Ivan2006 wrote:@Tiel the idea behind flight fields is that they get turned on when gravity is hindering you and get turned off when gravity is helping you, resulting in fuel preservation. While it may seem at first like the flight fields are not a large benefit, let me give you an example for when not having them would be pretty annoying: Say your planet gets bombarded, the attacking ships with flight fields stay in a fixed position to your planet and can just fire their railguns directly at it, not having to cancel orbital velocity like with traditional orbital bombardement, allowing them to use the muzzle velocity of their railguns for added impact demage. Meanwhile, your ships have trouble keeping them form doing so, as the lack of flight fields forces your ships to constantly have the thrusters and RCS burning to stay close to ships that do have flight fields, which results in you having a choice between fighting continuously and burning a lot of fuel, resulting in the requirement for risky and dangerous mid-fight refueling if the fight takes longer, or only striking during a very short part of the orbit. As you see, the main advantage of flight fields is not that they give you more freedom, but that you can do stuff that would otherwise cause you to run short on fuel and generally make your fuel last a lot longer.
Not really, as again, orbits take much longer to decay than many of you have been led to believe. All it takes it a nice initial launch and the SMART drive takes care of the rest when it comes to countering gravity.
Fuel has never really been a concern around here, and if you insist that it is I'm going to be inclined to say that these Mass Effect expies are going to have to draw a lot of power themselves to be on all the time.
Ivan2006 wrote:Also, flight fields don't really cause things like drag 'for convenience' that one would associate with atmospheric flight, the comparison mainly refers to not having to deal with orbital mechanics.
Let's be perfectly honest here, this 'flight field' stuff is just your way of attempting to justify why a starfighter handles like an F-22 or a Harrier in the middle of space with little to no effort. I've researched atmospheric flight mechanics and how they work in the past half hour, and there are a ton of things this explanation discounts. Hence why I refer to it as asspull more than anything else. I'm more than happy to not attack these flaws like a rabid dog provided I utilize my own system of doing things.
Ivan2006 wrote:Also, you may have missed Error's link that elaborates how flight fields are actually not arsepull in the first place, as it is a sensible application of Warp technology, which you can hardly describe as 'arsepull' and be taken seriously.
Warp has no grounding in reality. To call it anything other than arsepull would be a major misnomer. Yet that doesn't mean I'm not content with it existing - I'd just like my own system to be able to coexist with certain caveats given that it would realistically work pretty well. I don't think that's too much to ask.