Unfortunately I haven't actually had a chance to play VO on a tablet yet, but going by what I've seen of demo/review videos and heard from players who are using it, I've come up with a goofy idea for a touch-screen control scheme.

Why not instead of having 4 arrow keys and a virtual "joystick", just use two virtual "joysticks"? With a slider for forward/back and roll, you could play in Physics Mode with the touchscreen and have variable control over most of your ship's maneuvering.

Here's an ugly scribble i made up of what the hud might look like:

Hardware willing, I could probably play VO effectively on a tablet with something like this... Dunno how robust the multi-touch is on these tablets, but any less than 4 touch points would suck without F/A mode on.

Not surer about the shoot weapons placements... can hardly see taking hand off pitch/turn while shooting... maybe exchange them with roll/throttle sliders? Other then that looks mostly usable.

I would like to use tilt for x and y with a touch control for roll, or tilt for pitch and roll with touch for slide

this isn't too bad though imo the fire buttons could be placed on the side of the screen to be used by the index finger, they can only touch the sides of the screen but it should work plus the radars do encroach a bit on the center of the screen something that should be left untouched.

That looks a whole lot better than the current control scheme. Especially like the turbo slider. Typing /+turbo on the xoom all the time sucks.

I'm not a Xoom user, but I think it would be handy to have a general purpose button or two (so you can bind whatever command you want to it for easy access).

Yeah, It'd be ideal for all of this stuff to show up as just buttons and joystick axes like regular desktop VO.