You can just explain it away with sufficient justifications… like they did in Star Wars…
if you don’t set a speed limit but movement is based on acceleration like in real space, you end up with a terrible game, unplayable at best.
If you have tryed Elite 2 you know what I mean.
In a game you have to balance realism with playability
We should put a 3-d printed Helion in a wind tunnel and run some tests.
Speaking of 3-d printing… 
So is the drag dynamic, or arbitrary/set? Say if some large SF ship had some asymmetrical thingy on one side, will it have the tendency to turn to that side when the ship is at higher speeds, or does it even matter?
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What makes Newtonian spaceflight mechanics “unplayable”?
it’s the unlimited velocity that makes game unplayable.
Ships would move so fast that it would be impossible even to see them.
try Elite2 that has complete newtonian mechanics and you will understand what I mean.
DB has done this mistake once, I am happy he learned from the past.
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Accumulated velocity. How long would it take to intercept the New Horizons spacecraft? That’s why the warp prototype had a speed limit and relatively quick transitions through the available speed range; ships needed to be kept within a certain time of each other’s velocities.
The downside to a speed limit is that once a ship reaches it, it cannot be caught. Fortunately, ships eventually need to slow down. Certainly consequences can be introduced to ships that operate near the speed limit to make it less attractive.
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The absence of a top speed and full implementation of newtonian physics (well, minus gravitation fields) in regular space works just fine in Independence War I and II. My sensors could see anything, so seeing a fast moving vessel was no problem and far from impossible. The onboard computer had various autopilot programs that could assist me in navigation toward such fast moving vessels.
It appears that govny has been flying very antiquated ships.
Those are single player games. Your opponents might be zipping around at high speeds, but never at a speed so great that you’d have difficulty catching them. That’s their reason for existence, of course; to be caught by you.
What was the typical time taken to match speeds with an NPC ship?
Yes it is a single player game, what is your point? Other ships, or opponents as you call them, would often kick in their LDS (inter-planetary drive & short-range inter-stellar drive) and move so fast that I would lose sensor contact with them at which point they are gone. So yes, I would have difficulty catching them. I find your lack of imagination to be staggering, their reason for existence was as much to add atmosphere and flavor to the game as it was to be caught by the player (me).
I could match speeds with an NPC ship easily in LDS, of course I could not fire weapons or take any other action while in LDS (with the exception of an LDSI missile of course) but I could stay with them until they slowed down. Were I to use my sublight drive, there was no typical time, it would depend on the ship I operating, some sublight drives accelerate faster and ‘burn’ more powerfully than others. Were I in an I-War II basic Tug ship, and were I to have seen a ship travelling very fast in sublight, I would not be very motivated to chase after it, unless my life depended on it. On the other hand, I would have little difficulty plotting an intercept course and matching speed with something moving say, 9000 m/s in the Tachyon Class Advanced Patcom, with all the latest drive and software tweaks.
Of course, if I was a pirate, even in a sleek ship, and saw a freighter moving at 18,000 m/s in sublight (non-LDS) I might just say, why bother? If a captain spent the time getting those lumbering freighter engines up to that speed I may just let her pass on by and look for something easier.
You asked my point. That’s it. No player is ever going to fool around with any tactic other than maximum acceleration to his halfway point, then maximum deceleration to his destination (plus or minus, as best a player can manage). Unless an interceptor wants to spend a long time matching velocities, they’re just going to hang around destinations and try to pick up a ship when it is either starting its acceleration run or ending a deceleration run.
The net result is that travel in interplanetary space is uninteresting from a gameplay standpoint, making the movement system a nuisance for the pilots. So the game might as well have EVE Online travel, where ships hop from destination to destination.
That’s an issue with ships sensors being improperly matched to their purpose. It’s not a problem with Newtonian controls.
That’s an acceleration issue. If acceleration is too low, it takes too long to get up to a reasonable travel speed, and so interception is impossible. This still isn’t an issue related to top speed, because…
New Horizons isn’t a good analogue here because it doesn’t have a final destination. It hasn’t been designed to go anywhere. It just goes. Players will, ultimately, need to slow down, which functionally limits their top speed.
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What happened to the warp effect JB evoked earlier? Setting a high enough max velocity would still leave it Newtonian where it counts.
Also, remember that beginners will overshoot. Newtonian physics aren’t intuitive at first (though it does become pretty natural with some experience), and many will instinctively ignore warning or even override auto-pilot to try and get faster, resulting in much confusion and disappointment harming player retention - and making it less fun for other players as well.
It’s OK to overshoot your target by 1km/s and loosing twenty seconds to correct, it’s another to overshoot by 20km/s and waste several minutes.
So you with to deprive the freighter captain and her lumbering engines of this tactic to evade dangerous areas? I for one, would be quite bored with a game deprived of as many options as it can have. You are assuming all players act a certain way. We do not.
