Very few large ships in this game have a significantly smaller thrust than 1:1, at least from what I've seen. And it isn't because there isn't an obvious pointer that says HEYYY YOU SHOULDN'T DO THAT.
Because losing all power the instant you try to hit top speed on your giant rocket engine isn't enough of an obvious pointer?
It's because everyone who followed that suggestion got their ships trashed by the guy who could run in circles around them with a Titan.
I don't think this is the reason they lost. I've been in countless battles with titans myself and the most common reason I and others have lost against those titans is not because they can move fast, but because the game has so much trouble processing all that's going on, with those massive ships slowing down the game (as you pointed out later in your post, which i will bring up below), that the people in those smaller ships find themselves lagging out, freezing up or crashing.
Point is, people will make huge ships with large power requirements that behave like bloated versions of their younger cousins. They'll do this because the power generators give them the tools to do so.
Yes, and this is also their critical weakness: A few good missile hits to the titan, and those reactors are dead. Once that happens, it's game over for the titan. That's what balances out having those power generators; their lack of durability is the tradeoff the pilot makes in exchange for the additional power.
Personally, I don't understand large vessels over ~300k or so mass - they really push the limits of the game's system design and, tbh, are next to useless against a well-made fleet. It's like a floating block of free resources.
Exactly, the game can barely ever handle them, and their massive size already gives them a huge advantage in that they can literally just lag out their opponents. My faction has fought much larger ships and taken them out simply by a war of pure numbers, because we overwhelmed the titan and took out all its turrets, but we did occur heavy losses of our own, and in fact, during one particular such battle, my game froze to where I was unable to fight, and my ship was destroyed.
In the end, we destroyed the titan, but at the great cost of most of our own fleet. This is a perfect example of why soloing in titans as a one-man army is not something the game is going to condone, but that at the same time titans are very powerful, and that's exactly how it should be.
Another question I have for OP is, why are you trying to achieve such ridiculously high thruster speeds with such a massive ship in the first place? If you're trying to traverse long distances, why not use a jump drive (that's what they're there for). Aren't you aware how game-breakingly dangerous it is to fly such huge ships so fast anyway? Flying such massive objects at high speeds has a large potential to cause massive performance problems.
Also, forgot to address this:
I don't think you realize how devastating to a server a ship with internal docking modules can be. It is anything BUT exciting and interesting and stuff. MFleet might even BAN their use if the problem gets any worse, tbh.
I don't know what you're doing with those internal docking reactors, but unless you're deliberately severing the docking enhancers so the modules auto-undock and cause tons of physics lag, you should be totally fine. Even so, the game has gotten lots of enhancements for those kinds of collision issues; it should automatically noclip the reactor out of the ship after a certain point (if the bug fixes I have been keeping an eye on in the bug tracker worked).
Still, the lag from such a physics hiccup is no worse than the inherent lag that comes with titans hovering nearby each other in titan-titan combat.
