Acceleration caps [feature request]

[nozmajner]

I was thinking (well, I constantly do) about ship stats balance.
I found that limiting accelerations to a couple of Gs, possibly no less then 7g, combat type encounters become much more manageable.
And right now our ships can go up to very high accelerations compared to a fully loaded cargo hold, or as they shed propellant, way above 20g in some cases. Which makes balancing ships quite hard too. (an emtpy high capacity freighter could easily out accelerate the fastest couriers for example)
I think the game would benefit from a cap to acceleration, so even with an empty hold, a ship could not go above a set acceleration. But could still go way low if it's overloaded. So I'd like to ask for this feature.
The nice thing is that it won't affect long range travel times too much, because for that deltaV is the important metric.
It would benefit the preciseness of the stop distance calculator.

Some points that need to be considered (that I could think of)
- Preferably set up in the ship.lua file. Maybe there could be a setting for each direction, defaulting for the main, if not set.
- Possibly a way to override it. Even with the added caveat of it doing damage to the ship eventually (possible choice for the player: flee from combat, but risk some damage, or load up your ship fully, and risk some damage as you ascend to orbit). And to make the ship able to land on high G worlds.
- The autopilot should know about it, so opponents aren't faster than the player. That would be quite frustrating.
- It should not affect deltaV I think, to make guessing travel times easier.

The in-universe reason for it is that people still aren't fit for 10s of Gs of acceleration. This would also be true for the other directions, since humans can handle acceleration way better if lying on their back or sitting/standing, than sideways or reverse. And combat craft could have special acceleration couches and/or gimballing cockpits to better handle aggressive maneuvering.
The other reason could be that there are limits to what ship structure can handle, but I'm not sure this would be true in this case, because if you have more load, then your acceleration is proportionally smaller, so the load should be the same (assuming constant thrust).

Some possibilities it could also open up:
This may even open up a the possibility for a new equipment down the line: acceleration couches, which could add a bit to the acceleration, in exchange for making the ship a bit heavier.
Passenger cabins and passengers could also come with an acceleration limit. Accelerate too hard and they refuse to pay, or even get injured or die on you, putting some crimes on you as a result.
Same could work for cargo: delicate stuff could turn into rubbish at the slightest push on the thrust lever, but others could withstand quite a lot.

[Keeper]

Fragile cargo is a cool idea. If implemented, then my request of being able to adjust the thrust output with a controller axis (i.e. a throttle controller slider or separate throttle device), instead of having to take your hands off the stick to reach for the mouse/keyboard, would be even more important so you can dial up to the thrust limit of your fragile cargo. (An added g-meter to the HUD would be necessary, for sure.)

[ishmael]

Maybe the top limit might be based on the square-cube law for a ship's structural reasons. Larger ships cannot accelerate as fast as a smaller ship due to load bearing structures don't scale up as fast as volume/mass. An option for ship equipment is an up-graded hull structure which can allow for higher accelerations at a cost of taking up volume that could've been used for cargo. Military ships don't need cargo space so they'd have such an upgrade for performance.

[clausimu]

I fully support the idea, nozmajner. The points you made also provide more options for gameplay, which is nice (fragile cargo, grumpy/bumpy passengers, etc.). But we do need a g-meter on the HUD then.

[impaktor]

Not missiles, I assume?

Possibly a way to override it. Even with the added caveat of it doing damage to the ship eventually (possible choice for the player: flee from combat, but risk some damage, or load up your ship fully, and risk some damage as you ascend to orbit). And to make the ship able to land on high G worlds.

Is it E:D that has a narrowing / tunnel vision when pulling high G? Or is that
some other game I'm thinking of?

So each ship has a limit / default how high Gs it can pull? Then some C++ side
damage function starts kicking in if over?

The in-universe reason for it is that people still aren't fit for 10s of Gs of acceleration.

You propose two functions, 1. limit of player's acceptance of high G, 2 limit of ship's acceptance of high G?

If so, it might be illustrative with some graph or similar showing when you start noticing the effect of one and then the other, and once you get maximum penalty from either one, for say combat ship, and cargo hauler.

e.g. "start" below showing where G-limiting code starts punishing / influencing the game play (cracking bulkheads for the ship structure, and narrowing view of player):

Code: Select all

cargo hauler structure:             [start]----------[crash]
cargo hauler pilot:                                      [start]-------[passout]

combat ship structure:                                              [start]--------[crash]
combat ship pilot:                                             [start]-----[passout]

delicate cargo:               [start]---[all destroyed]

INCREASING G:       0--1--------------5-----------------10-------------------------->

We would need some OnEventTriggers, like "OnGForcePassed(4)", etc. for integration with modules.

[FluffyFreak]

Could do a fullscreen fade-to-red/black to show dangerous G-loads quite easily

[impaktor]

I imagine that might be fun to use in scripting.

Not sure how though.