cowman
Final Approach
Yeah this, like my defining speed in space thread is me thinking about my fictional story. I got to writing a bit where a character in training gets to fly the ship for the first time and I realized I don't know how the ship is piloted and that just won't do.
So here's my general though- when flying planet to planet over long distances you probably would be punching in numbers. Basically a flight director/autopilot type system.
But then you have situations like docking or ship to ship combat where you might need manual control. This gets more interesting. A spaceship, unlike an airplane can move(relative to the ship) straight up or down, left/right. You could also alter your pitch/roll/yaw without changing direction which brings up the whole issue of inertia. Clearly any sort of control would have to be fly by wire with a computer interpreting your wishes and applying thrust(or whatever the ship uses) to accomplish whatever you appear to be trying to do.
So initially I'm thinking OK, we have 2 joysticks and foot pedals. The left side is pitch/roll and the pedals are yaw. Then your right side is straight up/down left/right movement. Then I thought OK that makes sense if I'm trying to move slowly around and dock at a space station or something like that but now how do I go forward/backward? Some kind of thumb switches/throttle control setup? Well that could work, but now if we're flying around at speed and dodging projectiles do we assume aircraft like thrust pushing forward and mostly fly with an aircraft-like pitch/roll/yaw arrangement? Seems like the controls would need multiple operation modes.
Or, I had an abstract thought. What if you had a virtual reality interface and there was a little model spaceship in front of you... kind of like a model airplane you could grab and physically move around however you wanted it to move. The VR could simulate the difficulty in say changing direction due to inertia by making you pull harder to move the model.
I think I figured out why Star Trek always just had Sulu punching random buttons. This stuff is complicated.
So here's my general though- when flying planet to planet over long distances you probably would be punching in numbers. Basically a flight director/autopilot type system.
But then you have situations like docking or ship to ship combat where you might need manual control. This gets more interesting. A spaceship, unlike an airplane can move(relative to the ship) straight up or down, left/right. You could also alter your pitch/roll/yaw without changing direction which brings up the whole issue of inertia. Clearly any sort of control would have to be fly by wire with a computer interpreting your wishes and applying thrust(or whatever the ship uses) to accomplish whatever you appear to be trying to do.
So initially I'm thinking OK, we have 2 joysticks and foot pedals. The left side is pitch/roll and the pedals are yaw. Then your right side is straight up/down left/right movement. Then I thought OK that makes sense if I'm trying to move slowly around and dock at a space station or something like that but now how do I go forward/backward? Some kind of thumb switches/throttle control setup? Well that could work, but now if we're flying around at speed and dodging projectiles do we assume aircraft like thrust pushing forward and mostly fly with an aircraft-like pitch/roll/yaw arrangement? Seems like the controls would need multiple operation modes.
Or, I had an abstract thought. What if you had a virtual reality interface and there was a little model spaceship in front of you... kind of like a model airplane you could grab and physically move around however you wanted it to move. The VR could simulate the difficulty in say changing direction due to inertia by making you pull harder to move the model.
I think I figured out why Star Trek always just had Sulu punching random buttons. This stuff is complicated.
