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Original post by Derakon This is a bit off the subject, but you mentioned in passing that you were considering "Making the movement optional (default no gravity and you stop when you stop thrusting)". One way to read this is that you don't intend for your ship movement to be inertial (i.e. ships that do not thrust eventually stop regardless of where they are). I'd like to strongly suggest you not do that, since in my opinion it'll really ruins immersion. Moreover, it makes it really hard to conduct combat with any ships that have forward-facing fixed guns, since you have to be flying into your opponent to shoot at them (in contrast, inertial ships can fly to the side of their opponents, then turn to face them and shoot as they drift by).

Absolutely...

For example.. Some of the sequences in BSG really show this well...

To be able to zoom off after a ship, fly parallel with it, and then turn and blast the crap out of it from the side is awesome..

The only problem with this is people learning the control system... and switching between them.

One idea I had was to have different drive systems, which work in different ways.
At the moment I have three..

One which is attitude jets for maneuvering. (a la real space flight.)
And another which is constantly thrusting from the back so your direction changes where you look / fly towards. (Elite.)
And finally a hybrid harrier jump jet style system for atmosphere approach. As you slow the thrust angles more downwards.. (Sort of like Virus - if anyone remembers that?)

Tweaking these to be playable is the problem...

This sounds like an extremely interesting mechanic.

I would prototype and flesh it out in a stand-alone gameplay demo to see if it fits with the experience I'm aiming for in the larger game.

The questions that I think most obviously need answers are:
Just how much assistive UI is needed to effectively navigate?
Is combat when bound to orbits still interesting?
How is maneuverability affected?
Is applying an impulse to an enemy ship an interesting mechanic?
Is compensating for impulses applied to my ship by my own weapons an interesting mechanic?
Limited Fuel?
Crashing into planets?

Good luck!

It really depends I think on how much gravity affects game play. If you want to build it into the game heavily it would make this more complex, and possible more interesting but potentially more challenging to get into.

I remember an anime I watched years ago had space battles take place in the orbit of planets. It was interesting because the battles were both short and long. The crews would plan the encounters hours in advance by determining when both ships orbits would intersect and plan repairs and tactics accordingly. A battle might last a couple of days but the actual exchanges only a few minutes before the two ships were to far away from each other. Add in laying traps in the other ships orbital path and the option to expend fuel reserves to alter orbital path in order to surprise the enemy and it made for an interesting combat form.

Gravity would make for a really interesting mechanic in a rusty nail type space game were fuel, munitions, and supplies were precious forcing the player to way up their options carefully.

I question the motivation to try to provide 'true' newtonian mechanics in combat. BSG was mentioned, and the ability to turn while in motion. However, while introducing some realism, BSG and other games with semi-newtonian combat tend to avoid the fact that in true newtonian there is no cap to velocity (other than the speed of light). Further, given a certain maximum thrust, it takes as long to slow down as it did to speed up. For playability, they tend to create some arbitrary velocity cap, and make it easier to stop. My conclusion is to expect motion to be a very minor part of combat.

It's not as exciting as some of the other ideas that've been mentioned but I was just going to suggest an autopilot mode to put the ship into a set of standard orbits which might consume more power than manual maneuvers or maybe just that the advanced orbits are not available unless you take the time to learn them.