collisions

[wolf37]

i know that if you collide with a enemt plane, you go down, but how come you can'nt collide with your own team planes.
i was in a b-17 with two enemy fighters after me and at one point it looked as if they hit one another, but did not go down, i was shot down and thought that was not fair, if they collided in real life, i would not have been shot down.
what does everybody else think.
thanks for the chance to ask.

wolf37

[Swoosh]

Having friendly collisions off solves two problems.  The main problem being traitorious friendly pilots who intentionally ram their own teams planes.  Second, the time lag associated with the net makes the exact location of enemy and friendly planes impossible to determine.  Therefore, even if every pilot was honorable and had no desire to ram his own teammates, many collisions would occur that would not happen in real life.  

I wish it were practical to have friendly collisions on.  But as far as I see things, it is not.

[Jekyll]

My understanding is that friendly collisions are not modelled for the following reasons:

1.  Since aircraft spawn from the end of the runway, two pilots could collide simply by both hitting 'Fly' at the same time.  That would be unfair.

2.  Since aircraft spawn from the end of the runway, an aircraft on landing approach could collide with a friendly aircraft which happens to spawn right in front of him on final approach.  That too would be unfair.

However, if aircraft spawned in hangers, or revetments, and the host was smart enough not to spawn two friendly fighters in the same space, then there would not seem to be any good reason for friendly collisions NOT to be modelled.

Frankly, I hope this is the way AH is going to go.  If you want to take off, you first need to leave your revetment and taxi to the runway, avoiding friendly aircraft along the way.  Could also make formation flying in cloud real interesting  

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C.O. Phoenix Squadron
www.users.bigpond.com/afinlayson/index.htm
'feel the heat .......'

[Rojo]

Wolf37: This is a somewhat contraversial issue, both here and with brand-W.  Friendly collisions are turned off, as I understand it, for two reasons.  First, all aircraft start at the same place on the runway. I friendly collisions were enabled, people would be dying left and right as soon as they hit "Fly" and jumped to the runway. I'm sure you've noticed being "inside" another A/C sometimes when jumping to the runway.  Still it should be possible to disable collisions on the ground, but not in the air, but...

The second reason for friendly collisions being turned off is because of net lag while flying formation.  Try flying tight formations in Forts and watch how the other planes around you bounce all over the place.  This is due to net-lag, mostly.  Until connections become more stable than is possible with today's comm technology, friendly collisions will probably remain off.

I for one would like to try it with ground collisions off and airborn collisions on, just to see how bad it is.

By the way, HtC: love the collision model otherwise.  I've actually survived collisions with enemy aircraft, sometimes with catastrophic damage forcing me to bail immediately; othertimes with a heavily damaged but still [barely] controllable aircraft.  Much better than brand-W.  Thanks.

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Rojo (S-2, The Buccaneers)