(Old) Sub light Engines - LSFN/Design GitHub Wiki

=Description= These are engines that obey standard Newtonian physics that use energy to supply a directional force. They can theoretically accelerate to 99.999...% of the speed of light. Useful for dogfights and such.

Yep, and now for dealing with the consequences of that:

1. In space, there is no / negligible friction, and so they don't need to apply a constant force (unless you want to accelerate, of course).

Therefore, these engines only draw power when you want to change course. In a dogfight, I expect that will be all of the time.

If we go for full 3D, then we need to able to "strafe" in all 3 axial directions, rotate about all three axes of the ship and control, at least, forward thrust.

This gets hard to make intuitive controls for.

To quote BSG: "Every flying machine has four basic controls, roll, pitch, yaw and thrust..."

Yaw: 'A' and 'D'. Pitch: 'W' and 'S'. Roll: 'Q' and 'E'.

Thrust: 'Up arrow' and 'Down arrow'.

Suggestions?

Thinking about gameplay, we should probably fix movement to a 2D plane. At least, for now. The game itself will very much be in 3D however a number of the features are going to need extra thinking before they can be applied to the third dimension nicely. This also simplifies controls:

• W/S for forward / backwards thrust
• A/D for left/right strafing
• Q/E for anti-clockwise/clockwise turning