Thrust update is coming!+My observations [Dev Build 0.19525]

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    The Expanse ... it's a new show on SciFi (I'm only two episodes in)... they turned around to do a heavy burn to slow themselves down.
    In Serenity and or firefly, depending on what you prefer, the engines on the fighters and such move to allow for maneuvering ^_^
     

    Crimson-Artist

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    How about the ability to do inertial slides or cut engines and coast. You know like space actually works.
    you can do that. we now have auto dampeners which are our inertia breaks currently. we can turn off auto dampeners to enable newtonian physics. we even have a safety switch of sorts with another option to reactivate auto dampeners if you leave the ship core. turning both off will allow ships to be bumped and tossed arounds like IRL.
     
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    I'm fine with the current implementation, though I think any ship should be able to reach top speed eventually, but the accel of the ship should be based on a curve that sees capital ships taking many minutes or dozens of minutes to reach their full speed. I really disagree with the complexity of putting thrusters in 'front' aimed to the front, and so on for all six axes of motion. (presumably we could put them where-ever, but then would need a toggle to show/hide thruster plumes.)

    Has anyone yet tested fighting between a capital ship and fighter in the updated game? The smaller ship should have a better accel (and in a move away from Newtonian physics, a higher top speed for some reason). A capital ship could change its thrust immediately and it might not help if it takes +30 seconds for it to get full speed. Your fighter could already be behind it and able to easily stay behind it, and still have a higher top speed on top of that. Certainly, that seems to be the intention of the thruster changes.

    Besides, with a 15 second change timer, the fighter should already be behind it anyway. And the capital ship will have lost most of it's ability to turn.

    Of course, you could put thrusters on a docked entity that turns 180 degrees with the push of a button.
     
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    Has anyone yet tested fighting between a capital ship and fighter in the updated game? The smaller ship should have a better accel (and in a move away from Newtonian physics, a higher top speed for some reason). A capital ship could change its thrust immediately and it might not help if it takes +30 seconds for it to get full speed. Your fighter could already be behind it and able to easily stay behind it, and still have a higher top speed on top of that. Certainly, that seems to be the intention of the thruster changes.

    Besides, with a 15 second change timer, the fighter should already be behind it anyway. And the capital ship will have lost most of it's ability to turn.

    Of course, you could put thrusters on a docked entity that turns 180 degrees with the push of a button.
    If im not mistaken top speed is purely based on thrust to mass ratio so if you are somehow able to get a battleship to 2:1 and slap overdrive on you can outrun anything no matter what the size unless they also are 2:1 with overdrive. A 1.5 T/M fighter and a much larger ship also at 1.5 move at the same speed. The only advantage a smaller ship would have over it is it's turning speed. Accel is kind of the same. Dump everything into one of the 3 group and you will hit your speed cap very fast.

    The largest ship I have access to at the moment, a little under 2m blocks, has a max speed of about 84 (vanilla settings). It can hit its top speed in ~3 seconds with everything in forward/backward thrust, accell seems to be the same as other ships otherwise
     
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    The ratio to reach top speed is 2.5:1 now, so your ship has to have a lot of thrusters and little armor. With advanced armor, that is 5 thrusters for every 8 blocks of armor, not factoring in other systems. Then 10% of your ship will need to be overdrive modules for 100% effect. Then for every 20 thrusters and 20 overdrive modules, you'll need more than 5 more thrusters. If a 'capital' ship does this, then it will essentially be a destroyer or fast cruiser, not a real capital ship. Going up against another capital ship, it would be shredded.

    But this is a valid class of ship. It's an escort for a real capital ship. There won't be a 'battleship' that can reach max server speed. By definition, that won't be a real battleship, since another ship could forego the speed and stack on double the armament and 4x the weapons.

    As I said in my post, I'd rather see thrusters primarily affecting accel to the max speed, and thus fighters would always be able to out-maneuver and get to whatever side of a capital ship they want to be on. The engagement might get up to server max speeds, eventually, but again, I'd like to see it take a large ship many minutes to get there. And the fighter would get there first and still be more nimble. Thus it could be on the backside of a ship going in reverse, and stay there if it wants to. But the new changes do definitely help balance it toward the fighter a little more.