An interim update, since I worked over the weekend too. Radar cross-section now changes with viewing aspect. Roll isn't accounted for yet, but that's a detail; the foundation works, and works well and correctly. Handling roll is a matter of a couple of formulas with sines.
What else did I manage? We no longer fly only along the world axes. We now fly forward and backward, sideways, and up and down according to the ship's orientation. And yes, we've learned to rotate while calculating fuel, mass, angular momentum, and the kinetic energy involved.
Incidentally, we learned to rotate quickly, but learning to fly according to the ship's orientation rather than the world axes proved much harder. Considerably harder, but it works now. I showed my wife the size of the algorithms. She is sincerely impressed and refuses to understand them. Yes, there's a lot there.
Today I built, but didn't fully complete, the functions for automatically stopping rotation and aligning the ship. There's a lot involved there too. Something is still wrong in the algorithm, although the overall structure is ready and sound. The algorithm uses the existing engine commands, but doesn't yet use them quite correctly.
The difficulty is that the ship's control scheme doesn't alter parameters directly. It sends requests for the ship's systems to operate, changing parameters that are physically simulated. So it must first calculate which engines to start and for how long to make the ship do what's intended. More precisely, it must try to start them, because they may be broken or out of fuel...
I hope to finish that tomorrow and finally move on to firing. That should be relatively straightforward, but very engaging.
Today I realized that placing obstacles in the level already produces a piloting game about flying from point A to point B, and I like how it feels. It has coherence and solidity, which is extremely important. The connection between the player and the controlled object matters greatly to how a game feels. Today I simply enjoyed controlling the little ship and trying to approach another safely. The sense of motion, activity, dynamics, and scale is very good so far.
I used one and a half tonnes out of two to circle the green obstacle and make a proper braking approach to the NPC ship, currently represented by a "stool": a four-hull design intended for maximum side-on stealth and the ability to bring more than 50% of its weapons to bear in one direction. A delight. If only the ramming, docking, and boarding mechanics were ready... )) But those are coming soon now too.