Planetary Annihilation Orbital Mechanics

I'm new to the forums and I have a question regarding the accuracy of the orbital mechanics in planetary annihilation. From the livestreams the devs said that the physics involved was pretty impressive. I did a search to see if anyone else noticed (and saw that quite a few people from Kerbal Space Program were here; username Chet Manley are you in anyway related to Scott Manley?) that the asteroid in the "mock-up" video incorrectly burns prograde to lower its orbit into the planet. Its cool with me if the orbit mechanics are sins of solar empire space opera but it would also be pretty cool if we saw some feasible space warfare.

I think in the same livestream they mention that while most of the physics are pretty close to realistic, that shortcuts would be made to some stuff.

I imagine the calculations to get one orbiting body to hit a certain spot on a rotating body ALSO in an orbit would be quite long and intensive. Math, not even once ;-P I imagine that some fudging will happen there.

Yeah, I can see them fudging the math on dropping an orbital body from space (then again it could be a cool game balancing trick where asteroids dropped from orbit need to be fired inside a certain launch window because of delta-v restrictions). I do hope they make the orbit directions correct though (the asteroid in the video should have burned retrograde). As far as actual space combat, making it more realistic could require space vessels to close to close quarters (as the difficulty in hitting another orbital object that has countermeasures becomes easier when they are close enough that you can essentially fire "straight" at them) somewhat like space opera games. At the very least, they said they are tracking projectiles and it projectiles and debris from orbital fights raining on a planet could be cool even if it was only graphical and didn't have an effect on gameplay.

Are the dev's going to make space fighters? I'm worried that adding too much space conflict will make it turn into Sins Of A Solar Empire. :cry:

No, there's no plans for "space fighters".

If they are using somewhat-realistic orbital mechanics, space fighters would be mostly impractical and hard to use anyway. The most you'd get would be orbital asteroids or moons firing down while the enemy player sends up an army to attack it, unless planet-to-planet missiles are added.

i think it would be called 'annihilation of a solar empire' then.