X4 Beta 7.5 Flight Model: Detailed Analysis & Feedback

[@mikinbg]

Im a returning player after many years. I remember not being a huge fan of the arcade-ish flight model at that time. Now i started my playthrough straight with 7.5 and im loving it. Needs some polishing thou.

[@panagiotisgalinos]

Hey man!! Best wishes for a successful 2025. I’ve been eagerly looking forward to this video

[@Diego-fn3ql]

happy new year, cap'n!

[@EvlNinjadude]

I remember making my first Boron "travel fighter" from an Irukandji, and realizing that while I could mod it to go 14km/s, it could do so in no direction other than forward. It became impossible to steer it with anything other than flight assist toggling, which at the same time felt TOO powerful. And I couldn't change my speed either. Like you said, it needs adjusting, and I hope Egosoft take this into account.

[@nguyenhoangminhtrung2779]

Thank you for the video been looking for something like this since the update until I found yours

[@al-adeelah2507]

I got used to flying lazily in X4, and I used flight assist on/off depend on if I wanted to go Stright or "drift". I hope this will not take long to re-adjust. I never thought the flight model would be the focus on new patches. sense the current one is serviceable.

[@markhackett2302]

It looks like FA On is being fixed so you won't need FA Off except in special conditions, which really was a way to rein in players, because players could use FAOff, the AI not so much.

[@KaijuAKD]

I guess they just want to patch the exploit 🤷🏻‍♂️

[@RedundancyDept]

Interesting video, thanks. Evidently the new flight model is a mixed bag, at least as of the current Beta. I can appreciate EGOSoft's intent here; maybe they'll even succeed, but I can't help feeling that this effort is misplaced. "The player's flying experience" doesn't even rate on my list of complaints about X4. I'm not alone. I almost never see complaints about X4's flight model. Sure, it could be a lot better; no one will confuse X4 for Elite Dangerous, but that's the entire point: X4 has a different focus. What we do see people complain about, constantly, are frustrations with the AI (which is likely to regress under a revamped flight model), and a lack of purpose/direction in the mid/late game. When confronted with the obvious conclusion, that X4 would benefit most from developent on the "4x" side of the game, EGOSoft responded by ... releasing a standalone story DLC and then pivoting into a wholesale revamp of the arcadey flight model? I love EGOSoft, but good grief, lol.

[@AAnthony-]

I wholly agree... I am a new player and I've not had issue with the 'flight model' so far. I understood you can turn flight assist off as soon as I turned hard coming out of travel mode. My complains up till now have been exclusively UI clunkiness, lack of tooltips and AI (although I realise AI is a perpetual uphill struggle).

[@markhackett2302]

You also never saw anyone telling someone off for complaining that the flight model was wrong and needed to be changed, either. How about you do it next time, since you are so upset? Note: I didn't think the flight model needed to change, but you will also not see me complain that it should not have been changed either.

[@markhackett2302]

@@AAnthony- The Flight School canned tutorial also went into FA Off, but lots and lots, eager to NOT RTFM and wanting to make content for twitch et al eschewed any pretense at reading that fine manual or doing "boring" tutorials. See Sips_ Which is fine, but sips_ loves to complain that he was never told X when X was told him in a tutorial he insisted not to play.... THEN it is a problem.

[@Kriogenic_PixelMan]

I agree with the sentiment. I'd love for them to fully focus on AI and then UI. Then work on better gameplay for mid-late game. If these three things went from meh to good, this game would be easily 10/10. Unfortunately it's not that simple. It's not like putting everyone to work on the UI is magiaclly gonna make it good, there can be some technical issue making things difficult to change etc. And in the end, for the game developer it's always a battle between making the best game for the players, the best game you want to make and the best product to sell. Sometimes these three align, sometimes they don't :(

[@dancole3187]

Thank you! Fantastic observations, commentary, and analysis.

