The planet earth is indeed round. Think about how long that concept was HEE-HAW'd, by the righteous, only to be proved foolish beyond believe.
Minotaur, I already razzed Stiglr for holding this same belief. Now you espouse it.
With very few exceptions (most of which are currently living), no halfway educated person in the last 2000 years has believed the earth is anything but more or less spherical (and not simply round like a pizza). Similarly, the idea of padlock view is silly.
The game works this way: it presents to the player as much of the sense data as possible, and the player executes a number of inputs that should represent as closely as possible basic bodily movements. Where the mechanical aspect is, for gameplay reasons, too complex, it has been simplified.
Moving your head is not that hard. The problem with yer padlock is that,
A. It hinders the development of good SA. By automatic your head, it can disorient you.
B. It hampers reasonable ACM. Those fancy evasive moves won't work as well. Try a hartmann maneuver? Why? The bad guy will just keep tracking you. On the other side, it really encourages yank and bankin'. Line up your head with the stick, and pull. Moreover, much of your "seat of the pants" feel for the plane is going to be based on how the horizon is moving with respect to the plane. This feel gets lost once the plane and the horizon are moving relative to another plane.
C. As kier points out, it's got limited utility. If you get good, you'll want to run your own views anyway.
D. Programming "to do it right" would be a tremendous expense of resources. Obviously, you can't have it automatically acquire enemies, or you'd castrate a major part of this game. What are you going to do, force a mouseclick on the icon? Try that in a dogfight. Make it lock on whatever's in the crosshairs? By then you've already found your solution. And then turning it off when it's obstructed.How long do you wait?
So, it's a crutch that develops poor habits, has limited usefulness and poses programming challenges. Using it is as ludicrous as claiming that Columbus went out to prove the world was spherical.
