I wanted to see what people thought about my idle musings around the game physics. So much of the game is carefully made plausible; but some things just aren't.
First up is sound. Obviously with space being a vacuum, there isn't any. But the human being based on the surface of the planet is conditioned to give sound a very high priority in letting them know what's going on. SO: I have envisaged a system built into every Elite ship which uses the sensor array to convert outside events into sound. Someone just high-waked in? Make a sound. Someone flew past at high speed? Make a roaring engine type sound. And so on. It enables me to make sense of the fact that it's a noisy game. As an aside – isn't it ludicrous that all limpets come from the same stock, but each type of software has the drone make a different sound… more evidence for my onboard sensor hifi.
Second is the thrusters. Like… EVERYTHING about the thrusters. In space, if you keep making thrust, you keep accelerating. If you boost to 460kph, what in space is going to slow you down? So I don't get why you boost and then your ship slows down. I don't get why ships have an upper velocity limit… and most importantly, I don't get what the measured speed is measured RELATIVE TO.
Bear with me here. On Earth, we measure our velocity relative to the surface of the Earth for land vehicles, and both relative to the ground and relative to the local atmosphere with aircraft. In Elite, when I blast away from a station, my speed is probably being measure relative to the station. But what if I supercruise out to "deep space" in a system somewhere, and then drop… my "speedo" says "0 kph". Relative to what? What am I moving the same speed as? Why do I have a maximum speed while my thrusters are still pushing?
Help me out here guys – make this an interesting discussion!
