On the ship stats, there's only one thrust listed. This combined with the total mass of the ship determines how fast it can accelerate. My question is, is the same thrust used for both normal flight and turbo? When turboing do I only get a higher top speed, or do I also get higher thrust (and thus higher acceleration)?

Higher top speeds.

Followed by a maximum top speed that can be maintained untilt he turbo runs out.

You definately get much higher acceleration, but this may be due to the fact that top speed limits your acceleration based on what speed you're going instead of just setting your acceleration to 0 when you actually hit top speed.

That makes sense, Eldrad... but it's too much like atmospheric flight for a space sim IMO. I'm finished with work for the week now (yippee!), so I'll be making observations in-game...

except you can fly backwords and sideways and 360 degrees without turning your cockpit.

heh. so true, durgia... only thing you can do that in on earth is a helicopter.

But you can't do it inverted in a helicopter. Not for long anyways.

The devs talked about this alot, and the final conclusion was that a truly realistic physics model would not be good for gameplay. If you can travel at 25000 km/s, combat turns into gigantic lasers and missile turrets. There's no pilot skill in that, so they imposed a speed limit on ships. That way it's easier to have in-your-face combat without pulling thousands of G's (we don't have inertial dampeners..). It also keeps most ships within reasonable visible distance, so the universe doesn't feel too huge and empty.

It's one of the necessary artificial components of the game, and you get used to it after a while. Nothing says they'll keep the upper limit at 200m/s - that's just the limit of the current batch of ships.

another reason for topspeed::

do you _really_ want to splat yourself all over the back of your cockpit??

....G-forces suck, sometimes :O

I would like some "matrix" logic background story on why the ships react like this. Lets make up some mumbo about gravity drives that you create pockets of gravity which are incredibly efficient however the field must be maintained when the drive powers down your gravity field has to neutralize pulling you back as much with as much force as it pulled you forward.

Something that makes you think "sure, i'll buy it. not like conventional thrusters will get us to respond anything like what we have now anyways."

gee forces apply only to acceleration and not to how fast you're going. I could be going 50000 mi/hr and be feeling no gees if I'm not changing direction or speed. If I go from 0 mi/hr to 50000 mi/hr in three seconds, I'm most likely dead.

How about this. Evil Space Dust Bunnies!

You can attribute maximum speed for magnetic deflector effecency. The magnetic collection dohickey removes space dust and other particles from the ships immediate path. These particles would otherwise pierce the hull causeing the ships pilot to look like swiss cheese.

"gee forces apply only to acceleration and not to how fast you're going."

Thanks for the physics reminder =) but I originally said:

"That way it's easier to have in-your-face combat without pulling thousands of G's"

If you can go 50000 km/hr, but want close battles, the maneuvering G's would be ridiculous. Otherwise, you'd pass each other and be several km apart in seconds, so combat gets pretty boring.

And, practically, if the game tracks your position 20-60 frames/sec, at higher speeds, you could pass over most obstacles, since the distance you travel between frames is so great. That would mean it would be next to impossible to hit anything with any weapon, much less projectile weapons. Unless the servers use some wacky interpolation to compute intersections between ships and obstacles.

It's just for the sake of good gameplay.

Edit:
By the way, 0 -> 50000mph in 3 seconds = ~764 G's
(definitely instant death)

Edit #2:
By the way, going 1000 m/s, then turning in a circular path with a radius of 1000 m, the acceleration would be ~102 G's, also near-instant death.

Yeah... I don't have any real problem w/ having a maximum speed (other than my knee-jerk reaction "Not true physics"). I totally realize gameplay would go down the drain without a max limit on speed. But if acceleration is inversly proportionate to the percentage of your top speed (you can accelerate faster at lower speeds), like Eldrad was saying, that doesn't make much sense for a space sim. But I read/watch/play enough bad sci-fi stuff that this is nothing. And I was really just curious about how acceleration compared between turboing and not. Intuitively I'd guess that turbo meant higher acceleration, but with only one thrust shown on the ship stats I wasn't sure.

Edit: If acceleration is limited by how close you are to your top speed, we can always explain it away... we're in fluidic space! Beware of species 8472...

space whales!