PitBowl

Conservation ov Momentum shall not be denied to any man, regardless ov his race, status, gender or creed. -- https://totl.net/Rights/

I have tricked the BuurPit into a bit of scientific research. Some time ago commander Snert and myself did a few experiments of ramming ships and pushing away the other with that. Already then I noticed that the physical concept of "Conservation of Momentum" is implemented rather badly.

So I brought a relatively low massed ship and rammed his heavy Imperial Cutter. With this different masses, according to physics as we know it, I should hand over some momentum to the heavy ship and myself bounce backwards. Only if both ships have the same mass, the incoming ship should exactly come to a stop and hand over all of its momentum to the other. If you want to read up about that a bit, I recommend the all-knowing trash heap (does anyone else remember where this reference comes from, BTW?): Wikipedia - it has an article with nice illustrating animations.

But in Elite:Dangerous something else happens: My smaller ship always comes to a complete halt and tries to hand over all momentum to the heavy target, that shoots away. Except, it again hits something (like the ground), then it will give up all momentum again.

Also, I guess due to the netcode behind the game, it can take some time for the momentum to arrive. This is actually a noticeable delay, so after ramming I stand still and the target starts moving a little later.

So last weekend I accumulated my willing guinea pigs to try this: Arrange a lot of space ships like bowling pins and get someone to crash into that, to see the momentum distribute through the group. It turns out the first part is already extremely hard: herding a fleet of mad spaceship commanders to actually just park close enough to each other. It is even much less possible to archieve a dedicated formation, so we gave up on that relatively fast.

To have a reference at least in one of the three dimensions, we did this on a planet, just above the surface. Also it looks better seeing ships tumble in gravity. So here is some video footage of what happened:

Most parts are rather irrelevant for the science, but "Act 4" of this video actually shows the effect - even though just at the side of the screen because of my bad camera works. You can see the purple-pink-ugly-thing being crashed into...  it starts moving, shortly after that hitting the next ship. That stops the purple ship and accelerates the next.

Act 3 should actually have worked, but it did not - I can currently only assume that this is because the purple ship is trying to distribute its kinectic energy between multiple ships and this is just too much for the in-game physics model and it gives up.

So generally one could build upon this, but honestly: herding commanders is hard. Sadly the "just turn everything off and do nothing" part always fails to reach someone.

As the final we tried another idea we had in mind - and having so many people with the same type of ship in the same place was an opportunity: We played spaceship Jenga, by stacking all ships on top of each other, then switching all flight assist systems off and letting a ship at the bottom of the tower boost out of it. It is also in the Video.