what if, you know, like, if you were flying directly behind another ship, you got a little energy boost where your energy drain would be reduced.... because of the consmogrified warp bublitude? sort of like the 'drafting' effect they use in the tour de france, stock car racing, etc....

Love it. Dunno how hard it would be to implement, though...

yeah, and if we ignore physics completely, we could have the ships blue with pink polka-dots.....

since there is no wind resistance in space, drafting would never be possible.

Then it must be magic that slows our ships down from turbo speeds.

Doak, there is no true vacuum. Particles float in space that resist movement. It'd be a very minor increase though.

magic IS one of the factors.... so are gummybears.

Something like this does make sense, if our engines are ones that manipulate gravity. If they had a gravity well, then other ships may be affected by it. This has been suggested before, and is a good suggestion.

In fact, the whole way engine power is calculated could be redone. Engines could create gravity wells (yes, this would be a major thing to try to implement) based on how powerful they are. Any engine would have the power to move any ship, but if you put a tiny engine on a huge cap ship, you'd take forever just to get up to a crawling pace. If you put a huge engine on a small ship somehow, maybe you crush your ship.

Other than simply the size and power output of the engine, there could be two "efficiency" factors:

1) Energy efficiency. This one's simple, how much power is delevered per unit/second of battery power consumed.

2) Focus. This is where the gravity well "drafting" factor comes in. A better engine would focus more power on a smaller place, wasting less energy. If the focus is loose, then nearby objects would be affected by the well. This would be handy if you have a large ship and want to assist small escorts and pull them along a bit. Otherwise, spend the extra cash to get a tighter focus and utilize the full extent of the engine's power for just your own ship.

Drafting as it exists in car racing wouldn't work in space, but gravity wells would be interesting in many ways.

aww, and here I thought this thread would be about mandatory combat missions for members of a nation's military :/

Umm, dufus, it would work the OPPOSITE way in space, especially if the ship is undergoing acceleration. The thrust and exhaust matter of the engines would drag on a following ship more than the rest of space, slowing it down.

Unlike cars, ships use rocket (or ionic matter) propulsion, so 'drafting' (and the proper term btw, is 'slipstreaming') would not work. The only possible exceptions would be perhaps some gravatic and trans-dimentional or space-folding drives, that could perhaps suck a nearby ship along for the ride.

Thank you, Cunjo, for using the correct term, I was going to post about that.

I also agree with the rest of your post.

Still, ananzi has a point, it would be Nice To Have™. If we assume the space-time-continuum (it is important that it IS a continuum, because then, we can apply majeekified fluid dynamics) to be a fluid, our ships as objects in this fluid, and the engines as devices that actually make the whole system work like an object in a fluid (with linear and turbulent flows, stalling, wake, spoilers…).

The ships in VO use gravitonic engines, projecting gravity wells in front of the ships to "fall into". So say the Devs! *cues the chant "So say the Devs"*

Just a suggestion, take it or leave it.... If you want drafting then you can have it. Physics is useless, it's a game. Just like on tv when that guy gets beat up real bad and is almost dead, but somehow finds enough whatever to get back up and beat up on the little ninja guy with swords that are on fire, exactly the same situation. Obviously the dev's tried to make the physics as real as possiple, but if you can explain it, then it works. Not magic, just code. Simple. No need to rewrite the engine, just make it so if your ship is directly behind another you have a 1% increase in speed for every second, or something as easy.

so by your suggestion of 1% of speed per second of slipstreaming,

it is entirely possible to have this get completely out of hand.

take into concideration that it is a known ability to choreograph ship movements. use this link as evidence.

let's say we have ten ships in an initial "circle" formation. using the same choreography (in a circular pattern), and with each ship following close enough to the ship in front of it that slipstreaming would occur; this could cause a whirling dervish of inconceivable speeds.

for each second that these ships follow the ship prior to it, it increases 1% of it's speed. which compounds on itself the second after that. and so on, and so on, and so on.

if the initial speed of each ship was 100kmph and for the first second of slipstreaming it gained 1%, each ship would now be travelling 101kmph. but by then, another second would have passed and now the speeds increase 1.01kmph for a grand total of 102.1kmph.

if you can guess where i am going with this; within the first minute of this formation, these ships have gained 81.8kmph (182kmph total)... thirty seconds later they are travelling 111kmph faster than they started at (211kmph total). let this "stew" overnight, and you have yourself travelling at mach 9, or something closely matching "Going Plaid".

"drafting" isnt needed in this game, and will just be a waste of time for the devs to implement. (almost the same waste as writing this thread....)

Yeah but you're not taking into account that drafting/slipstreaming takes speed away from the draftee.

I think you're missing the more useful part of the suggestion: rather than a speed boost, the effect would be to lower the drain on the following ship. I'm not sure how useful that would be in current racing applicatons. Essentially, it would penalize those who are trying to escape a chaser ship.

I'm all for that, but I think a more realistic and (most importantly) balanced approach would be to FIX THE DAMN SPEED CAP ALREADY!!!

You know, just maybe.

Dr. Lecter, by fixing the speed cap, do you mean increasing it, decreasing it, removing it, or something else? I'm all for increasing it by quite a lot, and making it an asymtotic value (It might be already, it kind of acts that way during turbo).

A drafting concept that reduces the follower's energy drain by a very small amount (the amount depending on the energy usage of the lead ship) would make the complaint of anyone being able to easily run away from any fight a little less common. Get ready for complaints from those that do run, though, and complaints that this just plays into the hands of pirates. Of course it does, and this is a good thing, because it is too easy to run away, which is bad for roleplay.

As a side note to the increased ship speeds, to keep ships from actually going faster than the weapons they fire, the obvious solution is to make the speeds stackable. This would also make for some interesting changes in strategy. Camping at wormholes wouldn't be as easy, and would require an actual chase. If someone comes out of a wormhole at, let's say, 250 m/s (which they spent a few minutes accelerating to achieve), and a stationary ship on the other side of the wormhole fires missiles at 220 m/s, they won't catch up to the target unless they are fired straight on.

I think that the ability to go faster could potentially add a lot to the game, especially if during cap ship battles, the small ships are going fast around the cap ships. It would give them a better chance against the defensive weapons upgrades that the cap ships should get.

Uh, yeah...

(1) I've been over this before: fixing means restoring the balance which predated the truncation of all speeds over 225m/s. This can be done one of two ways: proportionally reduce all other ships, relative to those which are supposed to be fastest; or, simply put things back the way they were. The first approach preserves the 'we're reducing turbo speed because people complain that the game has become too fast'--except that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard and is a complete non sequitur. Turbo speed affects only chasing, racing and how fast it takes to get around. It has nothing to do with, zero relation to combat speed. The second approach just puts things back to the status quo ante nerf, which seems the best approach.

(2) I'm not sure you've tried it recently, but WH camping is already a pain, unless you're in a fast light ship and your target is a heavily laden trader. The jump in area is very large. However, nobody "comes out of a WH" with any appreciable speed.

I've never camped a wormhole, but I hear people complain about it all the time. I know you don't come out with any decent speed, I think you should retain your speed. Both turbo speed and cruising speed should be increased. I forgot to say it in my last post, but turbo should be a multiplier of your cruising speed.

there is no effective way to camp a wh. your best bet is with quad rails shooting at a fat target. and even that doesn't necessarily produce results.

and space is big enough. we dont need to reduce the speed across the board. quite the contrary actually.

So this is a bit off topic now, but if it's so ineffective, why do people complain when it happens?