[@DrowChyld]

I have not even tried the beta myself, BUT!...I really wish they add a setting to not apply the new flight changes. I LIKE the way the ships fly, I don't wish to learn a whole new system and have all my installed mods mess up how I like my ships to fly.

[@daebi37]

One of the reasons I spent money on X4 was the fact I did not need a pilots license to fly my ship. I really do hope they add an ability to keep what I know and love. I really don't want to have to go find another Space Game that scratches the itch X4 did before the flight control change.

[@davinhunt7558]

ty sir always here for a new upload

[@johnathangoodwin3610]

Well represented video. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it.

[@xxpoisonblxx]

I feel like some hud clutter with rates and accelerations, both linear and rotational, would help the feel once a player learned to look at them, but I also suspect they'd expose a lot of the jank of the "this ship has X thrust available in this direction, except that's different in all these other circumstances."

[@khugansixtyeight]

Thank you.

[@ragingchimera8021]

I can't help but think hiring an animation expert would have helped this game go from A to AA more than hiring a flight model expert. But I hardly fly my ships in X4, if I want to do that I play Elite.

[@-drey]

good luck doing the races now

[@markhackett2302]

Something to check, if you have them, but potentially easy: just change the parameters of those racing ships.

[@markhackett2302]

The problem for your last point, that we "need to know speed in other than forward terms" is how do we mechanise it? How do you set "optimal speed" other than max? How do you set travel speed as not maximum? How do you do thrust via key or mouse (or HOTAS) when it can appear in any of three terms? THAT is where I see a problem. And its solution may be to not nerf the Katana so much, and if balance is required, cut its speed or acceleration. IMO travel speed was always a problem. It's "fine" for combat engines, and "acceptable" for all-round engines, but travel engines take so much longer to get to speed that most sectors never see any advantage over the less expensive all-rounders. Then you add on three times the delay, during which you are almost certainly going to get hit, ridiculously certain in an M sized ship, and suddenly you have a great need to eschew travel drives. And with X or XL engines, because both had a 20 second spool up for travel speeds TO EVEN START, there was practically no reason to go for travel drives over all-rounders. Also the "dead stop" would need a version that would steer yourself to whatever is needed to make your travel "behind" you so that the main engine thrust can stop you as quickly as possible and then put your nose back on point. However, that last bit is only needed because they decided to make engine thrust the only real way to move ships. I put forward that engines were just exhausts for generators of gravity wells, toward which your ship would fall, and the "max speed" would be how quickly and how deeply that gravity well could be made, and the manoeuvring would be how far and how fast it could move that gravity well around your ship. This was YEARS ago, mind. The engine output could be used to "afterburn" just straight ahead thrust by using it as pure thrust (hence the old X3 use of energy cells for afterburners as a post-release official mod), but in normal mode it was just an exhaust for material that wasn't needed to be kept in the ship. The material would be used for life support and foodstuffs on board, but if stores were full, it would be thrown out the back, and that would then explain why different races got different engine colours in XBtF to X2: different races required different food and air, hence the output exhaust would be different in constituents and therefore its combination back into basic components would release different wavelengths of light. Where fiddling about could be problematic is that the choices people made were based on the flight model at that time. Same for how bigger ships carried different loadouts. What they've done for carriers is instead of un-nerfing the ZeusE, they nerfed the Condor and Colossus Es instead. But that leads to wondering why you would bother with the carrier when you can just fly them freely and with the money saved, buy more. For the Zeus it wasn't as big a problem: the Paranid ships were fast, so didn't need a carrier. Teladi were slow, so a fast carrier COULD get them to the front faster but the Condor isn't a fast carrier. The Argons weren't that much faster, and so a carrier could be used, but nerfing that meant there was no call to use one, and doubly now since it was the slowest of the first three races. And then you have the changes to destroyers and traders, but those changes left them mostly worse off than the Vanguard variants. Some thought on what you'd use is more important. The Teladi might have greatly increased the drone count, since drones are cheap, the Argon may have more fighters because they were fairly cheap but more capable. The traders may swap dock space for cargo space (for example the Teladi) or swap dock space for more missiles and drones. IMO the new E variants should have been based around the size of the Sentinel and the speed of the Vanguard so that the prior blueprints would not be missed, and then balance that against "more useful" stuff, like speed or drone count, etc. and therefore along with price and dock counts being "lower than 40" because of cutnpaste dock entries, the E types not a runaway must have to punish those who bought the Vanguard blueprint before the E variants arrived.

