As you can tell from the earlier videos movement in your suit was pretty ponderous. I was basing this on other spacesuit simulators and what I’ve seen on videos of actual spacewalks.

After a lot of internal testing, frustration, and additional research I’ve changed the control scheme. Attitude change is much faster, you still have inertia and mass but you can change orientation in pitch, roll, and yaw relatively quickly. These changes are done with a single-gimbal control moment gyroscope mounted in your MMU. The gyroscope approach can produce a lot of torque for small power amounts and doesn’t waste precious reaction mass.

I’ve posted a video of the new control scheme – mouse for orientation (left/right yaw, up/down pitch,  left/right with right mouse down for roll) and wasd keys for thrust forward/port/starboard/aft.

I believe this is approach more accurately reflects the future maneuverability of spacesuits and combat spacecraft.  Ships will be able to change facing and orientation very quickly to unmask weapons or to use armored or less vulnerable sections of the ship to absorb incoming damage.  Of course changing orientation does not affect your velocity vector – changing that will always take time and reaction mass.

I’m a week or two from releasing the first technical demo to early access members, with the first public demo to go out in late November. These demos will not have a lot of ‘game’ in them – they will mainly serve to introduce the initial control scheme and look and feel of TorchShips.

(Note on the images and video, still a lot of placeholder art, including the hud frame which was created by Entereri)