🚀 go-pugleaf

mi...@netcom.com (John DiCamillo) wrote:

>Delance@ (Delance) writes:
>
>>	Why do you think WC engine arcade inspired, and X-Wing is
>>realistic? This is completely wrong... In fact, X-Wing's flight engine
>>don't even features inertia and ships tend to fly like they were in
>>atmosphere, not space, while WC engine, specially WCP, is much closer
>>to what a space ship would be like without making gameplay boring.
>
>WC is arcade because it doesn't have any angular momentum.
>When you move the joystick, the ship turns at a constant
>rate and when you center the joystick, this ship stops
>turning instantly.  Freespace and IWar (and the original
>Descent games) use a more realistic physics model which
>features angular momentum.

	Not quite! On Freespace, when you turn to a direction, you
face that direction. The turn is not very responsive (which gives the
illusion of) but there's no inertia.

	As for WC, there's inertia, since WC1. It's really easy to
prove, just fly head on a capship at full speed and turn 90 degrees.
You'll hit the capship, even if you are facing empty space. You can't
do it with Freespace nor X-Wing. End of story.

	WCP is even better, with linear acceleration... At any event,
no flight sim is truly realistic until if features something that have
actually existed and worked, not even I-War, which is the modern sim
that have the more realistic inertia model.

>>	If you consider X-Wing realistic just because the ship rolls
>>when you turn left-right, this is not realistic in space since, as we
>>all should know, there's no atmosphere nor gravity in space. And since
>>WC3, WC games have this "alternative" flight mode option...
>
>Actually, there is one good reason to use banked turns
>in a space fighter: human physiology.  A human pilot can
>withstand more vertical Gs than lateral Gs.  Thus it makes
>sense to perform "coordinated turns" to keep the ship's
>acceleration vector aligned with the pilots body.

	It's somewhat irrelevant! Of course all those space fighters
have some kind of gravity generator! There's gravity on the capships,
right? So on the fighters there's some way to counter the G-effects.
Or else a fighter that would accelerate from 0 to 1500kps in a few
seconds would probably kill anyone.

	Games feature this turn to pretend that they are realistic to
people that know flight-sims. As for the lateral Gs, hey, tell that to
all F-1 pilots...

>But, this is all a lot of hooey because neither WC nor XvT
>nor Freespace even pretend to use thrusters to turn a ship.
>They all use some mysterious unseen, unnamed force (well,
>the Star Wars books make mention of an "etherial rudder"
>whatever that is...) to control attitude.  So it is kind of
>hard to say that any of them is more realistic than any
>of the others.

	Not quite right again, the WCP Vampire have fully vectoring
thrusters. So does the Panther (horizontal)

	OK, so most of them don't have it. Still, it could be some gas
jet that is invisible.

     >> Delance <<