I\'ll post roughly the same thing here I did in the \"Realistic Scale\" thread. I\'m working on the assumption that you want a more realistically scaled universe; and that you are willing to change just labels (rather than actual metrics) to make that happen..
First, there is a hard programming limit for this game to work that keeps the maximum velocity of any object low. I\'m not sure where exactly that is, but I suspect 300 km/h or so is it. Player-ships flying at between 50 and 100 km/h seems to work fine. For the game to work on your computer, nothing can *really* move faster than that. We can change the label, but keep in mind that that label is based on the blocks your ship is made up of; anyone willing to do it can set up a simple ruler and time themselves and find out that they\'re moving only that fast.
Second, the universe is mind-boggelingly terrifyingly-humongous. Seriously. If you want to spend \"realistic\" amounts of time to travel between planets, you\'re looking at a timeline of weeks, months, and years; not minutes and seconds. Voyager was launched in what, the 70\'s? And only recently hit the edge of our star system? That\'s older than you and me, are you prepared to sit at a keyboard holding down \"w\" staring at a screen for 40 years hoping to get to pluto before you die in real life?*
The answer, of course, is that no, you are not. So we need to shrink the universe down from real-scale to programming scale (we\'ll use 50m/s as the limit for flight), and then again to game scale (since we don\'t want to spend 40 years in transit anywhere).
An example of what game scale would do; the moon is 348,000 kilometers (348,000,000 meters) away from earth. At our 50 m/s programming limit, that\'d take 80.5 days to travel. That won\'t work. So for the game, we\'ll scale everything down again; the earth should be a few minutes from the moon at the most. A 2 minute travel time gives us a distance of 6 kilometers orbit-to-orbit. Keeping that scale, it\'d take 4.3 hours to travel accross most of the solar system. That\'s maybe not unreasonable, but seems high to me; I\'d rather not have to spend that long sitting holding down a key to get somewhere in-system.
This means that FTL would be nessecary to the game for getting most places in-system, and it would only be possible to travel out of system with FTL. It also means that each system would consist of 1,938,886,985,559,067 (~2 Quadrillion) or so sectors. Good luck finding harddrive storage for all that; fortuneatly, 99.9% or so would be nothing but empty space.
Which leads to the last reason that anything like realistic scale systems are a terrible idea - that is so many sectors that, without augmentation, it\'d be impossible to find another player. Statistically, every human being that has ever lived could play Starmade and we\'d never see eachother. Every person on Earth right now would have ~276,000 sectors to themselves. With augmentation (player tracking, point-of-interest identification; basically letting players see planets and players and stuff from the other side of the system - which is actually 100% legit IRL), it\'d just mean that everyone clusters around the points of interest - planets, asteroids, and moons. Which would mean that what you really want is a system where you must use FTL to get between small, localized systems centered around large planets^, with asteroids, space junk, and moons contained within those smaller systems and travel times in the low minutes between anything within a planetary-system.
Now, I don\'t think that that would be the absolute best system; I think smaller than we have with larger planets would be more fun. Right now there\'s no cover and no way to outrun anybody, haveing a starwars-esque chase through an asteroid field where asteroids are tens of meters apart would be way more fun.
However, another good idea that ties into yours is that accelleration should be more difficult to get. You shouldn\'t ever feel the speed limit, it should take time to get up to it and slow back down. It should take specially designed ships to be highly-manuverable, or to reasonably attain the maximum velocity of the game.
As others have pointed out though; right now everything is in alpha, loot limits are insane, and there are all kinds of glitches. I suspect that, once the engine is ironed out, we\'ll get a better \"game\" experiance.
^I am all for larger planets; right now it doesn\'t feel like you\'re orbiting anything. For the above, orbital times of a few minutes (planets in the low Kilometers experianced diameter; that is, the diameter in space. Given a landing transition, the planet could well be an infinite minecraft world.) would be ideal.
*Yes, I know that where Voyager is is not where Pluto is.
