someone please tell me how a ship with a huge truster in the back could use it to turbo-trust sideways?

thank you.

Heh, yea and make combat a whole heck of alot more boring.
You can only put so much skill into Spray N' Pray.

Just because it has a huge thruster on the back doesn't necessarily imply that it has no other thrusters elsewhere. Even if you strictly followed the artistic design implications of the ship, if you considered boost to be kind of an "overload" on the individual engine (like a nitrous oxide shot in an internal combustion system), you could still choose which thrusters to overload. So say, you could gain a much greater thrust by overloading the rear (main) thruster, you could still have an equivalent & smaller boost by overloading a side thruster. It wouldn't necessarily propel you as quickly, but it could be useful in a combat scenario.

In addition, it would be nifty if you could push your engines beyond their design specifications, with some bounded chance of negative repurcussions (engine damage, reduced performance, sudden explosion, whatever) if you did so.

But, yeah. Lots of stuff would be nifty. God knows when we'll get around to adding it.

I think you may have misunderstood because I wasn't clear, LostCommander. Of course mass has nothing to do with top speed, realistically any of the ships in the game should be able to go any speed, but that would get crazy in the game universe. Low mass would mean higher acceleration, though, so you'd get to that speed faster. I do think that all the ships should be able to go at least a bit faster, and I think that boost should increase speed by a multiple (or percentage) rather than a set speed. That way, if you're going 20m/s and your turbo will give you x1.5, you now are going 35m/s, and can accelerate/decelerate like normal but x1.5 while your turbo is on.

A scout ship would be able to have multiple turbo engines instead of weapons, each with its own battery. That way, the turbo power wouldn't be split, but each directional turbo engine could operate at full power. Of course you wouldn't want to get close, but in an emergency you could pull off some spectacular moves.

Didn't we already conclude that that thing on the back is a thermal exhaust port and has nothing to do with providing thrust? :-P

I would prefer the art and the game physics to coincide. Don't get me wrong, the new ship graphics look awesome. I really am impressed. I've tried to do art, and I'm just not that creative. But, if the engine/science is unconventional, have the ships look accordingly unconventional. If the ships look traditional, then have traditional newtonian physics. Just don't do any lame Star Wars III garbage and have the ships take a dive when their gravity goes out.

The ships in this game (the new ones) look pretty much conventional, just very extremely cool-looking; some of the best ship art I've seen in a game.

Thermal exhaust ports provide thrust.

Um.
How?
If you're talking photon drive, no. It doesn't work. Second law of thermodynamics.

Heat sinks that 'just radiate heat' and thus transport it out of the ship would probably be all over the ship's hull, realistically speaking, and thus they'd negate any directional thrust effects you might hope to gain.

Toshiro is right.

If these ships work by actually providing thrust (which it seems they don't), then it would be radioactive exhaust from the reactors doing the work.

What these seem to do is use large amounts of power to manipulate gravitational fields, and "boost" is just a stronger field, and directional.

The problem is that such a system of propulsion would use much more power than our most powerful energy weapons, and yet it doesn't even drain the battery unless you "boost." Personally I'd rather see Newtonian physics (engines provide real thrust) like in EV, and I also want to have to consider fuel. I don't think it's going to happen, though.

Any type of exhaust, thermal or otherwise, will provide thrust. Newton's Third.

You can't simply radiate heat. It has no mass, that I'm aware of.

I don't really know what a photon-drive is, and to be honest I'm not really sure what a photon even is.

Yes, you can 'simply' radiate heat, in the form of electromagnetic radiation - which is why I mentioned photon drives; you can propel mass with a more or less coherent (notice I said coherent, which heat radiation isn't) beam of light, namely in the infrared spectrum, with wavelengths ranging from .8 µm to roughly 1 mm.

However, the force generated by that is omnidirectional and very weak, due to the relatively large surface required for effective heat radiation, and the abysmal coherence of the rays.

With a rough estimate and a bit of handwaving, I'd say that you'd need temperatures above 900K, a plethora of ideal black bodies, i.e. a cavity with one single opening, with the opening facing in the direction desired, the walls being heated, and insulation around the entire black body besides the opening, preferrably a good reflector. That way, you might have a steady acceleration in the range of photonic engines, but that's pretty weak, and the actual 'heat engine' will be even weaker.

However. You have to consider much more than physical feasibility. How are you going to control it in a manner that allows quick changes in directions? How are you going to counter the delays (inherent in the system), like warm-up, cool-down, et cetera?

Additionally, you contradict yourself. Newton's third law states that, and I quote:
"To every action (force applied) there is an equal but opposite reaction (equal force applied in the opposite direction)."

While light particles have no 'mass' as such, they have so much energy that, following Einstein's probably most famous formula E = m*c², they must have a so-called 'mass equivalent', and thus an impulse, and a steady impulse over any discrete time interval will produce a force.

If there're any botches in my argumentation (and the chance of that is not neglectable by any means), please point them out to me.

Sources:
black body radiation, Newton's motion laws, impulse, Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, wave-particle duality.

Please note that this was not meant to be an ad hominem, but an ad causam. If you feel insulted by style, content or general attitude of this post, I'll take it down and try to write something less offensive.

This isn't really boost like we've been talking about, but I think it would be fun to fly this:

Project Orion

Ever since I read "Footfall" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, I've wanted one of these.

Also, toshiro or anyone, how do I make my links look all nice like that, and be what they're about and not a messy URL?

Much like in UBBCode:

[ url=http://my.exampleurl.com]This is what you see.[ /url]

Without using any of the spaces in the tags of the example above. Spaces between the tags will be included ( "] this [" will use the space before and after "this" in the url).

There's other tags too, they were listed in a thread, but I can't find it.
short list I remember:

[ b]text[ /b] should be clear,
[ i]text[ /i] too,
as should be this [ u]text[ /u].

Then there's ^superscript: ^ {text},
_subscript: _ {text} and I forgot how to do strikethrough, if that's at all possible.

All of the tags will work if you omit the spaces in them.

If I knew them all and had guide powers, I'd make a thread and sticky it. Alas...

Awesome. It worked. For proof that it looked look here. Hehe, I did it again. Coolness.

Thanks.

Yes, it's possibly to radiate heat through the medium of electromagnetic waves. It's also possible to eject heat in a more directed manner, through the medium of say, exhaust from method whichever of propulsion you choose. I'm guessing that the latter is truth for these imaginary space craft in VO. I had assumed that the craft propelled ^themselves through _the fast ^release of _exhaust gases, ^you see.

It ain't rocket science

No, see... that doesn't work. Not with the ships we have. They'd require large gas tanks, which they (obviously) don't have; it's already a mystery where they put the cargo (the cargo not affecting the moment of inertia is another thing, but hey...). There's also the fact to consider that if you heat up a compressed fluid (liquid or gaseous), the pressure will rise (universal ideal gas equation), eventually rupturing the tank (even in the far future, there's limits to what you can do). And if you 'blow off steam', you reduce the mass of the stuff, therefore reducing its capability of storing heat.

It would be an effective method of cooling the ship, but more feasible with collected space dust (there's *tons* of it flying around you if you turn space junk on), scooped up, heated up, and ejected again. But this has been discussed to death multiple times already.