With orbiting planets come a host of strange and non-physical problems that need to be worked around, fixed or hacked to make the current behaviour of ships in space work. To get around their orbit in a year, real planets move at very high speeds: Earth moves at about 30000 m/s, our fastest ships move around 1200 m/s. This creates problems such as how to catch up to a planet in orbit, as well as not getting run over by a planet. Just taking off from a planet in the wrong direction will have the planet keep catching up to us immediately after we leave, preventing us from ever leaving in that direction. Right now, gravity just stops dead as soon as we leave atmosphere. If space is to be taken as seriously as Star Citizen usually takes things, the obvious solution is to implement proper Newtonian gravity and proper orbits not only for planets, but for our ships as well, rather than fudge it all. The tricky bit about this is to do it without making the game so hard to play that it isn't fun, as well as maintaining the ability to dogfight without breaking our current combat flight model (in particular making it possible to still have limited top speed and SCM speed). A simple mechanism to help players is QT and coupled flight mode (a.k.a. IFCS). Using QT, you could simply aim for a planet, engage QT and have avionics power through in a straight line to deposit you in a standard orbit around it. That is enough to make the game easy for those times you don't feel like thinking through the orbital mechanics. If you feel up to it, it could be more fun to really do orbital navigation manually, with computer assisted UI. There could be a benefit to those that are skilled enough to take advantage of gravity to pull them along, instead of just powering through in a straight line. For instance QT could fly you faster the better aligned you are with a pure gravity assisted path, rather than when you just barge through against gravity. QT could have exactly the same effect as time-compression in other games, but since space and time are different aspects of the same spacetime, it does it by compressing space rather than time so that everyone in game can stay in the same time-zone. The better you follow a gravity assisted curve and the less you use thrust to push against gravity, the more QT is capable of compressing space, and the quicker your path will be. To have our ships orbit properly, our top speeds can no longer be limited as they are now. At the same time, we need that speed limit to give us our current dogfighting model; much of it is based on ships having different top speeds, as well as SCM speeds. The solution to having both unlimited and limited speed at the same time is by making that speed relative two different things. Right now, our top speed is relative the location of the system's sun, however in combat that isn't very important; we mainly care about our speed relative our opponent, not the sun. So, when we are close to an opponent, we can take our speed relative the mid-point between all involved ships; the speed relative the centre of the area we are fighting in. Our ships' speed relative that centre point could stay as they are now, limited to some set top and SCM speed. At the same time, the centre of the battle might in turn be in a proper orbit around the sun, the mid-point itself moving at tens of thousands of m/s relative the sun, without affecting the combatants. The above are only some suggestions to hint at possibilities. My main question is this: Will ships in SC have proper orbits, just like planets will? Maybe not now, but at some point in the future? Granted that a good way of doing this can be found, is this a long-term goal for Star Citizen? EDIT: Just as an example of the game play that will be possible, instead of the step-by-step straight-line Quantum jumps we now do to get to a station around a moon (e.g. Hurston to Kareah), a manually created gravity-assist path could take us from Hurston, use gravity assist at Crusader to slow us down, sling-shot us to Cellin, curve around the moon and deposit us at Kareah, all in one single QT jump. TLDR; Technically, what I am proposing is simplifying the global space simulation to run directly on Newtonian physics for everything in space. This gets rid of all the special cases and manual work-arounds we currently have, and more so, it avoids the whole slew of new hacks and fix-ups that will be needed for orbiting planets (e.g. has anyone thought of why moons are always so far away? Rotating moons can't be close because of those hacks). It will make space systematic, like Star Citizen generally tries to be. The way I propose is to use QT as the in-lore explanation to how orbital flight can be time-compressed ("QT uses spacetime duality to convert time-compression into space-compression"), where QT gives more time-savings the less you use power and the more you use gravity assist. Apart from the general simplification of the game-engine, it also opens up avenues of game-play by manually plotting trajectories, allowing those that learn the skill to travel faster (or slower, if they mess up). If you don't do manual plotting, you get a straight line trajectory where IFCS uses powered flight to force a simple straight line, but without the time savings that a gravity assist trajectory would give. Since QT is faster the more you rely on gravity assist, a Hohmann transfer will take less time than a Brachistochrone, giving us the archetypal trajectories of space movies, despite our engines working "Very well. Efficient." TLDR; TLDR: Simplify the global space simulation to run directly on Newtonian physics for everything in space, getting rid of all special cases and work-arounds. Use a combination of QT (huge amounts of g's), highly efficient engines (huge amounts of delta-v) and IFCS in coupled flight mode (automate and simplify orbital mechanics at a slight cost).