Any particular fixed point format will have slightly more precision/accuracy at the edges than a floating point format with the same number of bits, but then it will hit a brick wall and stop working entirely. And it's easy for it to have less precision/accuracy in practice because it's hard to keep each intermediate result at the exact right exponent.
Fixed point won't save you from the space kraken. Instead of going so deep into space that consecutive numbers gradually become .1 apart, your ship will spontaneously explode a fiftieth of that distance out.
It's probably much easier to use two coordinate frames than to properly use fixed point numbers. Then a ship can run physics relative to its center of mass or a nearby planet/moon and have very high precision/accuracy.
Comments
Any particular fixed point format will have slightly more precision/accuracy at the edges than a floating point format with the same number of bits, but then it will hit a brick wall and stop working entirely. And it's easy for it to have less precision/accuracy in practice because it's hard to keep each intermediate result at the exact right exponent.
Fixed point won't save you from the space kraken. Instead of going so deep into space that consecutive numbers gradually become .1 apart, your ship will spontaneously explode a fiftieth of that distance out.
It's probably much easier to use two coordinate frames than to properly use fixed point numbers. Then a ship can run physics relative to its center of mass or a nearby planet/moon and have very high precision/accuracy.