EVE General Discussion

While I can understand your sentiment for accurate physics this would create a programming and reality nightmare as everyone has to plot a new position based on the orbit velocities of the POS/citadel AND any ship with its own velocity/acceleration EACH time they want to just dock up.

If you want accurate-ish physics I suggest Kerbal....

In addition to what what Eternus said...


It all comes down to playability.

How you ever played the Kerbal Space Program? That is a pure physics simulator. And while fun, it is also maddeningly frustrating.

A little thruster power here... and the whole ship veers off to the side and spins on all 3 axies.
A little thrust there... now you are WAY off course and have to spend time decelerating, accelerating again in a new trajectory... oh wait... I didn't take gravity into account let me ju- NONONONONONONONONONONONONO... ****... ****... died.

True Zero-G physics is very unintuitive for most people to grasp. So much so that it puts people's attention span at risk.


There are also more practical concerns current players would have.

Bookmarks are static coordinates in space. Moving planets, stations, gates, etc would render bookmarks that are not "safe spots" pretty much useless.
That insta-undock you prepared in case you have hostiles outside a station? Nope. Not there anymore. You are stuck.
That tactical bookmark you made around the stargates to drop in on a hostile from an "off angle?" It won't do what it is supposed to now.

Now you could make bookmarks move relative to certain objects... but then the server would have to track and process the innumerable amount of bookmarks players have made over the years (I personally have over 400 scattered throughout the game).


Ship balancing is another concern.
At the moment, max speed is a balancing factor between bigger and smaller ships. Smaller is faster, bigger is slower.
With no max speed you can potentially have very large and more capable ships going as fast as small ships... effectively obsoleting them.
(Fun History Lesson: there was a time when this did happen. It was called the "Nano Age." During this time, modules were not stacking penalized and you had battleships going some 3000 to 5000 m/sec... which lead to a situation of "use this tactic or you die to someone who does.")

While this would be very realistic (because in RL, bigger ships move faster than smaller ones) it would effectively create a meta of "train into bigger, more expensive ships ASAP."

Physics does apply. It is not ignored at all.

Or the sensor suites that somehow immediately detect ships 14 AU away (hint: it takes ~8 minutes for light to travel 1 AU)

Or the cloning technology that allows our conscious minds to to instantly travel lightyears away to a new body... intact... and aware.

Or how taking drugs somehow makes your ship faster.

Or how coming within 200,000 km of a star does not immediately incinerate your ship with with its SEVERAL MILLION DEGREE corona... but somehow a small 125mm slug can dent the shields.

Or ramming a several billion ton capital ship with a several thousand ton frigate causes both ships to bounce off each other and fly away harmlessly... when the frigate should be a CRATER on the capital's face.


Yeeeaaaaaaaaah. Just enjoy the game for what it is.

*waves hand*
*Yoda voice*
Make sense it will, if you make up stuff.




"Guys? GUYS?!?"
"What?"
"There is a Titan coming in!"
"Cool! Grab the HICs! Get leadership on- OH ****! It's on a collision course at 100,000 km/sec!!! EVERYONE!! MWD FIT YOUR SHIPS AND RAM IT!!!"

*imagines a runaway freight train running into a cloud of insects*

Pro-tip: use quotes so people don't get confused on whose is saying what.

use [quote.] at the beginning and [/quote.] at the end of a text blurb (minus the "." in the brackets)


This is already the case in EVE... though in a more simplistic form (see: mass and an agility modifier decide your turning curve in relation to your speed).

But that still doesn't change the fact that it would be used and abused.

Example: I know a person who has played the game longer than I have. He still has nightmares about "Calvary Ravens" (battleships flying at ludicrous speeds while spewing long range missiles) from the Nano Age.
Only frigates could catch up to them... but they had neither the firepower or the survivability to stop them.


Real physics in a game like EVE is simply one of those things that is good on paper... but not so much in application.

It was broken in oh, so many ways.


Yeeeaaaaaaaah... remember that part about how playability is more important than realism? This is just another example of that.

The server sees your ship as nothing more than a sphere filled with stats.

The "front" of your ship is decided on your trajectory (speed + alignment). In absence of a trajectory, your ship has no "front."
Turrets firing and hitting their target? Those are merely lines with math and a little probability attached to them. No line-of-sight mechanics have been added to them.
Missiles? They don't take ship speed into account. When they fire, they launch from the point the ship is at as if the ship were standing still. Missile range is decided on that basis (and thankfully so, otherwise you have a a whole bunch of new issues that will **** players off).

Basically... take everything you see graphically with a BIG grain of salt. It is merely the client trying to keep up with what server says is going on.



Also... I should add than even with the "incorrect" and "simplistic" mechanics of EVE, the server still has issues processing it all... especially when you have 500+ players in the same system.

You can tell when the server is groaning when time literally slows down in-game. It is called Time Dilation.

And yes... CCP has invested a lot in their servers.
Apparently... they are a decommissioned military supercomputers (no, seriously, it's true) and have been repeatedly upgraded by our DEV Overlords over the years.

you clearly haven't known ccp all that long have you

http://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20141014/694349.jpg
Edit for clarity : thats a generic image, for illustrative purposes

It still amazes me how often works of science fiction get criticized for not being entirely factual in concept. Stranger still given how much of real science is often purely theoretical, sometimes entirely "placeholder" because we simply have no better than a mere guess.

Still, I get where the OP is coming from. Eve, if only for immersion's sake alone, still needs to be believable...still needs to make sense. It's a fine balance between what can you code, what can you balance and maintain, what can you make seem real, and what can you make seem fun. It's great when CCP can hit all of those at once, but I'd imagine rarely are they in such a position and more often than not must pick one or the other.

Maybe you should look into KSP, because that physics thing would completely make EVE a KSP. With system like this you have to build game ground up and think about everything in physics means. Essentially building a real world simulation rather than EVE, EVE is more about future, war and culture, society, politics and of course pretty space and spaceships. They had to sacrifice somplexity to some extend.

You think it's funny that planets and moons don't move....
Instead you should revel in the hilarity that stargates, bookmarks, and POSes do move occasionally!