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I dont know how much you knew about this but...
In space you cant just have a ship warp into space around a planet and start fighting if you did that you would have a short amount of time (relative to the hight of the ship over the celestial body and the gravity it has) until you get pulled into the atmosphere.
So this in a sence can balance things out a bit: If you have a massive fleet you would need to jump in to there space then set an orbit up (manualy or automaticly with computers)
while being bombarded with weapon fire from the defending planet before you could even start to attack.
Also do you know how hard it is to use missiles to just fly straight towards a target? The answer is very hard or using a ton of fuel so to get around this most space weapons other than lasers would be designed so they would intercept the targets orbit then send itself on a kenetic path of devistation.

So the main question here is: Will there be orbit mechanics?

In a word, no.

Well, probably yes, at least to some extent, but not like this. We're not going for Kerbal Space Program. A ship is probably smart enough to keep itself out of the atmosphere until it's seriously damaged, at which point it will definitely fall into the atmosphere and catch fire in really awesome ways, Invisible Hand-style. You won't have to find a safe orbit before defending yourself, certainly.

No, inertial dampening and all that stuff is good.

Yes there will be, but it will be heavily assisted.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:Yes there will be, but it will be heavily assisted.

Define "assisted".

As in you can fix your elevation above a planet and the nav controls will work out a suitable velocity to maintain that orbit. That's how I saw it working anyway.
That and locking onto other targets to match their frame of reference so that they appear stationary and you move relative to them. It would also let us easily auto-generate waypoints for stable Lagrange points and geosynchronous orbit.

I'm positive we've talked about this.

I'm a fan of Lagrange point only jumping. That, and far enough away from any celestial body to where gravity isn't an issue.

There is something to be said for L-point jumping. It gives the planet time to react to you (if they can and prevents the "drop out of warp, blast your city, jump into warp, escape".

You could still park in unstable orbits if you wanted, but you'd have to run the engines the whole time to maintain it. Probably make you more detectable, too.

Fr0stbyte, is this level of realism really necessary?

On an unrelated note, what happened to my Designer status? I've been demoted to Developer...

Dr. Mackeroth wrote:Fr0stbyte, is this level of realism really necessary?

On an unrelated note, what happened to my Designer status? I've been demoted to Developer...

I've gone from model artist to Developer, but Fenway and Fr0st are still texture artist and senior coder respectively.

Also, we should try to stick to a similar level of realism to what Minecraft already has, and if that isn't good enough at first, we ramp it up a bit.

Prototype wrote:

Dr. Mackeroth wrote:Fr0stbyte, is this level of realism really necessary?

On an unrelated note, what happened to my Designer status? I've been demoted to Developer...

I've gone from model artist to Developer, but Fenway and Fr0st are still texture artist and senior coder respectively.

Also, we should try to stick to a similar level of realism to what Minecraft already has, and if that isn't good enough at first, we ramp it up a bit.

I think a bit of suspension of disbelief would be good too.

Decision: No orbits.