[@CptSnuggles07]

When thinking about how to implement a 3D velocity indicator, I was envisioning the system used by Elite: Dangerous, which isn't so much a precise indicator as a combination of audio cues, visual effects, and a couple of additional HUD elements, which collectively give a good indication of what your orientation and speed are relative to your target and to your acceleration vector. Other people have suggested a full-on 3D velocity indicator built into the HUD. You'll be happy to hear that Travel engines are actually the best choice for travel now! I haven't finished all my tests yet, but that's been definitively true for the roughly half-dozen lineups I've tested.

[@planexshifter]

So my Mamba and Novas will be super fun!

[@neurolancer81]

Thanks for the detailed analysis! I just subbed, as a fellow dataphile. I will be digging into the dataset myself. You probably talked about this elsewhere on your channel but what is your flying setup? Do you think people with a HOTAS or a HOSAS will have a "better" experience vs K+M?

[@CptSnuggles07]

I used to play with KBM + flight stick, but lately I've switched over entirely to KBM. A recent post on the forums said that flight stick controls feel very unresponsive in the beta compared to the live version, but I can't vouch for how accurate that is. I imagine throttle management would be easier with HOTAS, at least.

[@neil168]

I tried with my HOTAS and it felt VERY clunky. Right now I'm using KBM + throttle comfortably. I think I want to get a Space Mouse. Have you guys tried one of those?

[@archrexem7274]

@@CptSnuggles07 Sadly i experienced the same, i am quite new with the flight stick only have around 20h or so, but the races in timelines were nearly impossible for me. Set back to KBM and it went so much smoother, so for now i suggest KBM.

[@markhackett2302]

@@CptSnuggles07 The problem is that you use up a lot of desk space you can reach when running HOTAS and KBM, but you need a mouse to manage the map, and the keyboard is required to type things in. I have to put the mouse a long way away and stretch to it for map use. However don't listen to neil, there's nothing clunky with HOTAS unless he means "instead of KBM" in maps etc.

[@markhackett2302]

@@archrexem7274 I think most of the devs use KBM and the CEOs son uses that on a laptop, so it is mostly about KBM use, because they optimise what they prefer first. Isn't helped by the fact that keyboard and mouse makes the map view so much easier to use. A lot of the recent changes are to make controller use fit better, and it uses much the same inputs as KBM too, so optimising for controllers means "better" KBM too. You'll not use the wheel to select stuff with a HOTAS, but you WILL with a controller.

[@Dr.Do0m]

the fact that boost was tied to shield made me always rage quit before this patch. so annoying that as soon as u lost shield u were a sitting duck in a slow ship

[@markhackett2302]

I kinda hope that having it taken off the shields is used to balance the types. So fighters don't get much boosting, but what little they get is filled up quickly, scouts get a medium amount of boost, but longer fill times. And for the only interceptor, it gets both a long boost time and huge refill of that boost bar, so that it could run as a "real interceptor" as opposed to a "nimble and VERY slow scout" as it currently is. It may, however, be too late for that since Elites are now just labelled fighter.

[@CzarnyBonek]

Verisimilitude Have you tried timelines races yet? Certain ships there used to be absolutely horrid to fly with no matter the FA setting (first and/or second race in particular), i wonder how they feel now.

[@CptSnuggles07]

No, I've had my hands full with the open universe. I am curious about Timelines though. Might give some of the scenarios a try if I have time.

