Some observations

[Phoenix-D]

"Also, if you give infinite (or even, very high) max speed, won't ships still be able to reverse direction quite quickly?"

Lower the turn speed and acceleration rates to match. I'll test this now, see what happens..

EDIT: a big problem, though, is you can only speed up in 25% incriments. Very odd for a pure newtonian system.

Tested. Speed doesn't affect turn time at all. It does, however, affect turn radius. I didn't play with turn speed, since there is no way to vary it depending on speed.

That does and doesn't make sense. Does, because a ship could turn around quickly. Doesn't, because a ship would still be moving the other direction. Not so in Starfury.

[ September 24, 2003, 22:07: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

[Suicide Junkie]

The key thing will be that top speed does not depend on your engines. The built-in top speed of the hull would be very high, the built-in turn rate and built-in acceleration would be zero.

Engines would add to the turn & accel. Engine damage would thus force you to go in a straight line, and prevent you from slowing down (top speed is always above current speed)

You could only set desired speeds in increments of 25% (of lightspeed, perhaps) with the keyboard, but with mouse controls, you can get it in 1-pixel increments.
If the acceleration is low enough, you don't need to worry - just press full throttle to accelerate and zero to slow down. When at your desired speed, you can click the mouse where the speed line is to set cruise control, or just alternate between gas and brakes.

[PvK]

Yeah, especially if you turn up the max speed to something very high - it would be challenging to come to a stop near enough to a planet to "shuttle over".

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

Sorry to burst that bubble there Puke, but you can be tearing alone at any velocity you like and still shuttle over. Better, you come out of port in exactly the same position and speed.

[PvK]

Don't worry about bursting bubbles, since that's not what I was talking about, and I'm not Puke.

What I meant was, if a modder decides to increase the maximum speed to many times more than the current maximum, that will make the current four speed settings available with the keyboard be rather farther apart. So 1/4 speed might be rather too fast to easily manage to pull up alongside a planet in orbit range.

However, you could still use the mouse to select a smaller fractional speed than 1/4.

Still, it seems like there would need to be hard code changes and AI changes before the movement would be much like Newtonian.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

Err, oops. On the name at least, since I was refering to the shuttling over comment in the post before mine..

"Yeah, especially if you turn up the max speed to something very high - it would be challenging to come to a stop near enough to a planet to "shuttle over"."

[milo]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Err, oops. On the name at least, since I was refering to the shuttling over comment in the post before mine.

The issue isn't whether or not the ship comes to a halt. The issue is whether the player can maneuver it within the shuttle radius of the target station. By analogy, if your car's choice of speeds were 0 and 100 mph, it would be pretty hard to get it safely into the garage.