S/M ship behaviour around gates is ugly and annoying

[LameFox]

The fact that so often they just don't slow down anymore really ruins a lot of the game's short-ranged interactions, like scanning missions or piracy. You have ships regularly coming out of a gate in travel drive and making a very sharp turn without ever disengaging it, and they end up flying sideways because the ship can't truly turn that fast. It looks ridiculous and unless you actually shoot them out of travel drive (which itself is hard when they are turning at those speeds) there's nothing you can do to interact with them because there is no period when they need to slow down. I took a simple mission to scan miners passing through a system today and I could not even interact with a huge volume of them because of this, and it made this simple poorly paying mission take ages because I could only scan L miners and a small handful of M miners. Didn't catch even one S miner despite also being in an S ship.

This was not always the case. Until roughly the SV release, they would enter the system, and if not flying straight ahead to their destination, would have to shut down their travel drive to turn before starting it up again. I have reported this as a bug before (with a save and instructions to replicate) but nothing came of that. I am beginning to think it is just a really, really ugly optimization, which is just depressing. To me this kind of small scale piracy and policing was actually quite fun in X3, but now, not only is most cargo in the 'real' economy not very valuable, it's a lot harder to actually interact with moving ships due to travel drive and highways. This weird, cheaty pathing quirk is just adding insult to injury at this point.

[Raptor34]

Sounds like what a player would do tbh.
Perhaps it could be improved, but why would I stop at an obvious chokepoint instead of blasting right out of the gate at max speed.
If I would change it I would make them come out of the gate fast, stop at a random distance, make a quick turn and then proceed on.
Higher skilled pilots could even do the flight assist off drift too.

[LameFox]

Perhaps it could be improved, but why would I stop at an obvious chokepoint instead of blasting right out of the gate at max speed.

Well, as a player you wouldn't, but in-universe it probably makes sense to be wary of what you might hit on the other side if you just carry on through.

That said, this isn't like toggling travel drive and turning then entering it again. They never have to leave it, they just take a sudden really sharp corner and carry on like it was nothing. Their ships can't even turn that fast, so they end up flying sideways.

[Raptor34]

Perhaps it could be improved, but why would I stop at an obvious chokepoint instead of blasting right out of the gate at max speed.

Well, as a player you wouldn't, but in-universe it probably makes sense to be wary of what you might hit on the other side if you just carry on through.

That said, this isn't like toggling travel drive and turning then entering it again. They never have to leave it, they just take a sudden really sharp corner and carry on like it was nothing. Their ships can't even turn that fast, so they end up flying sideways.

In-universe the area around a gate should be an exclusion zone too and defense stations shouldn't be allowed to just park itself there. So lets put that aside.
Wonder why it's coded like that though, perhaps the AI is just too dumb to fly normally? This isn't the only thing anyway, their flight has several other oddities, phasing through stations for instance when docking.
But to come back to piracy, you can knock them out of TD using EMP missiles, but I doubt you'll be going around blasting everything to find something valuable. Or perhaps you can go camp a Claytronics facility and then intercept them in deep space.

[LameFox]

I'm guessing it was simplified for performance reasons. S/M ships did not seem to struggle greatly with navigation around gates the way L and XL have, so I don't think it was correcting an inability to fly.

As far as piracy goes, the most disappointing part to me is that neutral or even hostile sectors are now a lot less relevant (for S and M ships anyway). Travel drives made them matter less, and now the gates themselves don't matter much either. A sector they only transition through will often have them in travel drive the whole way. Only a few stop (I'm not really sure why some do and some don't, if there's a pattern I haven't spotted it). This is also why it sucked so much for that scanning mission. Ships weren't mining there, or selling to refineries, only going through. I don't think whoever wrote that mission intended me to need to shoot ships out of travel drive to scan them, it was just a job to see if anyone was carrying silicon.

Maybe increasing scan range would help, then at least the EMP missile approach would be more worthwhile. However I have tried those missiles before and even they seemed to need me to be in the path of the oncoming enemy to knock it out, so it'd have to be a big boost.

As a side effect, maybe large ships wouldn't have to ram to scan things anymore.

[GCU Grey Area]

That said, this isn't like toggling travel drive and turning then entering it again. They never have to leave it, they just take a sudden really sharp corner and carry on like it was nothing. Their ships can't even turn that fast, so they end up flying sideways.

Sounds like a flight assist off turn while in travel mode. Do that myself quite a lot. Flying sideways for a while after the turn is a normal characteristic of this manoeuvre - takes a bit of time after changing heading for engines to overcome inertia along original vector.

[LameFox]

That said, this isn't like toggling travel drive and turning then entering it again. They never have to leave it, they just take a sudden really sharp corner and carry on like it was nothing. Their ships can't even turn that fast, so they end up flying sideways.

Sounds like a flight assist off turn while in travel mode. Do that myself quite a lot. Flying sideways for a while after the turn is a normal characteristic of this manoeuvre - takes a bit of time after changing heading for engines to overcome inertia along original vector.

Maybe I'm describing this badly, but if you watch them do it, I don't think it's something a player can do. They're not drifting after a turn, they change direction before their ship can physically turn. Say they come out of a gate facing "South". Their ship then quickly speeds off to the "East", making a turn that is so sharp it's like a right angle. Meanwhile, their ship is still facing "South". It very slowly tries to turn "East" to match the direction it is going.

If a player can just suddenly convert all their momentum to the side like that without re-orienting their ship, I have not figured out how.

If you want to see this in action, watch a gate where the destinations of ships coming through are often at extreme angles from where the gate faces. The gate from ZYA territory in Heretic's End is the one I used in the bug report, because nearly every ship that comes thru makes a hard turn to the other gate into ARG territory.

[sh1pman]

Sounds like a flight assist off turn while in travel mode. Do that myself quite a lot. Flying sideways for a while after the turn is a normal characteristic of this manoeuvre - takes a bit of time after changing heading for engines to overcome inertia along original vector.

It’s also my main way of changing direction on long distance flights. Especially on large ships that take a lot of time to enter and exit travel mode.

So, ironically, the NPCs are doing exactly what I would do in their place.

We can’t do sharp turns, but for performance reasons it’s a close enough approximation, as the end result is similar.

[LameFox]

Took a few videos to show what I mean:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18BEhOc ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ccxEwB ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_pfpWK ... sp=sharing

As you can see the ship comes out of the gate and just shoots off to one side. When I go to external view, you can see that the ship itself hasn't re-oriented itself yet, it is still facing the way the gate faces. Slowly it then turns to face the direction it is already travelling (apparently at this point it sometimes needs to re-initiate travel drive).

Can a player do that? It's as if the entire momentum of the ship has been suddenly re-directed to the side before it can even rotate. I know we can rotate and then thrust to change direction of our momentum, but this seems like something else entirely.

[Nanook]

I think the main issue here is that NPC ships apparently lack inertia when in travel drive. I, too, have noticed exactly what the OP describes. It can also be seen when NPC ships, especially L ships, fly to a destination. They tend to go at full travel drive, and then instantly stop, unlike the player ships. It appears that the devs have removed momentum calculations from NPC ships in travel drive in an attempt to increase performance.

[Duncaroos]

Perhaps it could be improved, but why would I stop at an obvious chokepoint instead of blasting right out of the gate at max speed.

Well, as a player you wouldn't, but in-universe it probably makes sense to be wary of what you might hit on the other side if you just carry on through.

That said, this isn't like toggling travel drive and turning then entering it again. They never have to leave it, they just take a sudden really sharp corner and carry on like it was nothing. Their ships can't even turn that fast, so they end up flying sideways.

This reminds me of the days in X3 where I would be ZOOMING in an M5 Rapier and get obliterated on the other side by ramming a TL / TS

[Nanook]

You still have to be wary about using travel drive through gates. Many's the time I've zoomed out of a gate and ran right into something big, usually some stupid construction vessel. Sometimes, though, it's a station built right in front of the exit gate. Inconsiderate locals!

[Y-llian]

I agree with the OP and have also seen X-pilots pull these manoeuvres. It’s not pleasing to see and draws your eye because you know that it shouldn’t be happening. All for optimisation but they should be hidden “under the hood” or where they can’t, effort should be made to make the visual impact less intrusive.

You still have to be wary about using travel drive through gates. Many's the time I've zoomed out of a gate and ran right into something big, usually some stupid construction vessel. Sometimes, though, it's a station built right in front of the exit gate. Inconsiderate locals!

Not to mention the Terrans who park Asgards right in front of gates! One would think that, given the X-Verse’s affinity with racing, that locals might be more mindful indeed!