Yeah, there's a reason why there should be a limit to certain things...>He claimed that the fact it took twenty minutes to fly to Babylon 5,
>because REAL PHYSICS, was proof that this was going to be the greatest
>space fighter sim of all time.
... yeah, one of the things that will make me instantly like any given MMO more is if traveling between Places Where I Can Do Stuff does not consume subjectively more time than actually doing stuff. (STO, at low levels, can have painfully long travel times here and there, but (a) I can set autotravel and walk away to use the restroom or get my drink, or just alt-tab to watch a cat video on YouTube or something. And there's also the fact that I can click on a single button and be instantly warped to wherever I need to be, if I so choose, though sometimes doing so requires spending some EC, and sometimes a somewhat non-negligible amount.)
Upthread, I was more bugged by the general assertion that "spaceships are like airplanes" (which, in reality, they're not, although a transatmospheric craft would make that somewhat more ambiguous); while I'd like to have somewhat more freedom of movement in the third dimension (not to mention being able to mess around with orientation if I'm so inclined), I don't object to the general aesthetics of spaceship flight in STO at all. For fuck's sake, it's Star Trek, where space combat and movement should occupy a space somewhere between wet-navy battles, submarine battles, and cinematic aerial dogfighting (as opposed to real-world dogfighting, where you're almost certainly never going to even see your opponent as anything other than a radar blip), based on whatever's cooler. (Same thing with Star Wars stuff, for that matter.)
>The other thing I'm remembering is from an article on Star Citizen,
>where the developers commented that they're making it 'realistic,
>within reason'. They commented that, when experimenting with earlier
>builds, they went overboard, and found the end result to be too
>complicated and boring as all hell.
Indeed -- see, when I think about finding the balance of "respects physics and dynamics of space combat" and "actually playable", I think about some of the combat scenes in B5, such as one in the first season when Sinclair leads a wing of Starfuries in an operation, and one of the maneuvers is to do an attack run, and then, after they pass the target, use the orientation thrusters to spin around without changing vector or velocity to launch another volley.
"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding