Railjack, input from an actual pilot

[DraekoSilver]

(Taken from reddit with the OP's permission)

 

[AEP8FlyBoy]

One of my biggest peevs about being a pilot (in real life as well) is having to strut backward about 10m to access a cannon that the pilot should have access to already. Being that it's on the front of the ship anyway.

In the stead of the Forward Artillery seat they could easily add a Front Gunner seat (Bow Gunner), right underneath the Pilot. (And a Tail Gunner or Stern Gunner while you're at it too.)

Would make sense for the swarms of fighters you deal with that you'd have more than 3 turret positions, and being able to shoot more than one direction on the immediate front of the ship would allow for more coverage.

Edited December 27, 2019 by AEP8FlyBoy

[DrakeWurrum]

Enemies being different color isn't about their proximity, but about their... alertness, really. White means they have no idea you're there. Red means they're aggressively intent on ending you. I'm not sure of the difference, exactly, but yellow and a weird "white outlined with red" seem to be indicating that they're "alert" but don't seem to have noticed you yet. I guess yellow could mean they're close enough to you for line-of-sight, but haven't seen you yet? I guess I could see where he gets that from.

Also, crewships are technically distinguished from the rest: their icon is a 4-pointed star, rather than a diamond. Not very easy to distinguish, so I do agree there needs to be a better method. His color suggestion wouldn't hurt for this alone. I'm not sure alertness is valuable knowledge in Railjack, but there's other ways to show it besides color.

I agree with his suggestions overall. I don't know why the hell we don't have a real radar on the ship. X-Wing VS TIE Fighter, made in 1997, handled radar by having a "forward" and a "rear" - The center of "forward" meant directly in front of you. The center of "rear" meant directly behind you. It was basically the front 180 degrees and the rear 180 degrees. There's plenty of room for this on the HUD.

I think if the pilot himself could fire the main gun, that could come with obvious drawbacks like slowing the ship down while it's charging, etc. I feel like a lot of the ideas used in X-wing Vs TIE Fighter in regards to power consumption could benefit Railjack, as well. I don't know why they scrapped some of their original ideas.

As to his P.S. - The ship only feels sluggish when you lack the pilot skills to boost and drift, not to mention when you have terrible engines (and lack the Conical Nozzle avionics). Frankly, I don't think we should have a stamina bar (again). I'd rather not have to boost to move at a good speed... that should be the feel baseline. We wouldn't need the "drift" mechanic anymore without boosting, either. So they'd need to really change up the Pilot intrinsic a lot.

Edited December 27, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[Awazx]

Completely agree with OP.

I already said it in another post:

• the Railjack (inside) is poorly designed 
• the armament seems typical of the WWII
• and the ship lacks all the functions and properties that are typical of a flight simulator, let alone a simulator of space combat.

In general, it is a bit embarrassing to know that this ship belongs to one of the most advanced civilizations in the galaxy.

[0_The_F00l]

Yeah. 

It really feels like it is trying to copy a naval game in space and use a few flight concepts. 

Some things just don't translate well. 

 

[Colyeses]

I don't agree with some of the feedback, but I do agree with the crewship problem. The fact that crewships are arbitrarily entirely, 100% immune to all external weaponry apart from the Dome cannon is a massive stutter in the game loop. As a pilot, you have to stop the ship, get out of the seat, walk back 10 meters, enter the cannon seat, charge up, fire, leave the seat, move forward 10 meters, enter the pilot seat and then you can resume. That's a break of fluidity and it's really annoying. 

I understand that Crewships should be a serious problem, and for that reason I suggest they stay -mostly- the same, but lose a percentage of their extremely inflated armour so they can take reasonable damage from regular weaponry, and once they are at critical HP, they can also be killed by munitions weaponry. This way, you're looking at a very dangerous fight that can take quite a while to finish as you whittle down the crewship, to ultimately punch its reactor with your Tycho/Milati/Galvarc when the armour has worn down. That allows pilots a sub-optimal way to deal with crewships without going through the 10 step plan to dispose of them.

[Felsagger]

14 hours ago, DraekoSilver said:

(Taken from reddit with the OP's permission)

 

 

Thank you LORD because there are people out there with COMMON SENSE. 

Thank you LORD because there are people who explain things in precise detail like this quoted post. It's PRECISE, EXACT and SUCCINCT.

This is an OUTSTANDING POST.  

[(PSN)DEATHrocket777]

I know there's another post about it, but I feel like it should be brought up here too. Gunnery rank 10 gave a lot of people the impression that " Aim snaps turrets to the nearest lead indicator." meant it would function like the gimballed turrets from Elite Dangerous, or Mesa's current Peacemaker, where anything within a certain vision cone would get auto-targeted. Instead we get this CoD style "snap aiming" where "Aim will only snap to targets for 0.5s, after which it will resume manual aim." Considering a lot of people are already having a hard time with this content and the sheer cost to rank that up, spamming aim for a half-assed aim assist is pretty awful.

On 2019-12-26 at 6:50 PM, Awazx said:

In general, it is a bit embarrassing to know that this ship belongs to one of the most advanced civilizations in the galaxy.

^ This.

About the enemy markers though, I think what would help everyone, including the color blind, is making actual distinct differences in the enemy ship indicators, besides just "diamond" and "slightly curvier diamond," like say maybe Tenno-fied playing card houses. Diamond for the Cutters, Club for Outriders, Heart for Crewships (because of that damned healing bubble), and Spade for any Elite variants or if we get any ace enemy pilots (think Kuva Lich, but fighter pilot/dreadnaught commander).

Edited December 28, 2019 by (PS4)DEATHrocket777
Proofreading/grammar