[@flairbot]

Big fan! Just wanted to add some of my own insights that may help you. When you mentioned big thrust feeling sluggish and small thrust feeling more nimble, that's more likely due to inertia. I dare say a good test would be to simply time how long it takes to get to max speed, then time decelerating to 0. Things that could effect this would be engines/mass, thrusters vs engines, current inertia (something like mass*speed) I'm winging my equations here but you should get my meaning. So then, big thrust can indeed feel sluggish especially if your thrusters can't keep up, then it turns into having to point your ship where you want the thrust to be, but also if you've accelerated a lot there's a lot of effort needed to overcome that. I think I butchered my explanation so feel free to reply

[@CptSnuggles07]

I hear what you're saying. The tests and the statistical analyses accounted for inertia. You can check out the dataset to see what I mean. There are plenty of times with the Chimera, for example, where ~700 kN of thrust decelerated an equal mass from an equal speed at a greater rate than ~4000 kN of thrust.

[@flairbot]

@CptSnuggles07 I've got the spreadsheet open, great source of data! Can you check the Delta V's? Maybe I'm dumb but just looking at the first few entries of travel mode, no decel, it's 2425 with FA off but 2900 with FA on? Is that right?

[@CptSnuggles07]

@@flairbot Yep, that's correct for some flight scenarios. With FA off, your ship only automatically decelerates down to its maximum cruising speed, but with FA on, it automatically decelerates down to zero. That's mainly true while coasting; many player inputs cause FA-off to decelerate to zero, and some inputs cause FA-on to decelerate to max cruise. That's why it's important to compare Deceleration and the Thrust Modifier, as opposed to just the Time - they take differing delta V's into account, but Time doesn't.

[@MrDuncaroos]

They should have hired Evochron Legacy Dev for flight model update. One thing I LOVE about the game is the ship's HUD is designed for space flight. Horizontal, Vertical, Forward velocity vectors and an "Absolute" velocity vector to denote total speed. Along with A compass and an altitude ladder to know your pitch and roll, and you know exactly how your ship is moving. There's too many times where I have to rely on open up the huge map to get my bearings, as opposed to just looking at the HUD and a general sense on where I am

[@adamm450]

good old Starlancer(2000) and Freelancer (2003) had the best space sim flight model optimized for dogfigting and "fun" , these are 20+ years old games. I would have guessed game devs would have figured this out by now...

[@albortiiemango4094]

Damn, 300 hours and I didn't know you could turn off flight assist. Then I find out in this video explaining how it doesn't work like that anymore....Nice video keep up the good work!

[@markhackett2302]

It was people who either (or both) didn't know or didn't care that FAOff existed in X4 that complained that the flight model in X4 was arcadey. SC fans, trolls of all sorts (so if you visited ED or SC fora you would see them posting how SC was a scam or ED a failure), and so on. FA Off made it a 6DoF model, and every space game that includes combat other than "spreadsheets in SPAAAACE" have a max speed in space, because a KSP type of engine was tried in Elite 2, and all that meant was combat was a useless game of jousting.

[@JBMorris9]

😂😂😂

[@georgiosk.5601]

You didn't know about something that is stated in the flight tutorials? Jesus I can't imagine being a developer and having to deal with customers like you.....

[@xxpoisonblxx]

@@georgiosk.5601 "didn't pay attention to the tutorial" and "didn't read the tooltip/manual/blatant hints in the middle of the screen" are most people. People get tunnel vision when they want to play a game instead of investing in a whole complex learning process, so if they *can* scrape by without paying attention to the minutiae, they will. Then they get comfortable and adopt the "I know what I'm doing" mindset, at which point, why would they go looking for how to do this thing they didn't realize the game *could* do?

[@h0rnedfi3nd]

I’m almost sorry I have 1.4k hours in my current playthrough. Unfortunately the incentive to replay the game is rather low as you always end up doing the same things and replaying the same missions,which makes replaying the whole game rather boring. I believe the flight model isn’t helping much with all this. edit: very good video btw.

