I say we have the speed limit act as a sort of \"speed of light\" which you can get closer and closer to but never reach. Such that the faster you go the slower you accelerate. Say the speed limit is 50km/s. By the time you reach 25km/s you are accelerating at half the rate, so it will take twice as long to get to 26km/s as it did to ge from 1 to 2km/s. By the time you reach 37.5km/s your acceleration has been halved again. and so on and so forth.
This sounds like a good idea to me, especially if it\'s added to thruster ideas (splitting directional thrusters & RCS). Another method that could be used to limit large ship max velocity would be to base thrust provided primarily off surface area exposed (in the direction of thrust, if that\'s a thing).
So you\'d build your cube-fighter and your cube cruiser as 10 and 100 meter cubes with the same preportion of blocks being engines (10%). The cube fighter has 100 cubes exposed on the back acting as a 100m^2 thruster, the cube cruiser has 100,000 thrusters - but wait! It\'s back face is only 10,000m^2! That means some of the thruster blocks will need to be buried within the ship\'s hull/facing in different directions, adding 0 to the thrust of the vessel. The result is that the fighter has 10x the thrust as the cruiser, meaning it can get up to the max server speed in 1/10th the time.
It\'d probably be good to make longer thruster chains useful, so you don\'t have everyone just coating the back of their vessels in thrusters. Perhaps for them to be completely useful, they need to be at least 1/20th the length of the ship, and then only the exposed thrusters in the group provide full thrust. Perhaps additional (unexposed) blocks in the thruster-cluster provide 1/4 of the thrust of an exposed thruster; this would make it so our fighter would only have 6.75x the thrust of the cruiser (to server max in ~1/3 the time); as all of the fighter\'s thrusters are exposed and providing full thrust, while the cruiser only has 1/10th of it\'s thrusters providing full thrust and 9/10ths providing reduced thrust. I\'d then add that perhaps unexposed thrusters not part of a proper grouping might provide 1/10th the thrust of a proper exposed one, and exposed ungrouped thrusters might provide 1/4 the the thrust of proper exposed ones. Playing with the numbers yeilds different results of course.
I\'d also be a fan of nerfing accelleration accross the board - right now getting up to server max speed is pretty trivial in any ship that has thrusters - a speedy ship will only gain a slight lead over a more sluggish one. Making it so that all ships accellerate more slowly (thrusters provide less thrust) would make it so the differences between speedy ships and sluggish ones were more apparent. If this were combined with the above suggestion (server max speed is approached by a soft cap), speedy ships would at least be able to outrun slower ships.
Should be noted - short of limiting thrusters such that they simply cannot provide thrust at a certain size, it\'ll always be possible to build a large ship that is just as fast as any small ship. The current limitation on turning is an artifical nerf, but for actually moving, as long as you\'ve got the same % of your ship made up of thrusters as a smaller ship, you\'ll go just as fast (of course doing that usually means you need to build your ship mostly out of thrusters and power equipment - the power generation caps limit how much energy your thrusters can use and a ship made up of 20 blocks with 5 thrusters would mean a ship with 10,000 blocks would need to have at least 2,500 thrusters).
