Time acceleration

[zzz]

Hello all you talented people!

I have a suggestion:
What about binding the time acceleration with the g-forces the pilot has to sustain.
By accelerating your ship at 1g he has a pleasant trip (reads a book ,sleeps...) and so the time can accelerate at maximum.
If you go for maybe 7g's or more you have to travel at real time, because he suffers drastic forces.
For 2g-6g something between (10X-1000X).

What do you think?

[nozmajner]

I should note that there's no such thing as time acceleration in the Pioneer universe. It's just an UI feature for the player, so he or she doesn't need to sit trough multi day or week transits. So no time manipulation, stasis or anything.

[zzz]

I know, I try to make it more clear.
If you would travel in real life with a spaceship for several days you want this with only 1g or a little more, because your body is used to this forces.
If you accelerate your ship with more g's it would be very stressful for you and these days would feel much longer.

It's just for identification with your pilot.

The autopilot could be set by default to accelerate with only 1g, as a realistic feature.

[torham2234]

I presume that in the Pioneer universe there is a technology to negate high G forces on the human in the spaceship. Otherwise ships like Varada are really just a very expensive coffin. Human body can tolerate up to around 10 G in short intervals, so small fighter ships which are capable of 20 - 25 G acceleration would kill you pretty much instantly.

[zzz]

If there is a technology which lets you easily sustain constantly 20g for several days, you should sustain up to a hundred g's in short time.
So fighters should have thrusters wich produce this high g-forces, otherwise they are ineffective.

[nozmajner]

There's no technology in the game like that, at least explicitly. Those accelerations are more for game-play reasons. Also it's true that 1G continuous acceleration would be ideal from the viewpoint of the pilot and passengers, but that would mean much longer travel times, and most players are finding a several in-game day transits already too long. And most people would get bored after a few 1.5-4G orbital insertion (there are ships already at around 4G).
Don't forget that this is a game, not a simulator, so there are some decisions we need to make, in order to provide an enjoyable experience. These engines would already qualifying as weapons of mass destruction anyway.

Same for fighter accelerations. Sure it would mean an edge in combat, but we should consider making it enjoyable too. When ships whipping past each other at hundred G, then it quickly become too fast, hard and not really enjoyable. It was even too fast at 30G. And we can say that drones and AIs, or remote controlling can solve that problem, but then we just removing the player effectively.
Also, too high accelerations remove lot of the sense of scale and mass too.

[FluffyFreak]

These are things we refer too as "Handwavium" - I.e: things that make the gameplay work ;)

[zzz]

You could lower the coasting phases by increasing the delta-v (but not over c, which you already can, but that's another thing).
When you come out of hyperspace the usual distance to the next station is about 10AU.
With 1g it takes 10 days. Seems o.k. for travelling time.
For the greater distances you might be right, the trip could be too long for some players.
But I see pioneer more as a simulation than a game and when you can't go faster without suffering you have to deal with it.
I think this realism fits quite good with the pioneer universe and there is always an option for implenting some sort of in-system micro-jumps when travelling times get outta hand.

I personally play it this way, without autopilot and using the low thrust option, although it is not very comfortable or precise with only 6 settings.
I also tweaked all ship thrusters to produce only forces a fighter pilot can stand nowadays.

What would it be to fly a ship through space now or in the near future and with this method I come this feeling as close as it gets.

[bmaxa]

I think that frontier gave explanation that pilot has anti-g protection. Normally human cannot sustain more then 1g for long.

[DraQ]

I'm somewhat torn.

On one hand I generally hate mixing game and metagame (and time compression, like, for example, save and load or external views I consider to be strictly the latter), and I hate trying to balance overpowered features with tedium.

On the other hand this is one of the few cases where tedium would so mindbogglingly astronomical, that it would just work as deterrent.

Now, the main caveat here is that it simply cannot work in current Pioneer. For it to work you'd need much finer control over thrust and have it apply to autopilot as well.

I think that cool feature for pioneer to have would be ability to throttle engine using both exhaust flux and exhaust velocity. High exhaust velocity would mean low exhaust flux, high delta-v but low overall thrust (sub-G to 1G accelerations) - a perfect cruise mode for those lengthy interplanetary journeys allowing for thrusting for most of the way. If we added some sort of heat management it would also be the mode where ship would produce the most heat (as it couldn't be dumped into massive exhaust plume, but would have to be forcibly pumped into thin, ultra-hot particle beam pushing ship), so we could, for example, have ships deploy radiators in this mode and suffer from maneuverability penalties.
OTOH high flux would mean high thrust and much more efficient cooling but relatively rapid fuel consumption so it would only be used for combat and dramatic maneuvers, and would actually make fuel conservation matter during those despite their short duration.

Now, if we had something like this, and the autopilot would be smart enough to throttle, it could work - but at this point we'd no longer need time compression restrictions.

OTOH, speaking of time acceleration - we really need a notch above the current max.