There is a post in another thread that kind of explains this... short version... quantum friction has something to do with the "braking" effect. On this basis there must also be essentially some kind of concept of quantum inertia too which is where the acceleration side of things comes in to play.
Don't get me wrong, I like all the lore stuff, and unless FD chimes in with a definitive answer there's perhaps an interesting discussion to be had over whether the game design dictated the lore or vice versa. Chicken and egg.
I just don't quite understand why the game
plays this way. With a number of players pointing out that in-system flights take too long (or that there's nothing to do during them) I'd like to know why FD haven't chosen to speed them up. If there's a technical limit I'd like to know what it is, and if it's a design choice I'd like to know why FD have chosen to keep it largely unchanged for so long. Adding more gameplay during supercruise would clearly be a challenging task (perhaps one that will be mitigated a bit by space legs, perhaps not) but taking the limiters off the FSD appears to my ignorant eyes to be a lot more straightforward. At the end of the day, in the hope of simplifying without being dismissive, supercruise flight is really just moving a camera's POV through a large orrery. Unless there's a networking/multiplayer aspect that I'm not seeing, I wonder why there are such hard limits.
Personally I don't think I'd even lose the sense of scale if they ramped up supercruise speeds and responsiveness, because that's largely headcanoned using the combination of speed and distance which until the planet is in visible range is mostly just numbers on a screen (and slight movement of the orbit lines, if they're turned on). If those numbers were changing more quickly, that wouldn't break the sense of scale for me. It might for others, of course. Maybe that's part of FD's thinking, but we can only guess.
Ultimately, the main thing I can see being tweaked by FD in the case of FSD engineering is the extent and/or positioning of the optimal/safe throttle zone. I do not think there is likely to be nor do I believe there should be any changes to the acceleration/deceleration curve behaviours.
Like I said, I'm more than happy to carry on with things the way they are. It strikes a good balance between, using the words in their broadest sense, the "simulation" and "action" aspects of the game. But I still see opportunities for change. If those changes are still being dismissed, I'd just like to know whether it's for technical reasons or policy reasons.
Hutton Orbital (and to a lesser extent those other big systems where mission USS spawn at crazy distances) is the interesting edge case here. Learning the hard way that some stations orbit at insane distances from the primary is a sort of rite of passage for
ED and it would be a shame to lose that. Micro-jumps would more or less destroy it (unless a lore reason could be established for Eden not having a beacon, which I guess is possible). I can't recall whether it's possible to reach 2001c during the Hutton Run; if so then increasing the hard upper limit might also affect it. Changing the acceleration and deceleration curves (or removing them altogether and making it linear) would have some effect, but given the distances involved probably not a huge one. And it might replace some of the "It took me 45 minutes to get to Hutton" threads with "I overshot Hutton 27 times" threads, which could be amusing for a while.
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