I thought this up waaaaay back, as a way of having asteroid racing doable within the bounds of human reactions. OGJ-period, it'd likely be going open source.
Basic problem is that stuff happens too fast for people, and some manuvers are likely going to be too tight to maintain consciousness (depending on ships and inertial compensators and whatnot) so something needs doing.
The solution I had in mind is essentially a high-resolution autopilot combined with sensors and computer systems sufficient to (reasonably accurately) predict the motions of stuff in one's flightpath based on velocity vectors.
So how this works is that, say, coming to a stationary assortment of rocks, you program the course through them as far ahead of time as you feel comfortable; computer's going to know how sharply your ship can turn and accelerate and thus what you can and can't do. Then, as you get closer, you continually fine-tune things; maybe some of the rocks are moving and your prior course would take you into them, or from long range your sensors didn't see some of them.
In stereotypical dogfighting, you probably can't do things as far ahead, but with practice and skill one could probably figure things out a few seconds ahead of time. In traditional, non-inertial-compensated craft, the basic idea is that the pilot could sketch out controlled manuvers that have them blacking out but leaving periods in between to adjust tactics and figure out what's next.
Or yeah, we could just leave all of it solely to the AIs, but what fun is that?
(why yes, I am procrastinating working on schoolwork!)
Basic problem is that stuff happens too fast for people, and some manuvers are likely going to be too tight to maintain consciousness (depending on ships and inertial compensators and whatnot) so something needs doing.
The solution I had in mind is essentially a high-resolution autopilot combined with sensors and computer systems sufficient to (reasonably accurately) predict the motions of stuff in one's flightpath based on velocity vectors.
So how this works is that, say, coming to a stationary assortment of rocks, you program the course through them as far ahead of time as you feel comfortable; computer's going to know how sharply your ship can turn and accelerate and thus what you can and can't do. Then, as you get closer, you continually fine-tune things; maybe some of the rocks are moving and your prior course would take you into them, or from long range your sensors didn't see some of them.
In stereotypical dogfighting, you probably can't do things as far ahead, but with practice and skill one could probably figure things out a few seconds ahead of time. In traditional, non-inertial-compensated craft, the basic idea is that the pilot could sketch out controlled manuvers that have them blacking out but leaving periods in between to adjust tactics and figure out what's next.
Or yeah, we could just leave all of it solely to the AIs, but what fun is that?
(why yes, I am procrastinating working on schoolwork!)