[@Zentsuki-Wh]

Well to be fair, most games get somewhat boring after 1.4k hours

[@markhackett2302]

@@Zentsuki-Wh Heck, most games get boring after 20 hours.

[@Derzull2468]

That's the problem with Sandbox games were you don't create parameters for yourself. All your runs end up similar. If you start with a plan and a general direction, for example I'm going to be a VIG pirate and nothing else or I'm a bounty hunter and not interested in a fleet or an empire, your runs become different.

[@interestedparty497]

Honestly, it won’t make much diffence to me because I rarely fly the ship myself. I’m looking forward to the AI analysis with the changes to see how my beloved Odachi fares.

[@tioalra6746]

Havent played the game yet, due to its weird flying. I clicked on this video to See how it changed, but i have to ask: are spreadsheets and diagrams a normal thing when talking about mechanics for this game?

[@timothypricesr5953]

major bugs fixed my small ships still freeze etc and some mediums still have trouble landing

[@Draceb]

Thank you for this deep analysis but they really need to make the option for the old flight model and you can turn on the new one by choice. From what you said it seems like it was good the way it was ships were flying with the feeling of RCS or inertial dampeners and you turn it off to go into space flight without RCS or damps, so now they are trying to copy start citizen which is terrible. I do not get why they are changing something so far into the games development i mean this game is years old and now EGOsoft wants to mess with the flight?? Seems like a bad idea when so many other things need fixing in this or to be made more intuitive. How will mods effect ship handling as well? Game mods too will we be able to use Mods like VRO to get back to the old style feel? I hope this new flight model doesnt destroy mods, as i find this game isnt even playable without mods. There is a saying if it aint broke dont fix it. I would have like to see so many other things than this design change so late in the life of X4. Either way im not sure EGO soft cares what the players think more just like you said pushing to make it more accessible to newer players so they can boost sales. Either way, I play on steam and does not look like i have the option to refuse this update and keep enjoying the game as it is. I am not a vet of this game having only around 300 hours, but I have been playing X series since the 90s and while its the best space game out there. Making huge changes like this so late in the game seems bad especially after the massive failure that was Timelines. Thanks for you very diligent work Snug you are the X4 man and your content always has my likes and subs. Keep it up.

[@markhackett2302]

The script for the AI needs to be balanced and written for the flight model, so having both models would mean changing the ai scripts too.

[@Dr.Do0m]

and well i havent played in years so i dont remember how ships used to play^^

[@lupf5689]

Same here ... I started a new playthrough 2 weeks ago, after a break of 3 years or so. The new flight model seems to be fine. Most probably since I completely unlearned and forgot, how the old model felt. :-)

[@leonidnikityuk9460]

It is especially worth considering the ability of AI to use this flight model

[@CptSnuggles07]

That's the next video!

[@planexshifter]

I just worried about the AI trying to fly now-

[@henningg.1687]

Thanks, this was very interesting! However, even after rewatching I don't understand how you come to the claim that the old model was internally consistent. Even if we accept a universe with a lot of weird laws of physics (like extremely noticable drag in near-vacuum). I don't see a way to "explain" how ships behave in 7.0. Like, if it takes all our engines taken together several seconds to accelerate to a certain speed, how the hell can disabling flight assist, turning the ship, and enabling flight assist again, get rid of all the forward momentum and turn it into lateral movement in a heartbeat to slide into a gate or something, without the drives even pointing in a reasonable direction? I totally agree that it makes sense to neglect "real realism" in favor of an enjoyable game play loop. I am not arguing for turning X4 into first-person KSP. But as a somewhat newer player I still vividly remember how obscure the whole flight behavior was for me. This only changed when I stopped looking for reasons and just memorized "ok if I use this sequence of button presses I can do that kind of maneuver". And then I really liked it, because drifting is fun! Still can not make any sense out of it. Looking forward to trying the new flight model when 7.,5 releases!

