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.
Changing cruise startup times can cause alot of problems. In Evolutions an LF can go from not moving to going at 300 (cruise) in 5 seconds or less. If we change impulse and thruster speeds it will cause a lot more balancing needed between the fighters.
For jets in atmosphere, thats true. But for ships in space its not.
The bigger the ship, the faster it should be, but the slower it should accelerate. Because the engines are bigger, more powerful. but the mass of the ship is bigger too.
Remember that fighters arent supposed to travel FTL without TL and JG/H. But Big capships can. (And indeed, they used their own jump engines in vanilla FL, as you reach toledo inside the osiris. And as there are no JH to there, we'll assume that BS's have warp engines). So, bigger ship should have higher Vmax, lower A, and higher cruise charge time (all this for cruise engines).
(If you find any mistake in my English, please let me know via a PM)
(Really, I speak terrible English, so please, tell me if I make mistakes. I'd like to improve it a bit )
Yeah I agree, realistically in space only the acceleration would be affected. Though I'm trying to think of it in gameplay terms, as Freelancer is action rather than simulator :0)
I was just thinking of it as a way of creating a bigger gap between ship classes, to emphasize their specified roles. As it is at the moment, you can use anything from a Light Fighter up to a Bomber and they'll all perform quite similarly, whereas a Light Fighter should be all over a Bomber like a rash.
Also, no ship can actually catch any other ship in a straight chase, the only exceptions being Cruisers and Battleships with slightly lower afterburn max speed. When anything smaller than a Cruiser comes up against either of those ship classes, they're not going to be running anyway.
I don't actually know what problems an increased or decreased cruise charge time would cause in-game or coding-wise so I wouldn't mind being enlightened, Light Fighters cruising in 5 seconds flat doesn't sound too un-balancing to me.
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