Finally for the flight system, a ‘Core’ IFCS toggle was added to allow pilots to turn off various assists and fly fully decoupled. This is being used to experiment with a heavily stripped-back IFCS system.
Please make this available to the pilot in game, not just a dev side only tool. If CIG wants to claim they delivering a BDSSE this is exactly what you need to provide to players. Let us choose if we want a heavily assisted flight experience or one with as little as we wish.
I would also be an amazing opportunity to make coupled and decoupled to be true to their function.
That is,
- Coupled mode being the one with heavy flight assists active, including a lot of limiters imposed on it, and this all has its pros and cons.
- Coupled Mode would at its core, require the different velocity limits per axis because it is a fully automated thrust system. Because of this, the ship automatically and perfectly (as only a computer can), uses ‘trichording’ which is why coupled mode has an acceleration max advantage over decoupled.
- Decoupled mode on the other hand, would have no limiters or assists and you can enable some assists that coupled has but not all.
- Decoupled Mode would not have different velocity limits per axis. It would only have one speed cap and that would match the speed max that coupled mode has when thrusting forward with main thrusters. However, since decoupled does not use automated thrust, it has less max acceleration possible in strafe directions (aka anything except forward) since the ship does not automatically/perfectly trichord.
The thrichord advantage can be mathed out or visualized as a ~10 to 20% acceleration output difference between coupled and decoupled mode. Not too much but enough for it to make a difference.
The IFC CORE toggle could then be used in either coupled or decoupled to enable or disable certain assists. Not all of them because some are required for each mode to function as outlined above. For example:
- Things that cannot be disabled in Coupled Mode: Automated rotational thrust, automated strafe thrust, Automated Vector shift. These 2 are mandated always on because its how the ship does its trichording and it literally defines coupled mode.
- Things that cannot be enabled in Decoupled Mode: Automated strafe thrust, Automated Vector Shift.
- Everything else should be allowed to be enabled or disabled regardless of if in coupled or decoupled mode. Things like counter thrust of gravity pull, proximity assist, gsafe, COMSTAB (please bring this back) , ESP, etc.
Thus we end up with pilots having different flight experiences, each having its pro and con based on the very things you cannot disable from IFCS core functions.
Pros:
- Coupled mode has excellent forward-centric flight characteristics and enjoys higher acceleration outputs (thanks to auto trichording) in 6DOF.
- Decoupled mode has a unified speed cap in any direction and has true 6DOF freedom of flight experience. It also has lower fuel consumption in general since thrusters arent firing all the time.
Cons:
- Coupled mode has lower speed caps in all directions other than forward as this is how IFCs ensures the ship can stay inside a speed range that it can quickly zero out in favor of forward centric flight. Coupled mode has higher fuel consumption rate because its thrusters are firing all the time.
- Decoupled has up to 25% lower acceleration output in all directions except forward since it does not auto-trichord. Note that even if player manually trichords the ship is still unable to match coupled mode because coupled will use ALL available strafe thrusters to add to vector and that is something the decoupled pilot cannot do manually.
So we can have a Hornet that:
In coupled mode has 10g forward with speed cap of 800m/s and 6g strafes with up/down/left/right speed cap of 500m/s . This mode flies primarily forward centric in nature and has excellent quick vector shift capability.
In decoupled mode has 10g forward with speed cap of 800m/s and 3g strafe outputs that in any direction have speed cap of 800m/s. This mode is pure 6DOF in nature and would rely on its main thruster for strong vector shifts. Speed control is entirely placed on the pilot’s shoulders rather than be limited by IFCS.
Finally, please please PLEASE can you guys FIX the current Acceleration limiter (and future power to engines based acceleration change) so that ROTATION rate isn’t massively reduced? It takes a fraction of the force needed to displace an object to get it to spin on its axis yet in the game the rotation rate gets reduced massively before the strafe output is reduced a tiny amount. Only snubships and some light fighters are spared this because they already have crazy high rotations.
The IFCS core can be turned off at any time, but it’s just too early to go into details yet. We’ll talk about it at a later date.
The acceleration limiter simply scales down the applied forces and does that for linear and angular accelerations equally. The amount of torque that the thrusters produce is already included in that scale … so you set it to 50% you get half the torque. Most ships in their default setup actually use only a fraction of the theoretically available torque, but that is a creative choice by the team that tunes the ships. In general we’re not striving for full realism here but rather for specific flight behaviours we want to achieve.