[@CptSnuggles07]

Sure, I can explain that. I went into more detail in the Beta 3 version of this video, which was just a few hours from release when Beta 4 dropped. Basically, I did some back of the envelope math using the very limited numbers I had available from 7.0/7.1, and the lateral/vertical thrust modifiers there were in more or less the same ballpark as the longitudinal thrust modifiers found in Beta 7.5. In other words, with both models, you have to accept that your ship is somehow capable of multiplying its effective deceleration thrust by a factor of up to 17x in certain scenarios. If you can accept that, the old model makes some degree of sense in-universe, because it applied (or didn't apply) those thrust modifiers in ways that provided distinct benefits to the two flight modes. Even then, there's still a fair amount of hand-waving involved, but not any more than anything else in the X Universe, by my admittedly qualitative assessment.

[@henningg.1687]

@CptSnuggles07 interesting, I will check it out! :)

[@CptSnuggles07]

@@henningg.1687 I meant that the Beta 3 video did not get published due to the release of Beta 4. Wording might have been a little unclear there.

[@henningg.1687]

@CptSnuggles07 ah, got you

[@markhackett2302]

Any game that wants space combat has drag. Eschewing that turns combat into meaningless jousting for a couple of seconds. KSP doesn't have drag. But it doesn't have combat either.

[@KaijuAKD]

How is this going to affect AI piloting? Someone commented about it and sudden chill ran through my spine. The pilots already had issues piloting jeavy modded ships, will the devs have to rework how they fly?

[@CptSnuggles07]

That's the next video!

[@interestedparty497]

@@CptSnuggles07 Nice! I’m super interested in the AI handling.

[@andriycholiy3204]

In the video you can see how you fly up to the Teladi ships, and the game starts to lose smoothness. Probably at this moment the fps also drops... Let the developers work on optimization so that during large-scale battles, the fps does not drop to 7-8 fps... On the video a card from a laptop, at the maximum setting the fps drops a lot...Nvidia rtx 3080ti...

[@Kataquan]

What's your cpu? This game is way more cpu bound than gpu

[@mrnobuddy3549]

this is a game where stations are static positions in orbit over a celestial body, without moving in regards to each other as they go through their orbit. unless this game decides to go Kerbal Space Program in its simulations, the "realism" approach is always going to be arbitrary.

[@markhackett2302]

Still no matter how much you cry to daddy tubey, KSP aren't modelling stellar motions. Which is arbitrary. As is choosing to complain that orbital mechanics isn't being done.

[@mrnobuddy3549]

@@markhackett2302 who is daddy tubey and who is crying? I'm just giving an example that any realism discussion is always arbitrary

[@MagiconIce]

In my headcanon, since it is the future, they got some thrusting technology built in to establish a geo-synchronous position in orbit, never changing position relative to each other, applying to absolutely everything you see.

[@jeanbrasse1148]

Im a new player who still discover the game, and maybe I’m missing knowledge about IRL space flight, but what do you mean by thrust deceleration ? Because how I imagine real space flight it’s like there is no deceleration since you are in space, you would need to stop engine, pivote your ship while you still go in the initial direction and accelerate in the direction that counter balance the *insert scientific name* force. Ships in the game just have back thrusts ( from what I encounter), like there is no reverse mode on a real thrust no ? And lateral movements in my mind are limited bc of your *scientific* force of you moving forward at 1.000 will never be nicely balanced by the pivote things for ships idk the name sry, Sorry I’m no scientist, I use the small I remember from high school physic class 8 years ago 😂 I just see current flight as the usual just a car in space with some 3D movements

[@CptSnuggles07]

All X4 engines can output similar amounts of thrust both forward and reverse. The lateral/vertical thrusters generally provide less thrust, but not dramatically less. It just *looks* like the engines can only push the ship forward due to their models and effects; most of them lack visual effects for reverse thrust.

