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[kalaratiri]

I believe they allow you to warp directly above each individual district. Rather than having one 'planetary orbit' grid, it will be split into smaller 'district orbit' grids.

Also, geosynchronous orbit isn't required for orbital strikes, it just makes aiming easier

[Morwen Lagann]

Also, geosynchronous orbit isn't required for orbital strikes, it just makes aiming easier

It is if the satellites are supposed to be over the districts.

Kinda hard to shoot a district that's on the other side of the planet due to rotation.

[kalaratiri]

Hence warping too them directly, and having a 100km area to stay in.

Also, 

[Morwen Lagann]

Kala.

Either the satellites move with the districts (moving grids, ie, could get nasty computation-wise, and would make probing people at these grids or making bookmarks on them entirely pointless unless they made the bookmarks take into account relative position to the satellite, which would ALSO be computationally ridiculous), or the planets don't rotate EVE-side.

You cannot have both from the EVE side of things. It's not feasible.

[Karmilla Strife]

I haven't checked from a district warp-in location. I think planets rotate from the perspective of customs offices. When you view planet mode you see that the office is actually orbitting the world, but in "space" where your ship's relative velocity to the customs office is it's usual submarine self, you see the planet spin beside you. I believe in order to reduce computational problems, at the expense of realism, they only show orbitting bodies when you're "On Grid" and even then it's relative motion.

[Mithfindel]

I actually made some calculations I considered posting on a similar discussion about rotating on Failheap's DUST 514 subforum, but then I figured out "meh, I don't even play DUST". However, if CCP is able to make a simple AI or a moving object, then it shoudl be relatively simple to have a "satellite" orbit a district, as planets would assumably rotate at a constant speed. Make the object not bumpable. Bonus points if it has a warpable beacon. On planets, the orbital distance could potentially be negligible compared to planetary radius, depending on orbit. The Operation Highlander site is tens of thousands of kilometers from the planet, but looking at real-life satellites, ISS has the apogee of 400-odd kilometers. Now,

(2 * pi * (radius of Earth + (500 km))) / (24 hours) = 500.189547 m / s

where

radius of Earth = 6 378.1 kilometers

says Google calculator. So on Earth-sized planets, following a geostationary point 500 km above the equator is well within the reach of afterburning destroyers. Giant planets would need to be made to rotate slower for this to work, unless the target district is located on a high latitude region. (We may assume that EVE "spaceships" fly according to the physics of rule of cool, at the speed of the plot, so the unlikely "orbit" above a high latitude point is possible. Orbit at 45 degrees from the equator cuts speed by the square root of two.) Of course, if the "beacon" is warpable and the ability to fire is tied on the beacon being on grid, heavier crafts can keep pace with the beacon with tactical warps. (Assuming "grid-fu" isn't used and/or is considered an exploit.)

[Morwen Lagann]

The issue is with a "moving' grid, mechanically, and how it interacts with a bunch of other parts of the game, namely the coordinate system used for warping people around.

Warping around in EVE is little more than selecting a set of coordinates in 3-dimensional space and moving to them, with the local sun as 0,0,0. Bookmarks are just recorded sets of these coordinates. The reason this works at all is because objects are, with the exception of ships and drones, stationary relative to the sun.

The reason that a moving grid (the requirement to have planets rotate AND for district satellites to always provide a view of the district in question) won't work is the same reason it's difficult to catch a small ship that's moving around running a MWD or AB just by using probes to get warpins - by the time you enter warp, the target's already moved a fair number of kilometers from where it was when you got the warp-in (again, a specific set of coordinates), and by the time you land, depending on how far you had to warp, it's even further away. Interceptors regularly hit speeds between 3 and 5km per second. It's pretty damn difficult (near-impossible) to catch a ship that's moving quickly just by using probes.

Basically, anyone creating a bookmark on a 'moving grid', or warping to something on one, be it a fleet member or a probing result - even a ship that is stationary relative to the satellite - is going to have to deal with the fact that the grid is many kilometers away from where they were supposed to land by the time they do land unless CCP comes up with a new mechanic for local coordinate systems for the satellite beacons.

I don't see that happening.

District satellites orbit about 12,000 km from the surface of the planet they orbit. The velocity rounds to about 1,337 m/s if we assume an Earth radius, which we actually can't, because all planets have their own stats in EVE. Caldari Prime has a radius of 30,217 km, for example. That'd be 3,070 m/s. (Edit: Note that I'm assuming the day length on CP is still 24h - it likely isn't, but that particular piece of information is not available to players - only the orbital period.)

Recall that CCP does NOT have anything resembling realistic values for the planets and stars in New Eden. We play in a universe where stars are 20-30 billion years old, "temperate" planets have temperatures that "average" below freezing or near-boiling, or have gravity two, three, even four times as strong as Earth's. We have a fucking moon orbiting at twenty-five percent of the speed of light in Eram, for fuck's sake.

I also don't see CCP doing anything to fix that problem anytime soon either.

In short, New Eden itself says "fuck your math and physics, I do what I want," and this kind of change would require enough changes to mechanics and the amount of data being streamed between the server and client (not just verifying coordinates during warp, but synchronizing the graphical effects of the rotating planets) doesn't make this seem like anything more than people reading entirely too much into things.

DUST-side I see these changes happening easily.

EVE-side I very, very seriously doubt we will see any visible changes.

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

The problem with arguing about ship speed versus planetary orbital speed is you assume that the ship arrives stationary with respect to the planet. Which, when you look at the speed of our ships, you have to - even pluto moves at a speed around the sun fast enough that only a well-fitted interceptor could keep station.

So if you're going to assume that, then why not assume that ships can warp in and settle to rest with respect to any given frame of reference? What I mean is you could assume that the warp-in point for a planet is in orbit around the planet and moving in that orbit, so that when you arrive you are already at orbital speed for the planet.

The problem with this, from Eve's point of view, is that our planetary warp-in points would be moving around the planet, so their position with regard to off-grid points would always be changing. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

If I were CCP, though, that's the route I'd go.

[Aria Jenneth]

Just make the "night side" of a planet rotate independent of the star's position.

Bing! Problem nonsensically solved.

[Lyn Farel]

Just make the "night side" of a planet rotate independent of the star's position.

Bing! Problem nonsensically solved.

Its not because realism is already butchered that its good to butcher it even moar 

[Aria Jenneth]

Just make the "night side" of a planet rotate independent of the star's position.

Bing! Problem nonsensically solved.

Its not because realism is already butchered that its good to butcher it even moar 

Actually, having read the dev blogs on the topic, it doesn't solve much anyway. The posts claim, essentially, celestial correctness, with fully simulated night, day, "sun," and ship placement ... though I won't be surprised if that's not quite what we get.

The only way I can think of to do this in Eve is to have rotating "orbital zones" around each planet in Eve. I'm not sure how you'd program these into Eve exactly, but they'd move over time with the planet's rotation, acting as functionally stationary orbit over the planet's surface. Move into one (or have one move into you), and you move with it. Move out, and your movement reverts to "Eve normal."

Crazy. Fraught with difficulties. ... Only thing I can think of that fully delivers on what's promised without totally rewriting Eve.

Pretty sure this isn't it. Puzzled, I am.

[Ché Biko]

Side note: I started recreating the EVE Tekaima system in a gravity simulator, and the mass/density/radius/orbital period/escape velocity/orbit radius values for stars and planets there are pretty good, apart from some problems like the star's mass/luminosity/radius interactions and a misplaced comma/dot in the density numbers, but in theory, the system could be put into motion with mostly stable orbits using these numbers, as far as I can tell so far.