Using the current balance of thrust / drain for each ship as a base point, create a drain / thrust / max speed formula that allows players to set drain during play.

As an illustration of what I mean. I want my Rev C to be infiboost, so I lower the drain to 50 which allows me to travel at top speed but takes me longer to get to that speed because my thrust has been reduced. Say I'm an evil person chasing an XC and I don't want to run out of juice so I lower my drain to say 45-48. I still have infiboost, but my top speed has been reduced because the engines output can no longer sustain the higher speed.

So pretend I'm a pirate who sees a detested Fluffy flying an XC, I ram up my drain to say 60 for better acceleration and then immediately when I catch up, I drop it to 50. Well, at this point I'm probably only going to have around 1/4 charge left and one or two shots is going to kill my bat. I drop it down a notch again to 45 and I'm now growing energy, but I"m traveling at maybe 150 m/s.

That would be great, if there was some concept of balance in the current thrust / drain settings.

I love this idea. A way to dynamically tune a ship to specific performance would be awesome. Maybe Shape's balance algorithm could be tuned to set base values for thrust/max turbo speed/drain?

Heh, my turbo bind is still an alias of "+turbo -1000."

Anyway, something about this suggestion doesn't sit quite right with me. It feels like another one of those "wouldn't my life be easier if..." posts, without much thought given to how the game would change as a result. Could use a few well thought out worst and best case scenarios.

I'm certainly an advocate for more fine tuning options, so on the surface I think this is a good idea. I think what is flawed is the "on-the-fly" aspect.

Tune your ship in the shop, live with the consequences.

Well, the obvious down sides is the additional level of complexity new players would have to master as well as the probability that someone would create a plugin to optimize turbo during a chase, giving the pursuer a clear advantage.

I don't think this qualifies as a "wouldn't my life be easier". Its more of a "wouldn't VO be more interesting if" suggestion, which I admit does not take in the full impact on gameplay. Since this would only impact game play during turbo, I think it would encourage new strategies on both sides of the chase. As a potential side benefit, It would give slower ships better acceleration before reaching max speed, thus hopefully reducing some of the travel tedium.

/swarmturbo works like that... you can set desired speed (sort of).

More than that results in turbo=accelerate more,

I like this idea in general except that i seems like there are some possible breaking points when you have a ship a lighter ship with a good thrust to weight ratio and a high drain that is used in bursts. For example, lets say that some pirate has me in a station and I am in a Hornet MkII with Heavy battery. So, if I set my drain to 200 for 1 sec and then 100 for the second after that and 45 until I hit the 3k mark. will I be moving faster than the game engine can handle? I think that if something like this is implemented, a z-curve around the current drain/thrust rates would be better than a linear function based on energy drain.

I guess you didn't notice, glama, but ships in VO have a hard-limit maximum speed.

I think what they mean is changing the turbo button to a turbo toggle button and then having some F/A-style HUD concept for the turbo thrust/max speed/energy drain utilizing the thrust keys while in turbo.

Personally, I like the idea of more specialized ships that you choose before launching. Add more ship variety, encourage group participation rather than turning every fighter ship and valk into ships any jock can fly, blindly and by themselves, all the time in.

no infiboost everything would be lame as hell

I agree, more ship variety, more specialization, less of this valk jock-style flying crap.

lardon, please read the entire post before posting.