Hello,
Just discovered this game and it looks promising ("Minecraft in SPAAACE!!!"), but before I commit to investing time in the learning curve, I was wondering how space flight is modeled in the game. Is it less realistic, like in Star Wars -- i.e., atmospheric space flight in space? Or is it more realistic, like in The Expanse -- i.e., Newtonian physics/objects in motion remain in motion unless acted upon by an opposing force? Or is it somewhere between the two -- i.e., the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica?
Thanks,
WP6
It's all of the above, depending on your config settings.
That's.. not very helpful, so I'll be a bit more detailed.
By default, the game is psudo-newtonian, but there's an option in your thruster config that "auto dampens" your speed as-if you were going through atmos so you have to hold W to maintain speed. If you turn it off, you for the most part maintain your max speed over long distances (there's a negligible slow-down by default somewhere in the cfg files, like 0.5% per second that you can totally turn off if you feel like it.)
You have mass. Other things have mass. If you hit something 1/10 your size it will go flying. If you hit something 10 times your size you will go thud. Planets and space stations are an exception. They don't move. They always make you go thud. And sometimes crash the game when you thud them. Don't thud.
if you "fall off" your ship in motion...it keeps going. for ~ 2 sectors when the game engine unloads the asset because there's no active players around to care about rendering it anymore, after that it "loses" it's speed giving you a chance to catch-up to again. Exception with a "fleet" ship, where you order it to go to a certain location, it actually goes FASTER when it's in unloaded space. Most servers use close-to-default values for ease-of import for premade ships/stations, some are exceptions.
For learning curve...Ignore the tutorials. they are wrong and broken. Except for bench's logic, it's like 95% up-to-date-accurate. Only watch youtube videos published after june or july 2018 if you want to learn the game, everything before that is going to be lies and heresy and forbidden legends of past golden ages. Except ship reviews. They still look mostly the same, bu they won't work propery anymore. At all. So, still mostly lies i guess, just pretty white lies.
