That_Frog_Kurtis

Hi Mr Roberts! First I want to thank you for doing this AMA and also for being so brave and challenging the industry and it's BS console focused mindset. This project is one that I personally had given up on ever seeing and I believe it will have a massive impact on the future of gaming. I am very excited.

I have a couple of questions that I have tried to think out as best I can, which I think are points the current community would like clarification on, and I hope they are answerable.

Physics: I have been playing A LOT of /r/kerbalspaceprogram recently and have a pretty good understanding of how spaceflight works in reality. In your physics explanation video you explained how the ships will fly - kind of. You said that it was absolutely rigid body but the demo showed a slightly different picture.

1. I'm pretty sure I heard or read somewhere that you will set a desired speed setting, not a thrust setting and that there is a max speed for each ship. Obviously this is not true to space flight but a needed consession for a space fighting sim. Will it take as long to decelerate back to zero from a ship's top speed as it took to accelerate to it?

2. Must my ship travel in the direction it is pointing? For example, could I accelerate to a given speed, cut my engines and, as I would be able to in reality, use my RCS to turn my ship to a retrograde attitude and blast my tailing attacker while still traveling in my original trajectory?

3. Orbital mechanics - will they be included in any way? I can see phase angle calculations and orbital ejection proburns being very difficult if max speeds are limited. I can play KSP for that.

4. Jumping, warping, subspace, whatever - Could I set out a tasty bait freighter bumbling along with a shitty escort and have an ambush squadron ready and waiting to drop in from just under 12 parsecs away?

5. Will the universe exist mostly on a single plane with an up and down orientation, like the one in freelancer? Or will it expand equally in all directions with the only up/down orientation being shown on maps for readability?

Ships: This is probably the most important area for most people. I will let others ask most of the questions on this topic but here are two of my own:

1. How many ships, roughly, do you aim to include at release?

2. Are there plans to allow players, or groups of players if necessary to buy and operate all classes of ships? For example: me and my 5 buddies work hard for a few months and buy a big-ass cruiser. On the Star Trek style flight deck it needs a pilot to fly it, an engineer or two to look after energy distribution, co-ordinate shield cover with threats and to prioritise what order damaged systems get repaired, and a few or two of us to operate weapon systems. We could fill most of these positions with AI crew but today is a big day so we leave our fighters in the ship's internal hanger and hop in the hot seats. We hire a merc escort crew of 3 fighters and then join a loose conglomerate flotilla of like minded privateers and sail off to where we know by (devious means) ^{Bothan Spy Network} that the flagship of a massive, player run, multisystemal child care corporation, a Super Leviathan Treasure Battle Destroyer Pony class ship named Dingo Express manned by 15 players and escorted by another 40 in their various cruisers and fighters is being moved to another system but on our way we encounter an uncharted small moon...^{That's no moon} Anyway, yeah the question: are there plans for big ass player controllable ships or are we going to be limited to small single seat fighters and freighters, leaving anything bigger to NPCs like in Freelancer?

Well, like everyone else, I have lots more questions and have asked more than my fair share with 7. At this point single sentence or even single word answers would be more than I could hope for given the unexpectedly long winded nature of my questions. Thank you so much for your time and best of luck with the project!

• Colonel That_Frog_Kurtis

On top of this, what sort of health mechanic do you plan to use? And if the player is wounded, will the experience slower movement and greater weapon sway etc?

No 3rd person, best thing I've heard this week.

Fellow kiwi doorman, chur cuz.

He does, in fact he has a whole bunch of them. They all have "Emirates" painted on the side...