited RCS fuel was introduced and it wouldn’t be pretty.

[kerbiloid]

Would a really power-rich ship have RCS at all? It can rotate itself with gyrodines.

[Nuke]

On 8/13/2019 at 10:19 AM, kerbiloid said:

Would a really power-rich ship have RCS at all? It can rotate itself with gyrodines.

you still need a means to desaturate. but this is likely a lot fewer thrusters and less sophisticated (likely smaller with a very simple control system) thrusters than what you would need for something capable of docking. you can probably also detorque with engine gimbals or differential thrust on multiple main engines during burns if you aren't expected to saturate between maneuvers. ive managed 3 axis control with only four strategically angled thrusters provided you don't mind accelerating to do it (works fine with ion drives that need to burn continuously though). 

though im not sure if you are able to dump the momentum of one axis into another allowing you to detorque all axes with only 2 thrusters or detorque roll with only a single gimballed engine. 

Edited August 15, 2019 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

though im not sure if you are able to dump the momentum of one axis into another allowing you to detorque all axes with only 2 thrusters or detorque roll with only a single gimballed engine. 

A ship can have multiple gyro packs, engaging them on demand.
Then it needs only translation thrusters.

Profits are: unlimited rcs propellant, less holes in the hull, less rngines, pipes and tanks, better accuracy.

So, a nuclear ship should probably avoid RCS, using electricity as much as possible.

Edited August 15, 2019 by kerbiloid