Ship Speeds

[Badger]

I was just at work outputting an airshow publication (I work in pre-press production) and I happened to read some of the specs on modern day jets that were to be featured in the show. Then I thought about what this would mean in Freelancer. Basically, the bigger and heavier it is, the slower it should move which is partially reflected in the max thrust speeds of all ships. This isn't exactly what I would deem to be balanced though, as all ship types accelerate to their max thrust speed, and even accelerate and cruise at the exact same rates.

Here's a little example using some figures I read: A private passenger jet (in fact the fastest in the world) travels at around 500mph. This isn't much bigger than say... your average modern day fighter jet. Now one of those is capable of Mach 2, almost 1,500mph. That's 3 times as fast. Let's put that into Freelancer terms, and match a smallish freighter with any fighter. Max thrust? Identical. Cruise? Identical.

I guess cruise speed is a difficult thing to vary though, as ships of different cruise speeds in formation wouldn't work, plus (I don't know this) I think the cruise speed is global for all ships? Anyways, the solutions to this I've seen on other mods, where the cruise charge-up time is varied between all different ship classes. As cruise disruptors are pretty ineffective on a lot of bigger ships, this could deter dishonourable runners :0P

Afterburners could also be modified somehow to reflect different speeds, such as light fighters getting top speeds of 260, hf 240, vhf 220, bomber 200 etc. Something along those lines. I think changing the acceleration characteristics of anything would mean changing mass, which causes all sorts of handling problems for big ships so I guess that's out of the question, but massive Battleships accelerating from standing to 130 in almost no time at all seems a bit off to me.

Well just throwing an idea out there, would like to know what other players opinions are of ship speeds in discovery.

---

Evil The Badger - Blood Dragon
(NovaPG)-Anaguma
__________________________________________________
Faction Status Page
(NovaPG) Message Dump