Fairly low speed limits are required for healthy servers but a lot of people would like different speed limits for different ship designs, and very few people want that limit to be based on mass because it's physically arbitrary. Space does have dust and other particles in it though, and going too fast would put sensitive and unshielded components at risk of degrading over time.
So how about giving ships a speed limit based on stability, where hull blocks and other mostly decorative structural blocks increase stability and weapon/power/functional blocks decrease stability? Stability could be described as a maximum safe speed, and players then set their target speed wherever they want but if they go above the safe speed they'll start to take block damage.
This would also increase the use of hull blocks, penalizing ships that are just a big cube of guns and engines, while adding another feature to the challenge of putting together a balanced ship. If people want to have small ships faster than large ships then stability could have diminishing returns, requiring a significantly larger proportion of hull blocks to make a gargantuan ship with a high speed limit.
It would also add an interesting factor to combat and racing, each pilot trying to push their limits with the risk of a catastrophic failure should you push your systems too hard.
So how about giving ships a speed limit based on stability, where hull blocks and other mostly decorative structural blocks increase stability and weapon/power/functional blocks decrease stability? Stability could be described as a maximum safe speed, and players then set their target speed wherever they want but if they go above the safe speed they'll start to take block damage.
This would also increase the use of hull blocks, penalizing ships that are just a big cube of guns and engines, while adding another feature to the challenge of putting together a balanced ship. If people want to have small ships faster than large ships then stability could have diminishing returns, requiring a significantly larger proportion of hull blocks to make a gargantuan ship with a high speed limit.
It would also add an interesting factor to combat and racing, each pilot trying to push their limits with the risk of a catastrophic failure should you push your systems too hard.