Why does it seem like Supercruise has been forgotten again?
A possible way to change supercruise for the better would to improve its acceleration. Changing acceleration would likely solve most of the issues without touching top speed, only extreme cases like Hutton Orbital would be somewhat problematic. Once you accelerate through the usual gravity wells, surpassing the blue zone, suddenly the ship would accelerate to a higher degree. At this point if there are no significant gravity wells and there is enough distance before the next gravity well, the ship will attempt to maximize its speed. It would use an acceleration curve similar to what is available when you are between stars, 50,000 ls - 200,000 ls out. The sort of acceleration that increases from 30km/s to over 100c in a few seconds.
This way a trip between planets of 300,000 ls wouldn't take 15 minutes, but a few minutes. Similarly, the ascent from the surface of a planet and cruise out of orbit should be longest part of flying between nearby worlds.
Of course, I don't know what the technical limits to implementing this are but it seems like once the planets are rendered as fuzzy dots is when they are no longer producing a significant load? At that point, is this possible for supercruise? This would hopefully prevent any sweeping changes or incompatibilities by retaining the existing acceleration curves up to the upper end of the blue zone.
I know this has been discussed countless times but it has never received enough attention for what it means for the game.
A possible way to change supercruise for the better would to improve its acceleration. Changing acceleration would likely solve most of the issues without touching top speed, only extreme cases like Hutton Orbital would be somewhat problematic. Once you accelerate through the usual gravity wells, surpassing the blue zone, suddenly the ship would accelerate to a higher degree. At this point if there are no significant gravity wells and there is enough distance before the next gravity well, the ship will attempt to maximize its speed. It would use an acceleration curve similar to what is available when you are between stars, 50,000 ls - 200,000 ls out. The sort of acceleration that increases from 30km/s to over 100c in a few seconds.
This way a trip between planets of 300,000 ls wouldn't take 15 minutes, but a few minutes. Similarly, the ascent from the surface of a planet and cruise out of orbit should be longest part of flying between nearby worlds.
Of course, I don't know what the technical limits to implementing this are but it seems like once the planets are rendered as fuzzy dots is when they are no longer producing a significant load? At that point, is this possible for supercruise? This would hopefully prevent any sweeping changes or incompatibilities by retaining the existing acceleration curves up to the upper end of the blue zone.
I know this has been discussed countless times but it has never received enough attention for what it means for the game.