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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

Freespace was the (un?)official successor. Freespace 2 was incredible and I’d be willing to bet it holds up to this day.

Nowadays we have the modern version of Elite Dangerous, but its flight mechanics are too close to aeronautic flight mechanics to compare to Descent.

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When I bought Free space it was actually titled Descent: Freespace - The Great War.

I wish the series had carried on, I really wanted to find out where the confusing plot threads of Freespace 2 went!

> When I bought Free space it was actually titled Descent: Freespace - The Great War.

I loved the series too, though the name was only prefixed with “Descent” to avoid a trademark conflict with an existing bit of software already called FreeSpace. It’s completely unrelated to Descent story-wise (and I’d argue is almost completely unrelated gameplay wise too)

Agreed. Very different gameplay, setting, everything really. Just two good games, weirdly sharing a name!

Wasn't there a different control mode in ED that made it more realistic or more like Descent though? I believe the default is that, where inertia is cancelled out automatically for easier flight.

Of course, to make the game playable and fair there's a maximum speed you can achieve while not in hyperspace.

If there is it’s completely a surprise to me and I’m now quite interested in using it. My biggest beef with the game is how slow the ship is to turn in combat and that I can’t do strafing.

FA Off, or Flight Assist Off, is the mode in Elite Dangerous where your ship does not correct any momentum (angular or linear) that you have, except for imposing speed limits. In this mode, you will be using 6 strafe thrusts and 6 turning controls, and it's entirely up to you to use them to cancel momentum if you want to stand still or fly in a controlled direction.

It is absolutely incredible to play like this, and very hard but rewarding. It can be essential for high level combat, and there's an entire community of hooners (sp?) that fly among narrow spaces between mountains doing incredible maneuvers. They use extra things like opening the cargo hatch or landing gear as aerobrakes (lower ship speed limit). Many "normal" pilots will enable and disable Flight Assist situationally, mostly to gain extra turning speed during FA OFF. It's worth searching youtube for some related videos.

Unfortunately for mouse/keyboard users like me there's a couple of things in the control scheme that conspire to make it harder to use than it could be. Still, the first time I landed my Cutter (a massive ship with brutal inertia) in a rotating station with FA OFF, I felt like the king of the world.

Note that you don't need FA OFF to do strafing in all directions. I do it all the time. However with FA ON, the ship will counter your strafes to correct the ship's motion into the forward/back axis. Strafes in FA OFF are more powerful and can let your ship move at top speed in any direction while facing any other direction, but you only really need that for tight flight maneuvers.

That sounds quite a bit like decoupled mode for star citizen. Altough, there you still get automatic following the cursor for rotation, but no correction for linear movement.

I loved Freespace 2 - I played it through two times I think (with my flightstick no less)

It was clearly a labor of love - way ahead of its time and would def hold up to this day in virtually every aspect

"DIVE! DIVE! HIT YOUR BURNERS, PILOT!"

Man, I still can't believe I actually escaped that one the first time. That was the most amazing moment in the game for me.

With mods, Freespace and Freespace 2 are still especially awesome.

I thought I had gotten this (Descent 3) for free with a graphics card I purchased, but Freespace was what I was thinking of, though it might have been Freespace 2.

The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!

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