> Thinking about it, if the controller software will handle it, there's
>probably enough buttons on an X360 controller for a chord-keyboard
>style setup for everything you need. I wouldn't want to use it
>though. I don't hate myself enough to even want to contemplate such a set-up.
>Yeah, I know, only "like". You can't stall them and you can't
>Immerman; but on the flipside the 2.5D model STO uses makes them a bit
>more like 'planes than they would otherwise be.
That's... the other direction entirely from what I was thinking, actually :).
Spaceships move in an environment that has (a) microgravity* and (b) a vacuum, and there's no reason at all they should move the way they do in STO (or in canon, for that matter), which is somewhere between a wet-ship, a submarine, and an airplane, depending on the specific vessel. They'll keep going in one direction, at an unchanging velocity, until and unless an outside force acts upon them -- a gravity well, a physical object, the ship's own engines. Orientation is completely arbitrary.
But STO ships bank to make turns, and only move when under power -- shut off someone's engines, and they stop moving, which is actually saying that shutting off one's engines applies acceleration of a vector and magnitude such that it cancels out the original velocity and vector, making them stop dead in the current inertial frame. (Well, that may actually be an effect of the inertial dampeners, of course.) Also, every ship ever defaults to the same orientation on the X, Y, and Z axes, with orientation only going off that plane when a ship is dead in the water (so to speak), and, most importantly, you can't actually pitch more than about 70 degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, so you can't even make a loop. If you want to reach some point that's directly below you on the Z axis? You'll have to spiral downwards.
That's just weird.
Of course, it's all to match up with how this stuff usually works in the canon, and, further, having Descent-style space mechanics could get really weird.
"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding
* Gravity affecting spaceships is a lot more complicated than assuming that it's immaterial once you're outside of a planetary gravity well, of course; using the gravity of various celestial bodies to affect vector and velocity is vital to our real-world space exploration, for that matter.
And let's not even get into the impossibly dense asteroid fields...