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[Fanful]

So, I'm sure this is known to all game veterans, but is this a bug? The collisions sometimes turn the game physics on, and in a weird way? Recently I was plasma burning and  think I hit something. Ended up flying with the top plasma burn speed for long enough to end up close to the edge of the map (and the collision was somewhere in the center), before the engines came online.

[KDR_11k]

I think it's just that your max speed is not enforced while your engines are offline.

[Fanful]

Yep, exactly, which is very weird.

[Deshara]

you can move infinitely fast in space if you keep burning in a single direction. In starsector, your ships are hard-coded to not allow you to go too fast relative to what's near you as a safety precaution (why safety overrides gives u the biggest speed boost). Your top speed is not an intrinsic factor of the shape & size of your ship like it is for an aircraft, it is determined by how strong your brakes are, IE how well your engines can cancel your movement & the safety limitations applied by the ship's manufacturer to help prevent accidents. So if you use a burn drive or something to exceed the hard-coded local speed limit and flame out during them, your ship will keep going bc ur engines aren't on to stop it.
I actually love that the game does this. It manages to both get the fact that there is no drag in space, and also get the gameplay benefits of there being drag in space. Pro tip; if you flame out an enemy ship you can physically shove them into your fleet. I've literally taken a cruiser with plasma drive, broadswords & an ion beam into a huge station defense battle and would flame out enemy frigates then plasma drive ram them to the station where they would either be destroyed by slamming into the station or would be pulled apart by being too close to its guns

[Fanful]

Ok, so it really is intended? Oh well. To me it's really weird. I can buy space with kind of aircraft physics (I just take it as a part of a game/genre), but collisions make it so incredibely obvious that it's just a gamey system and they break me away from the suspension of disbelief.

In starsector, your ships are hard-coded to not allow you to go too fast relative to what's near you as a safety precaution

I'd rather have no excuse for unrealistic physics than this, but that's my personal preference I guess.

[Deshara]

it isnt unrealistic physics -- even cars have governors. If the part of your engine that makes your breaks work stops working when ur on a hill ur car will go faster than you've ever gone in that car, because the engine is manufactured with an artificial top speed for safety purposes. Same thing in SS. It's actually more realistic than I've seen in any other space game (including stuff like Space Engineers) bc it doesnt just account for how a rock would move if thrown in space (IE goes forever), but also accounts for how people would design a ship to account for how a rock would move if thrown in space.

[KDR_11k]

It does seem a bit weird that a ship with damaged engines is able to maintain a boosted speed that its ship system could only manage for like two seconds, can be pretty annoying in combat too if you cause a flameout on a ship that is boosting and it just flies away at ludicrous speed while you can't get more hits in to utilize that flameout...

[Yunru]

It does seem a bit weird that a ship with damaged engines is able to maintain a boosted speed that its ship system could only manage for like two seconds, can be pretty annoying in combat too if you cause a flameout on a ship that is boosting and it just flies away at ludicrous speed while you can't get more hits in to utilize that flameout...

Counterpoint: It's hilarious when you only flameout half their engines and it just spins.

[Fanful]

it isnt unrealistic physics -- even cars have governors.

Come on, you seriously buy this? We are talking about rockets in space, which are able to accelerate for maybe 5 seconds before they get arbitrary "max speed" limit, which is applied out of what, safety (and then increased if they happen to not be shooting weapons)? Do they worry the ship will break in half due to the resistance of the void? This is kind of an artificial magical non-sense that's trying to explain some unrealistic gamey system in a vague scientific reasoning, but ends up making it actually worse. The more explanations like this, the more unrealistic it all seems, if you have any sort of education and spare a minute of thought. I don't mean to be rude, but it's just ridiculous to me. I prefer to have no explanation for things that are so obviously unrealistic, to not bring attention to them.

And to be clear, it's not just the max speed limit that's "unrealistic physics" I was talking about, the whole game premise is just unimaginable, starting from battles themselves, through the space travel, scale, interplanetary trade, nebulae and asteroid belts, and so on and on. But it's fun, I have no complaints about it, I would just prefer if the game didn't suddenly jerk me out of the suspension of disbelief with those moments when my ship is magically catapulted.

[Vanshilar]

Actually this is fairly common in games of this genre, that ships have a certain top speed, but collisions or other things can exceed it. First game that comes to mind is Star Control -- if you collide or go around the gravity well, you can go much faster than your normal top speed,  and you stay at that speed as long as you don't use your engines. As soon as you start using your engines though, you start slowing down, back to your regular top speed.

In Starsector, the difference is that ships will slow down to their top speed regardless of if they're accelerating or not, unless they lose their engines.

If anything this is for immersion -- once you lose your engines then you lose control, and that includes your top speed, so that the ship really is out of control. And yes when you collide with other ships during burn drive, you risk losing your engines.

Counterpoint: It's hilarious when you only flameout half their engines and it just spins.

Also kind of funny when you hit them as they're retreating. I think the funniest though is when I don't realize that the Radiant I'm pushing around (to control where it might teleport) has lost its engines, and it ends up flying away from me...even worse when I was jetting my SO Aurora.

[Deshara]

it isnt unrealistic physics -- even cars have governors.

Come on, you seriously buy this?

Spoiler

[close]

[Goumindong]

Come on, you seriously buy this? We are talking about rockets in space, which are able to accelerate for maybe 5 seconds before they get arbitrary "max speed" limit, which is applied out of what, safety (and then increased if they happen to not be shooting weapons)? Do they worry the ship will break in half due to the resistance of the void? This is kind of an artificial magical non-sense that's trying to explain some unrealistic gamey system in a vague

The void may be very low density. But if you’re going fast enough even a single hydrogen molecule can drop the hammer.

Buuut that is not where the speed limit is enforced. The speed limit is enforced only when you’re close enough to other vessels that a speed limit makes sense. So when you maneuver to prevent the enemy from escaping you’re plotting an intercept burn that puts you close enough to them that the collision avoidance systems tick in. At which point the global speed doesn’t matter but only local speed. So the ships can still be going very fast relative to some distant object. But won’t have high relative velocities towards the other ships in combat.

This is why, when you successfully retreat your ships burn off the map at high speed.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

Actually this is fairly common in games of this genre, that ships have a certain top speed, but collisions or other things can exceed it. First game that comes to mind is Star Control -- if you collide or go around the gravity well, you can go much faster than your normal top speed,  and you stay at that speed as long as you don't use your engines. As soon as you start using your engines though, you start slowing down, back to your regular top speed.

In Starsector, the difference is that ships will slow down to their top speed regardless of if they're accelerating or not, unless they lose their engines.

If anything this is for immersion -- once you lose your engines then you lose control, and that includes your top speed, so that the ship really is out of control. And yes when you collide with other ships during burn drive, you risk losing your engines.

Adding gravity slingshotting to this game would be legit, although I guess pointless except for sometimes cool means of escaping patrols... at this rate maybe not even worth expecting time dilation by 1.0.