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Yesterday i was hatching the new battlestar galactica and it gave me the erg to fly around space and blow s**t up. Alas all there was to offer was x2 and freelancer. Now i don't know about X3 or EVE, is EVE cockpit based?

This is when i realised, Freelancer, X and EVE put together in one would make a great SCS. Plus a realistic physics engine. where, for example, you boost fowards a few seconds and keep going and can turn ect while doing so. recoil from guns (well, mass drivers anyway) ect ect. Anybody know of anything at all like this? Any upcoming projects? If not i will have to talk to my friends about visual basic......

There IS no real applicable recoil in space. The engines and inertial dampeners would negate it.

And no, there's really no fun space combat sims other than Freespace 2. That was a good one.

But if there was no force from the engines, would the inertial dampeners be enough to negate something like a rail gun?

 

Physics Geek Alert:

Real Life: Newton's third law works just fine in space, thank you very much. That is, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If your ship throws out a high velocity junk of mass in one direction, there will be a push in the opposite direction (recoil).

"Inertial Dampers" are a made up thing, originally conceved in Star Trek (I think). If someone want's to explain how you think these work, go for it.

The engines COULD compensate for the force of the gun firing, but there might be some sort of perceptible change. And that assumes the gun fires forward. Turret mounted guns would do different things.

I'm pretty sure inertial dampeners aren't just "made up", I seem to recall them being mentioned before in a NASA report...who knows though. And I SERIOUSLY doubt that if a race becomes advanced enough to create massive starships and railguns, they definitely have gone beyond recoil...

Trust me on the Inertial Dampers thing...they are sci-fi. Feel free to Google it if ya like, but I should warn you that one of my majors in college was Aerospace Engineering. ;-)

It's certainly possible that an advanced race could have some technology to compesate for recoil. Heck WE have technology that compesates for recoil.

I think the initial post, though, was "is there any space combat game coming out with realistic physics."

I'm not meaning compensation. I'm meaning elimination The recoilless rifle immediately springs to mind as the modern day example of what would be effective for space combat...

But yeah. Games either completely say F U physics for space combat, or they take it to such an extreme that it's boring.

i always though rail guns didn't give off recoil. something about the way they use magnetic fields to fire the projectile. and rather than call them inertial dampers why not call them recoil absorbers (like the suspension on a bike, only on a big gun. sure there'd still be some recoil but not as much)

Nope, they have plenty of recoil.  Newton's Third Law is the basis of this, but the actual reason is that the railgun uses the spacecraft to "push off" from.  Every time you move something, another thing has to move as well; there's no "free movement" as it stands now. 

Wait a moment, what about rockets?

Rockets push off superheated propellant at high speeds to acheive their thrust; the propellant is what give it its "push off".

Recoilless rifles work the same way, like a bazooka (if I'm thinking of the proper weapon).  You don't want to be standing behind it when it fires.

And shame on all of you!  You should know better than to argue with Russ! 

"Games either completely say F U physics for space combat, or they take it to such an extreme that it's boring"

If only they would get the balance right.

This is one thing i never understood when playing space games, when you decrease the throttle you slow down. Silly people

I think a lot of it has to do with keeping the game playable. There have been some very realsitic space games in the past, but they were VERY tough to play, and did not sell well.

Some games have toyed with the idea. Freelancer and Wing commander had buttons you could press that let your ship continue in a straight line while you rotated and fired in another direction.

X-Wing was a game I felt struck that balance very nicely.

Posted By yakface on 04/28/2006 11:00 PM

X-Wing was a game I felt struck that balance very nicely.

Oh, how I miss X Wing and Tie Fighter. I can't seem to get them to work properly on a post-pentium computer.

Best games ever.

Period.

.

 

Why do you think I still have a Pentium 120?  It ain't for the looks!

Get dosbox for the old dosbased games. you can jack up the processor rate.

Hmmm, I think I do have an old 486 collecting dust somewhere. Perhaps its time to resurrect it.