[@MagiconIce]

@@CptSnuggles07 Because the thrusters do that work. When you deactivated travel drive and have FA on (in the current model), the engines will turn off and the thrusters at the front of the ship will activate and output thrust, until the ship comes to a stop. What is unrealistic about the current flight model is, that if you deactivated Flight Assist and turned off Travel Mode, that somehow your ship still deaccelerates without active thrusters instead of keeping the momentum according to Newtonian Flight physics. In that sense the ships in the current flight model don't behave like they're vehicles in space but like seafearing ships, because there this would make physical sense.

[@CptSnuggles07]

@@MagiconIce Bow thrusters are the visual effect. The force being applied is the main engine reverse thrust. That's one of the things I tested.

[@jasoncramer6717]

ok guys be honest. Verisimilitude is a brand new word to all of us.

[@markhackett2302]

I've used it for years. But only in the last few years heard others use it and so therefore knew how it was spoken. Very Ver Sim Ill Ih Tude? Ver eee sim ill tude? Ver eee sim iltud? Not knowing, I didn't care, if it came out my mouth, or fitted in the sentence, that was good enough.

[@robertscott2593]

@@markhackett2302 verh ih SIM leh tude 5 syllables stress in the middle. I learned it from an honest to goodness engligh lit professor so i go with that.. although it was at an art school so hmm

[@neil168]

I'll caveat my comment by saying I have just recently started playing X4, generally because I disliked its (old) flight model. I have almost 4,000 hours in Elite Dangerous, and over a 1,000 hours in Star Citizen, so I'm quite accustomed to the idea of the 7.5 flight model. That said, because they're using the John Pritchett flight model, my assumption is that directional thrust will be determined by the location of each and the size of each individual thruster and the mass of the ship. Some ships will have better lateral or vertical thrust than others, some will have great brakes, while some would be better doing a flip and burn. It should be logical just by looking at the ship model. The advantage is that it makes every ship feel very different from one another to fly, and so everyone will have their preferences. It definitely adds to the sense of realism and scale when the ships really feel like they have mass. I guess the downside is when you're former favourite ship becomes a brick to fly. As an aside, it seems possible with the new flight model to introduce new ship designs that aren't dependent on being horizontal.

[@CptSnuggles07]

This isn't the same flight model SC uses. X4 doesn't have the necessary granularity of ship design. Egosoft hired Pritchett as a consultant, but he didn't re-create his previous model for them, he just lent them some mathematical expertise (based on their posts). Ship handling doesn't appear to be tied to the physical model in any way, based on the ships I've compared stats for, although I haven't gone through the full lineup. Not saying there won't be variation similar to what you described, just trying to correct the common misconception that we're now using "the Pritchett model".

[@markhackett2302]

@@CptSnuggles07 It wouldn't matter much anyway because those attitude thrusters would have made the engine thruster placement largely irrelevant by being made bigger or faster or whatever.

[@Roman_S86]

Good Statically good

[@lexgronchi2749]

I NEED MULTIPLAYER ON THIS GAME

[@harryhoudini714]

Egosoft shouldnt have used the Word "Realism" but instead taken of the Edge by saying "more Authentic" or "closer to Reality" or something like that. I mean, lets not forget that this is a game with Space Battles that basically play out like Second World War Naval Battles. Just look at the difference of Naval Engagements today to 2nd World War, which is under a Century in Timeframe and we are already speaking of battles that take place "over the Horizon" with hundreds if not thousands of miles of distance between the combatants. You can imagine what Space, with its lack of Atmospheric Resistance, would enable for Weapon Systems ranges and combine that with Tech like AI that would have reached unimaginable levels and you can guess how Space Battles of a potential Future might look like and over what Distances it will be fought! Thankfully X4 never had any problems finding Fans even with its "lack of Realism", for the simple Reason that it was and is just a great Game even without it. So what if it is Arcade? People Play games with Dragons and Orcs that doesnt exist and enjoy it so why shouldnt they enjoy this too? Think of Flight Simulators. There is Ace Combat, that anyone hardly would call "Realistic" and there is DCS which many do call quite Realistic and both have no problems finding Fans.