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AFTER PLAYER CONTROLLED CAPPIES LANDING ON PLANETS IS DA NEXT PRIORiTY : ]

Mar 21, 2011 blood.thirsty link
or else how would i get fresh non synthetic pot soil : )

Come on, unleash hell, ye can do it!
Mar 21, 2011 PaKettle link
Stop by PA headquarters and we will arrange for all the fresh organic soil you desire.
Mar 22, 2011 Pizzasgood link
Let's assume our top speed is 200 m/s. Yes, some ships can sustain a greater speed indefinitely, but we're just approximating. 200 m/s = 0.2 km/s.

Low Earth Orbit is considered to begin at 160 km above the Earth's surface. The time it would take to traverse that 160 km at 0.2 km/s would be 3200 seconds, or about 53 minutes.

So the only way flying down to a planet's surface Infinity style would be practical in VO without changes to the flight system would be if we could jump to and from a position in the tens of kilometers above the surface, which would be pretty low altitude indeed.

Whether that's possible RP-wise depends on whether our jump system is disturbed by the overall strength of a gravitational field, or by the non-uniformity of one. If it is strength that matters, jumping around that close to the planet would not be possible. The little asteroids and stations that we need to be 3 km from have a very tiny gravitational field compared to that of a planet. Even those big training station roids are negligible compared to a planet.

On the other hand, if the distance has to do with uniformity of the field, jumping from near a planet's surface would not be a problem. The radius of a planet is so large that even on the surface the gravitational field can be approximated as flat. You'd probably still need at least 3 km from the surface to ensure that there are no disturbances from the misc. irregularities caused by hills and such, since even a baseball sized asteroid can prevent you from jumping.

I'm actually leaning toward the latter, considering that small and humongous roids all have the same 3 km limit, unless that's just a hardcoded safety limit in our ship's engines based on the fartherst we might have to be from the most massive roid, applied equally to all roids to make things simpler for the pilots and reduce the odds of any ship-rending accidents.

But IMHO, planet landing would only be practical if they added a way to achieve much higher velocities than we currently can, because simply put, planets are huge. With the velocities we can currently achieve, flying around them would be pretty boring.

In case you're wondering why I've ignored the option of "target the planet and press the 'land on planet' button to just skip over the approach phase", it's because that option is incredibly lame. It would be equivalent to adding a number of special new stations that you can't fly around and crash into. Personally, I'd rather just see more real stations than this style of planet landing. If planets are to be land-on-able, it needs to be done in the seamless style where you can just fly down and cruise around over the mountains and stuff, shoot at trees and highways, etc. Otherwise don't even bother.
Mar 22, 2011 Alloh link
On the other hand, despite sci-fi using it a lot, it is not practical, for an engineeting perspective, to create ships both for deep space and atmospheric flight.

One daring approach was tried in Galactica. While in space, vipers and raptors only use fuel to change direction, but near planets (deep inside gravity wells) they burn fuel constantly. And larger ships simply are not meant to 'land' anywhere. Galactica even jumped inside the atmosphere, launched vipers and jumped away...

Despite not realistic, surface-to-space flight can be very impressive and fun, as Infinity Universe tech demo video. But VO's developers are way more active than Infinity's...

Inc, why dont you purchase Infinity's dev team (=1 guy) after getting rich from Android sales? ;)
Mar 22, 2011 slime73 link
Not to go more off-topic than this already is, but the Infinity dev team has 2 people now and they're working almost exclusively on the engine itself so they can offer it for sale, before finishing the game. That's the main reason why we haven't heard much lately.
Mar 22, 2011 drazed link
"the Infinity dev team has 2 people now"

Incarnate should recruit said 2 people >.>
Mar 22, 2011 Lord~spidey link
I think it would take more than a mountain of hookers and blow to get those two away from that infinity project.
Mar 22, 2011 Dr. Lecter link
Then they need to reevaluate their priorities.