I know this isn't of paramount importance at this time, but hey it's an idea, so I'm going to share it.

Now that mass is a big part of the game, with weapons and cargo effecting it, it makes sense that your engine would be effected too. Also, a large trade cargo should have a different engine than a small fighter.

Basically my idea is that each ship should have it's own specifically tuned engine to it's mass, and purpose.
Yeah I know, "nothing new" right?
Wrong! :P

Engines will require different amounts of energy units per second (eps) depending on the mass and speed. So a Vulture that weighs 3900kgs would require say 25eps at 200, 20eps at 175, 15eps at 150... and so on.
The fast charge would top the eps generation at 20eps, and the others would be at 15eps, meaning that at 175mps your fast charge will not drain, but at 200, it will drain at a rate of 5eps, which means you could sustain 200mps for 50 seconds (assuming the capacity remains the same at 250 energy units)

So let's get the definitions out of the way:
Each engine would have a "top speed" which would require extra power from the battery and go as fast as possible (think of it as the "turbo" we have now).

Then there's a "cruising speed", this is the fastest the ship can go without draining the battery, It would be directly effected by which battery you have, and your total mass.

"maneuvering speed" would be the speed you can strafe, and the speed you can fly at before your ship is locked going forward.

So an example: Your nice Vulture which at 3900kgs...
top speed: 200mps
cruising speed (with heavy battery): 150mps
cruising speed (with fast charge battery): 175mps
maneuvering speed: 65mps

Now, if you load that vulture up with cargo your cruising speed will be effected by say... 1eps per 100kg of cargo, so with 500kg of cargo, it now requires 20eps to travel at 150mps, so that would become your cruising speed with a fast charge battery.

Everyone still following?
Good, because here's where it gets good.

A cargo ship would obviously have a differently tuned engine. It would be rated for a much higher mass than the ship itself (to allow for the cargo's mass) and it would be much more efficient.
For example, a Centaur at 9500kgs may have an engine rated to 20000kgs in order to account for the weight of the cargo.

So, your Centaur at 20000kgs total mass may have...
Top speed: 190
cruising speed (fast charge): 190
cruising speed (heavy): 180
maneuvering speed: 60

Notice that the top speed and cruising speed are the same, the engine is calibrated to be efficient at that high speed.
Keep in mind that if you were to go over the 20000kg weight that the engine is calibrated for, your cruising speed would drop, and at that point you could use the battery power to get up to the top speed if you wanted too.

Well that about wraps things up, I hope I have been clear enough for everyone to understand the concept. Questions and feedback welcome. :D

-Cam-

i second this. something needs to be done to the elaborate the (currently boring) engine scheme.

maybe this could be combined with some of the engine additions/mods that other people have been suggesting.

-cajal

I think the devs have said that they're trying to figure out the best way of re-implementing engines and the like.

This sounds very good to me!

I think you're on to something, but I'm not ready to think it through yet. :P Thinking out loud:

As long as we're questioning how the energy drain works, what about energy drain for maneuvering?

What about reducing your "boost" energy consumption (and top speed accordingly) to match your generator output? Is that what your "cruising speed" is? How would the controls for that work?

The idea here, I'm guessing, is to allow "fighter" ships to have short bursts of really high speeds to catch up to longer-range slower-going traders, and also to allow for more dynamism between ship configurations (but are you introducing combinations that are totally useless when compared to an alternate choice? I suppose not any more so than exist now).

I also think Cam is on to something, but although I'm ready to think it through what he's suggesting is actually complex enough that I haven't had time to do so yet.

First, Cam basically makes two suggestions. The first is rather simple, and the second is very complex. Although he mixes the two suggestions together, they aren't really directly related, so I'm going to take them apart to highlight what they are.

His first suggestion is that we have a 'cruising speed', which is the speed the craft would travel at if it was using exactly as much turbo power as its generator was producing.

We can deal with this suggestion very simply. It is a Very Good Idea. Back when the boost tapping bug allowed long periods of high sustained speed, the game was actually tactically richer. Of course, boost tapping had serious problems. It was inherently unbalancing, it was tedious, and it was hard on fingers and keyboards. Once the boost tapping bug was fixed, those problems went away, but so did the good things which were the unintended consequences of boosting tapping - not being a sitting duck versus rockets, and not being forced to rely on 'dumb' barrel rolling as an evasive tactic.

