[pronoiac]

To summarize: Elite was an amazing game that had a gigantic universe, procedurally generated from a carefully chosen and vetted random seed. There's a story on how it was made, discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892462

For the upcoming Elite: Dangerous, the maker is drawing as much as possible from current astronomy.

[Mithaldu]

Sadly he draws exactly nothing from Astrophysics, and instead of exploring the possibilities of truly interplanetary combat aided by highly advanced computer systems; the game is populated by vehicles behaving like WW2 era planes and blimps, floating in the ether between space objects.

[teamonkey]

There's a lot more to astrophysics than Newtonian mechanics. Stellar formation, element abundance, extraterrestrial geophysics, etc.

Have you played Frontier (Elite 2) at all? That seems to be what you're after. Much as I loved that game, the combat was awful. It came down to judging when to switch your autopilot on and off, because there was no way you could manually track your enemy as you passed by at 5000kph.

[anigbrowl]

Turns out that this is how people want to fly spaceships. Slingshot maneuvers and dumping reaction mass make for a great simulation, but not an enjoyable one for most people.

[electromagnetic]

Yeah, anyone whose played KSP can attest to how hard flying blind in space is. There's no "hey I see him!" and going for it unless you want the maneuver to take an hour.

I think space combat in reality would be 99% dull, 1% mind blowing too fast to react insanity, because the firing windows would be so narrow before just being missiles fired back and forth, with point defences having ages to pick down the enemy munitions.

Realistically speaking. Lasers would lead to mirrored ships. Particle beams would likely lead to the magnetic shields proposed for protection against the solar wind. Explosives will be highly inefficient in a vacuum, so they'd only be implemented like in current bunker busters. So we're talking kinetic impact weapons.

[davedx]

> Realistically speaking. Lasers would lead to mirrored ships. Particle beams would likely lead to the magnetic shields proposed for protection against the solar wind. Explosives will be highly inefficient in a vacuum, so they'd only be implemented like in current bunker busters. So we're talking kinetic impact weapons.

I've given this a lot of thought recently, working on my own hard sci-fi space game :)

I don't think mirrors are a good protection against high powered lasers. I've done some reading around the Internet and the consensus was that even if the mirror is absolutely flawless and perfectly clean, it's only a matter of time before a laser punches through it. The best defense against laser weapons turns out to be bad weather, which is hard to find in outer space. (Fighting inside a nebula might help?)

I think beam weapons will be devastatingly effective, once ships have enough power behind them, leading to battles at extreme ranges (light seconds to light minutes), where evasive manuevers can be somewhat effective.

That's my take on it, from reading various Q&A's on the net and thinking a lot about how space battles would probably really work in the near future. It's great fun to think about.

[teamonkey]

> The best defense against laser weapons turns out to be bad weather, which is hard to find in outer space.

Maybe some kind of gas or mirrored chaff as a countermeasure?

[Borogravia]

Completely agree. As a hack writer who periodically takes a swing at writing sci-fi, I struggle badly when trying to get both realism and excitement into space combat.

[pavel_lishin]

I always imagined it would be like playing a submarine simulator - you rely mostly on your instruments, the locations of your enemies and their capabilities are largely educated guesswork, and you spend most of your time waiting to see if an action you took an hour ago had any sort of impact.

[anigbrowl]

I used to enjoy playing a submarine simulator (688 Attack Sub, IIRC) but it's not that dynamic. Elite was firmly rooted in the Star Wars vision of space combat, which was in turn based on WW2 naval air combat. I remember a bunch of games based on Star Trek but they never became massively popular because they were based much more on strategy than action.

On the upside it's not an atmospheric flight model in Elite. You can orient yourself freely if you're not thrusting, and indeed 'flying backwards' by getting some thrust going and then doing a 180 so you can fire at the enemy with your forward-facing weapons is a pretty essential tactic.

[jimmcslim]

It wouldn't be the first time that accuracy has been sacrificed for playability... A space sim that fully relied on Newtonian physics would probably be quite tedious and difficult? (In fact, I think one of the previous Frontier titles was guilty of this)

That said, I do believe Elite: Dangerous does allow you to adopt an advanced mode that might be closer to what you are expecting.

[lloeki]

In Wing Commander Prophecy there was a key (or button if HOTAS was your style) that made you temporarily cut off the "atmospheric flight simulation" mode.

Using inertia and rotating was the only way to "strafe" along a cap ship, and much more efficient at destroying turrets than your usual back and forth fire-and-forget missile/torpedo/guns-blazing runs typical of post X-Wing/TIE Fighter space operas.

Also you could just turn around and shoot whoever is behind you (except they've got a time advantage since suddenly you're moving on a straight line and by the time you've got them on sight you're dead). An incredibly useful strategy was to just pivot then throw in the after burner for dramatic direction changes in an attempt to outmaneuver your opponent.

I always thought this game landed a good balance between fun and realism, with a suspension-of-disbelief-compatible in-story explanation that you're usually in computer assisted mode that simulates atmospheric flight behavior because otherwise dogfights are humanly impossible to manage.

[okasaki]

Independence War 1 & 2 and many other games had newtonian physics and were lots of fun.

To be it seems awfully insulting that players wouldn't understand that a ship doesn't necessarily go where it's pointing, which is really what it comes down to.

[maglevfield]

Interplanetary flight in I-War 1 & 2 was done with the inertia-less LDS drive (same as Elite: Dangerous super-cruise), you practically didn't do it in Newtonian mode opposed to the previous Elite sequels where everything was done in a single Newtonian mode, which also featured realistic orbital dynamics, moving celestial bodies and freeform planetary re-entry.

That said Elite: Dangerous regular flight physics are still Newtonian, even more so than I-War series as it features rigid body dynamics and not a point mass, but the ships have very strong maneuvering thrusters a flight control system computer to counteract the skidding and keep it within a certain speed limit, but you can partially turn it off.

See videos below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KAJuR5giGo&t=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwVYc_iPAvg

[coder23]

That makes the combat much more interesting, but the flight model is still way of, it simply violates Newtonian laws. You turn and accelerate immediately like a plane if you choose to and there is a max speed limit, unlike I-War. Resembles airplanes with the ability to strafe and pivot, which is fun but not what some want.

[maglevfield]

It doesn't violate any Newtonian laws.

http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ#W...

[z3phyr]

Does Kerbal Space Program qualify as a space sim?

[the_af]

KSP sounds tremendously interesting, but I think in the context of this discussion we're talking about combat space sims.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, people did various type of space combat experiments in KSP, and they're as easy and interesting as you'd expect (i.e. not very much).

[flohofwoe]

I really hope they keep the Newtonian mechanics as in Elite2, and implement a 'fly-by-wire' mode on space-crafts which makes them behave somewhat like atmospheric vehicles, it's just a matter of thrusters at the right places fired at the right time, but if you turn everything off, the spacecraft should properly be affected by gravitation of nearby planets and stars.

[Borogravia]

Beta backer here, have already wasted a ton of time in this game. "Fly-by-wire" is called "flight assist" in the game, and it works essentially the way you describe.

You mostly get the sort of gravity effects you're describing in the fast-traveling "supercruise" mode, where the proximity of a large mass severely slows you down. The effect is handy for slowing to approach speed close to stations, since they're generally close to a planet or a moon.