Questions/Comments for Pete Mackay and John Pritchett:
1. Could you please specify how decoupled-only pilots would use these new 3 IFCS modes?
Particularly
the precision and cruise modes. Decoupled flight really cares less
about what speed the ship if flying in since the IFCS is not supposed to
be negotiating vectors for it. So there should be no rotation rate
nerfs under this mode in cruise.
Also, if I understood
correctly, both boost and afterburner are to be available. Question is
why? If a ship can switch from SCM to Cruise to exceed its IFCS speed
limitation then instead of using afterburner to go beyond that speed the
ship should literally just switch to cruise mode. Its the same 'push
one button' procedure. What is the difference between SCM using
afterburner to prop up to 2x its top speed and the pilot simply
switching to cruise mode and doing the same?
Finally, I posted this suggestion some time ago about the new IFCS modes:
It
organizes coupled and decoupled into independent flight modes each with
the same settings but these settings operate differently depending on
the flight mode it is in.
('Universal' in that link's image is
'Cruise' ... perhaps a better name is needed? Universal is a word I used
since all ships could reach the same universal speed with it but the
name is not catchy...and cruise doesn't really describe what cruise
does..its not a fuel efficient travel mode. )
2. What is the
design decision/purpose of making the Hull series be slower than they
could be even when they are unloaded? Mass:Thrust would say such ships
could have very high accelerations and the only reason for denying them
this is the 'can't have giant empty trucks as the fastest ships around'
argument....which doesn't make sense. Artificially lowering their top
speed 'just because' destroys much of the ship's
flexibility/adaptability and bottlenecks it into being a slow, huge hulk
no matter what.
"All of the flight modes are available in decoupled. Precision reduces
acceleration a bit, to try to keep things nice and controlled when
performing close proximity maneuvers, and this will be true in decoupled
mode as well. We have talked about allowing precision to offer greater
acceleration in contrary actions, or actions that reduce total velocity.
This would make it highly responsive when trying to correct ship
motion, like when you are about to crash into something, but it hasn't
been tested yet, and we probably want to see how players do with the
current implementation before exploring too deep in how to improve it
from here.
SCM still imposes the same top speed in decoupled
mode, ensuring that at any given time the ship can come to a stop within
tolerable times. You might be advanced enough to never need this, in
which case you can just get into Cruise mode and stay there - Cruise
mode can throttle all the way down to 0, so if you have the control to
make this work, go for it.
Cargo haulers in general are designer
to accommodate far more mass than themselves, and we justify drastically
increasing the Load Rating of the engines at the cost of really poor
jerk stats - when fully laden, the ship operates as expected, but that
low jerk value really becomes the primary limiting factor when the ship
is empty. It's not really any different from any other kind of balance
trade off."
How will overclocking work into the upcoming flight model or will that be worked in later.
Overclocking is a separate system, but since it affects the output of
components, it will ultimately also have an affect on flight. Pushing
the components harder to get more thrust can increase your acceleration,
which can increase your top speed. This can be very punishing for the
components though, so there's a balance to be found to get the absolute
best out of the component without pushing it so hard that it breaks.
Comments
The changes sound quite good but it's the implementation that matters, a wait and see for me.
Developers answer questions about new flight model :
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/293412/flight-model-ifcs-2-0-feedback-and-discussion
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CIG Calix Reneau CIGCalixReneau
SCM still imposes the same top speed in decoupled mode, ensuring that at any given time the ship can come to a stop within tolerable times. You might be advanced enough to never need this, in which case you can just get into Cruise mode and stay there - Cruise mode can throttle all the way down to 0, so if you have the control to make this work, go for it.
Cargo haulers in general are designer to accommodate far more mass than themselves, and we justify drastically increasing the Load Rating of the engines at the cost of really poor jerk stats - when fully laden, the ship operates as expected, but that low jerk value really becomes the primary limiting factor when the ship is empty. It's not really any different from any other kind of balance trade off."
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Have fun