Cruising speed is definately worth exploring. Basically, ships could have a 'cruise control' toggle or key. While cruising, you couldn't turn, but you'd maintain a higher than normal speed without suffering energy drain. This would in effect be something halfway between 'turbo' and 'non-turbo'. It might even be worth exploring having limited manueverablility while cruising, mimicing your ability to turn a little while boost tapping. If you need a long term speed gain, cruise. If you need a short burst of accelaration, turbo. If you need maximum power for weapons, switch to normal mode.

The second suggestion is much more complex. To express it as I understand it, I'm going to have to restate it. Basically it seems like Cam is suggesting that engines have thier thrust ratings dynamically determined by the ammount of mass the ship has.

In essence, where a ship now has a thrust of T, new ships would have a thrust of T + c*f(m).

c is some value <1 and is probably very near to zero in all practical case. The higher c, the better the ship will handle hauling a heavy load.

f is some sort of function which is dependent on mass.

For now, lets assume the simpliest case where f(m) is linear, f(m) = m. Suppose we have too engines.

One engine has the characteristics T=190 and c=0, and another engine has the characteristics T=140 and c=.04.

190 + 0*m = 140 + .004*m
m = 12500

This shows that the for a ship with mass less than 12500, the first engines superior constant thrust is prefered. But above 12500 mass units, the second engine provides superior performance.

Real world propellers and internal combustion engines work something like our simple model. If you've ever owned a boat, you probably know that you can tune a boats performance for either speed or pulling greater loads depending on the angle of the blades of the propeller. On the other hand this is of course highly unrealistic using any known technology for travelling in space. Rockets produce X ammount of thrust and don't really care about traction and torque. However, I for one have long argued that a) the ships in Vendetta clearly do not use any known technology as so making assumptions about how they work based on present technology will lead to contridictions and confusion and b) that in a game realism is only important if it contributes to things like emmersion and balance. So, I see no reason to throw the idea out simply because it isn't realistic. The real question is, "Is it fun?"

Heck, I can even come up with a plausible explanation for the behavior. I've long argued that the bright shiny thing at the back of ships that every just assumes is the 'engine' is not the primary drive mechanism of ships. In fact, the primary function of the bright shiny thing on the back of the ship is to dissipate heat. The fact that it produces thrust is only a nice fringe benefit, which the designers take advantage of to produce the 'turbo' mode. In fact, rockets are horrible ways to get around the universe because you have to carry fuel. In fact, if you intend to get much of anywhere, about 99% of your ship's mass would have to be fuel.

This doesn't leave alot of room for weapons. Also, it turns your ship into a bomb which blows up when struck by the smallest thing.

The primary drive mechanism of our ships is in fact some sort of literal engine which grabs the fabric of space itself 'turns' and hauls itself along a small ammount, then lets go and repeats the performance. This explains why in normal mode our ships can move equally well in all directions. It also explains why ships have to be far from any massy objects in order to 'jump'. Space is too tangled up by gravity wells for the jump engine to work efficiently. With this sort of drive mechanism, the idea that a ship might have different ratios of 'traction' (the ability to grip and pull), and maximum speed (how often your engine can 'turn') is perfectly reasonable. Well, at least reasonable in so far that we have no idea how such completely speculative physics would work and are free to make stuff up. ;)

The real benifit of Cam's engine idea is that it lets us have engine for heavy ships (heavy fighters, freighters, and what not) which let them be something other than completely unmanueverable, but which can't be put on a light ship to turn it into something completely unfair. I haven't thought through all the possible implications, so this isn't a full endorsement, but on the surface, I like the idea, and it might even in the long term let us bring back the idea of configurable engines.

UPDATE #1: Re-reading cam's idea I've realized that I've slightly altered it. Where I was concerned with thrust, Cam is concerned with maximum velocity with respect to mass. That's fine too, but based on my experience with the game, thrust is far more important.

UPDATE #2: While I only addressed the idea of freighter engines, we could use the same idea to create 'racing engines' in which c was a small negative number. In other words, with a racing engine you'd pay a double penalty for excess weight. An engine with T=220 and c= -0.005 would be great on an unloaded centurian, but would blow on a really heavy ship.

UPDATE #3: One question you have to ask though is how worth it all this trouble is compared to creating specific freighters with low top speeds but high ammounts of thrust. We could probably have done that even with configurable engines without breaking anything.

I really like your breakdown, Celebrim. Heartily seconded.

I do want to mention that thrust, in a maneouvering environment, is all that's important. Having a set maximum vector is both stupid and counter productive.

Since the idea of maneouvering is to change direction, your ship will never go at its max speed, since it will constantly be accelerating in a new direction, and thus never reaching full throttle.

