[Offtopic]
Heh, one of my friends has a StarCraft replay of the most incredible comeback... but yeah, it did seem like his opponent had basically gone to sleep (he probably thought the game was already over, but the fat lady hadn't sung yet).
[/offtopic]

I ultimatly agree with you, Soltis, the one niggly thing that bothers me (/me glances around for Celebrim) is the whole realism thing. But then, this is a great example of Celebrim's point that realistic does not necessarily equal fun.

Soltis you may be responding to other comments in this thread but if you are not:

Does reducing the max turbo speed handicap a person in a duel? My thought process for this idea centered around NOT making it an additional detriment to the ability of a player to dogfight, but rather to make it harder to flee from a battle.

With respect to WH ganking. Valid point, and I would definitly want the damage to speed reduction factor to be balanced to give both sides a chance. Also it depends on whether it is to easy to avoid battle, just right, or too easy.

All in all with the upcomming engine/ship balance I think this discussion might as well be tabled for now :).

Soltis I think you're assuming too much of an effect here. It wouldn't be a "one hit my ship is now a fully laden centaur" effect, it would be a "my hull is less than 10% so now it takes 1.5x as long to turbo up to full speed" type thing. Just small penalty for getting knocked down that far so that running from a battle is just slightly harder than it is now. It won't take much at all to give the person with the upperhand a better chance to kill their target.

As it is now, you can literally just turn on turbo and escape from most enemies. To escape from skilled enemies you have to change your direction once or twice. That's it. By making it take slightly - SLIGHTLY! - longer to speed up, those who run once they get too low will have to do more manuevering to escape.

As for wormhole ganking, I tried to address that in another thread... but this effect will make little difference in that issue. A successful gank is almost always a quick and total victory. The guy comes out near you and you kill him with a burst of neut3s before he has a chance to even turn on turbo. So it doesn't really matter if you can't speed up.. you're already dead.

Starfisher: The only thing that would do is to change the time when people run. From 10% to 25%.

At 10% I can usually take 1 or 2 hits more before I'm gone (depending on the ship) so I usually zip out then. If my ship will misbehave at 10%, I'll simply pace myself a bit higher to zip out before things mess up completely.

See where its going?

I would disagree with the statement "my ship will misbehave at 10%". With the suggested formula(s) there are no breakpoints for degraded vs. non-degraded performance from 99% hull to 1% hull.

You as a player make a choice where you want to run, 10%, 25%, 99% etc and accept the limits this makes on your turbo ability.

Now you run with 10% hull and quickly get to 200m/s and have a close to 100% chance of escape.

Now here is the change.

Under the new system you run at 25% and get to 190m/s your opponent who is at 50% chases you at 195m/s and actually has a chance to catch you.

*numbers are strictly for the purpose of illustration and are not endorsed as correct.

Catch my drift?