Potaytoes, potahtoes. It’s an issue of time. Players will not be interested in taking the time to accelerate long enough to achieve the velocity needed to make an intercept. Meanwhile, those pilots not interested in being intercepted will spend all their time in acceleration/deceleration. That will make them least attractive to interceptors.
Even if it stopped at Pluto, the essential truth would be the same as my earlier comment - with no speed limit, the game might as well use EVE Online-style travel. Intercepts will take place only at destinations because the time to intercept is acceptable to players.
This may be accurate for battlescape, but I disagree if we are talking about TQFE.
I haven’t spent hours stalking people in Eve, getting intel, setting up the perfect gank, hunting them, etc. I would have no problems chasing someone for an hour or two especially if the payday is worth it. Otherwise, why else would they go through so much effort to gain such high velocities in the first place!
These sorts of interactions are basically out of scope for IBS. I might still stalk a resupply freighter to a forward base for hours. Or maybe spend a few hours coordinating a perfect raid - especially if Flavien’s remark about orbital mechanics hold true. I would have no problems setting up an intercept trajectory and then shutting off everything and glide in “dark” to avoid detection. If this trajectory has a 45 minute travel time but allows me to make a succesful surprise attack it’s totally worth it to me.
You can only get this trajectory with the ability in high speeds for intercepts though. By limiting top speed, you are limiting the gameplay options that you constantly argue for. Every ideas has it’s pros and cons. A very high max subwarp speed should be an option IMO. Obviously, playtesting in Alpha will probably determine this more than anything though.
I see it exactly the reverse. Limited top speeds keep players within reasonable interaction times of one another. They are forced to stay within those times. That fosters, not limits, interaction.
I’ve explained already why I would like to be able to maneuver using orbital mechanics. Do you think that that kind of raid is unreasonable if I’m dedicated enough to try it? I see only innovation by giving us the freedom. Keep in mind that transfer orbits and fast intercept trajectories are usually multiple km/s. These are the fast speeds I’m arguing for, and I see gameplay limits being imposed on the creativity of using Newtonian flight. No other game that I know of can you take advantage of physics like that.
I’d like to see what INS have planned but the way I see it:
Combat = Top speed cap. Ship acceleration and maneuvering is the goal. Anyone who has played Jumpgate will know it, and it does work well.
Sublight travel in-system = Very high top speed cap (ie. 0.2c) but which takes some time to reach. So you can get a head start on pursuit / escape.
Future MMO FTL = whatever works best.
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That’s true for fixed top speeds, too, though. Assuming all players have the same top speeds, that is (and since you’re apparently assuming all players will have the same top acceleration I think it’s a fair assumption on my part).
After all, whatever the top speed is it’s going to have to be high enough to travel between, at the very least, different moons orbiting the same planet without getting bored. No matter how fast your acceleration is, timing the start of your burn to catch someone going at such velocities will be practically impossible for unassisted humans (and even cheat programs will have a hard time with net latency).
Yes, you can bring yourself up to just below maximum velocity and then slowly drift up to your target from ahead of them, but then all they have to do is make a small course correction and it will once again be impossible for you to intercept them until they reach their destination. If they don’t want to be intercepted, “press D for a second any time you see someone in front of you” really doesn’t require a great deal of skill.
To me at least, it would make more sense to go with the fully Newtonian flight model, with warp-drive acceleration available whenever the gravity gradient is sufficiently shallow, and then give players a way to… encourage each other to not go full burn/flip halfway. For example, cheap, small, and practically invisible mines that have no active propulsion but a small keel of exotic matter, which experiences Weak Force attraction to active warp drives - get within a light-second of one while moving faster than the speed of light and it will hit you when you eventually slow down.
Not hard enough to kill you or anything. Really the mines weren’t even designed for combat, originally, but as a practical joke at a Centauran flight school: upon making contact with a spaceship (or any other solid surface) they burst in a spray of Emergency Sealant Foam. Completely harmless, but a bitch to scrape out of gun barrels and engine exhausts.
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I can cut all of this short with this observation:
If the game has separate thrusters and warp drive systems, one for short distances and the other for longer distances, and the distances being covered mean that pilots will typically not find themselves accelerating for more than N seconds, then that constitutes an implicit speed limit and most scenarios should work out just fine.
It is the boundary cases that I fear. Griefers and min/maxers love to go after game boundary cases.
If you want to try it, that’s your business. A game with a top speed can still allow you to make a stealthy approach. The warp prototype’s top speed around a planet was 3km/s. Its top speed got progressively higher away from planets. If anything, the warp prototype allows you a much more interesting stealth approach; you could try it from across the planetary system, and you got automatic speed matching when you got close to your target.
Interestingly, if you’re large enough relative to his ship, or he’s far enough away from masses that would anchor him, he might notice that he’s moving relative to the nearby bodies, alerting him to your approach. That happens as part of the velocity-matching that comes with the warp prototype’s movement system. And it’s exactly the sort of thing that I love; subtleties that are simply part of the system.