Yeah I think (as always) Celebrim explained it much better than I did.
I bow to him. :D

It kind of became two ideas as I worked it out. It started out as one I swear.
Perhaps dropping the complicated system of more mass requiring more energy to move would help as we contemplate the more significant idea.

I will admit that the idea of your engine having different levels of power drain spawned from my Wing Commander: Privateer experience. I remember dropping my shields down a level (which would lower the amount of energy drain per second) so that my afterburners would last longer.

As far as the way to control it would work, we have to somewhat abandon the concept that turbo prevents maneuvering. In this model, it's not the act of turboing but rather the speed of your ship that effects it.
Imagine being able to maneuver while holding the turbo button until you hit 65mps. Not much of a difference, but it is important.

<sidenote>
I like Celebrim's Idea that you could have slight maneuvering capabilities over that speed, perhaps a gradual drop after 65 would be better that a cold stop.
So between 65-100mps you maneuvering goes from 100% to 0% (This could change gameplay quite a bit though.)
</sidenote>

So "cruising speed" in my mind would work similar to the top (non turbo) speed right now.

This could be done in several different ways...

Leave it the way it is now, meaning that you hold the accel key until you're set speed is the cruising speed. This means players will have to be aware of their speed, because they could very easily accelerate too much and lose maneuvering capabilities.

(The more I read that last paragraph the cooler it sounds. :D But, again, it could greatly effect gameplay)

Or, as a1k0n suggests it could be two levels of turbo. Meaning you'd have two turbo keys, one to go cruising speed, and one to go top speed. Through custom binding I can think of a few very nice control methods for that.

i must say i absolutly love this idea.

In response to Celebrim's updates:
Heh I didn't even notice you were talking about "thrust".

Thrust is already effected by mass, Is it not?
We accelerate slower the heavier we are, maybe I need some clarification on what exactly "thrust" is.

"Thrust is already effected by mass, Is it not? We accelerate slower the heavier we are..."

Yes. The relevant equation is f=ma, where in this case the f is the thrust produced by our engines, and the m is the mass of the ship. The 'a' in the equation is the acceleration. Since the thrust of engines is currently constant, your acceleration decreases as your mass goes up.

However, the game doesn't use a completely realistic physics model in that as your velocity increases your rate of acceleration decreases (much like if you were approaching the speed of light), so there is an extra term in the actual equation that the game uses.

The important part though is that the more mass you put on a ship, the less manuevarable it becomes. To achieve the same manueverablity in a centaur that you do in a centurian, you need an engine that produces proportionally more thrust. What we'd like is an engine that suffers a reduced penalty to acceleration when loaded with heavy weapons or lots of cargo - while at the same time keeps the unloaded ship less manueverable than a zippy light fighter. If we put a standard engine on a centaur, either it will be more manueverable when unloaded than we desire, or else it will be less manueverable than we want when loaded with alot of goodies.

That's also the reason that the devs got rid of the configurable engines. Engines that would have been fair on a heavy fighter produced a light fighter that was more manueverable than intended. With a variable thrust engine, we could have an engine that would produce the exact same manueverability regardless of what ship you put it in - centurian or frigate. Of course, that would be unbalancing, but the point is that we could have an engine that produced only a slightly decrease in manueverability as you continued to load the ship. That would make putting heavy weapons on a heavy fighter alot more attractive.

The reason I talked about thrust rather than velocity is that velocity is a derived term. When you hit turbo for example, its not your speed that changes. What changes is your thrust and your the cap on your speed. Hit turbo and the thrust produced by your engine goes up rapidly. It's alot easier to come up with a formula for variable thrust than to figure out how to control velocity directly. Variable thrust will accomplish the goals you outlined of having an engine 'tuned' to a higher mass than the ship itself. I'm not clear exactly how your method would actually work, and in practice if you don't increase thrust on a massy ship then you'd never accelerate to a high speed anyway because you'd run out of energy first.

Okay, So you think that engines should increase their thrust to compensate for more mass?

*BUMP*

I'm bumping this up because I think its the best suggestion(s) of the past two weeks or so, want to bring it to more people's attention, and get some more comments on it.

I really like the idea of being able to choose to run your engine over the "cruising speed" at the expense of energy efficiency. Kinda like red-lining it for short bursts of speed :-)

*BUMP*

What with all the current discussion on running & lowering the turbo speeds, I figured this deserves a bump. This is probably my favorite suggestion on infiniturbo.