And I thought my ship was fast until...

[fus roh potato]

The simple answer is that

gameplay > gamelore.

Pretty much stops there.

If you look at how targeting works; for instance, it's very much about player input. Having ships that cruise around at 1000ms would be more realistic, but you aren't going to hit anything with our current combat mechanics - if you are going to have ships moving that fast - with targeting and munitions mechanics to cater for it, you start waking into the realm of dogfight simulation. Like.. where sensor range, munitions speed and computerization takes over large parts of the combat.

Not necessarily. I said in a post above that the game could use faster ships but with slightly less acceleration, especially beyond the 200m/s rate. If a ship is passing you at full speed, sure, it would be very hard to shoot, but this would be difficult to accomplish without getting a good head start from a great distance away. The floating target would have to turn and begin boosting in line with the passing target to get on it's tail.

If the velocities in combat were raised on average from 250 m/s to 500 m/s, with the possibility of reaching 1000 (if spending enough time to get there as I suggested slower acceleration at higher speeds), then yeah, we might need other adjustments to make it work. Sensors would need better ranges, slightly better weapon ranges, a proper target orientation, and even information displayed such as the target's speed. It wouldn't really be that much of a difference though. There are already small ships that are currently capable of flying at average speeds much higher than 500 m/s, like Eagles and Couriers.

It just feels wrong that:

• Mass affects top speed instead of having a focus on acceleration and maneuverability.
• A ship can boost up to top speed in .7 seconds and then instantly stops accelerating at 450 m/s.
• Combat maneuvers are very limited and simplistic, almost entirely about the ship's weapons, shields, ramming, and pip management, while little to do with movement.

 

[Madd_Matt]

A-12 Oxcart

Perhaps even more interesting than the SR-71 is it's even faster predecessor, the A-12 Oxcart...

 

[Winterwalker]

Perhaps even more interesting than the SR-71 is it's even faster predecessor, the A-12 Oxcart...

[up]

Have been reminded recently about SSC Bloodhound (land speed record, 1000 mph car). It's going to be driven for the first time in October (see the link above) but while 1000mph might only be 447 metres per sec, my favourite stat on this jet / rocket car is it uses a 542bhp Jaguar, V8 Formula One engine .. as a fuel pump!

Spoiler

[video=youtube;FORD2dTe_Sc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORD2dTe_Sc[/video]

(hehe)

 

[Shadowdancer]

If you're alright with only being able to push your throttle above ~30% five times between supply stops…

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

IIRC someone has already calculated G forces our CMDR experience in their ’slow’ ships, and actually most ships are blindingly menuverable. Try that in an SR-71 at that speed and it will disintegrate.
Se we could say dogfighting at 1000 m/s would cause you to pass out for good (best case scenario).

I think 1000 m/s Anacondas would also have trouble steering and stopping, it would be like a freight train.

 

[BDelacroix]

How long can you go at max speed before running out of gas? That is also part of the equation. The Bugatti Veyron can go up to ~409km/hr but only for 12 minutes. Which his ok, because the tires would only last a few minutes longer at that speed according to top gear.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

But you're comparing a 1966 airplane (an awesome one non the less) with spaceships inside a video game.

Ships in elite are designed with gameplay in mind.
If you want them to go faster you'd need to increase the range of weapons too.
That would result in two pixels shooting at each other from more than 500km distance, if a single ship can go 50km/s+

Not very engaging if you ask me.

Hmmm. That sounds a lot like another kickstarter space game...

 

[b101uk]

you could argue the SR71 or even a Piper Cub, are going much faster than their ground "speed" would indicate even when they are parked in a hangar, as the ground is moving with the rotation of the earth, and the earth is moving around the sun, and the sun is moving relative to other system stars, and the other systems are moving relative to our galaxy, which itself is moving relative to other galaxy, i.e. as your frame of reference changes as dose speed even though you have not change velocity, so a little sidewinder that is shown to be at 0m/s very high above a planet like earth holding the same lat/long position must be definition moving thus have velocity relative to other bodies.

i.e. at mid day and mid night relative to the sun I am traveling ~+-1037.5mph to earths orbit speed of the sun, as at one point me sat on my chair in front of my PC the rotational speed of the earth will have me at +1037.5mph to the earths orbit speed of the sun, and at the other I will be -1037.5mph earths orbit speed of the sun, while at 6pm/6am I will be +-0mph to the earths orbit speed of the sun, but I will instead be moving ~+-1037.5mph towards/away from the sun.

 

[Leper Messiah]

Since we're posting interesting things about the SR-71, allow me to draw your attention to this account of a pilot who survived one of them disintegrating around him at Mach 3.18.

Oh my word, I bet his underpants were a tad brown?!! Such a shame about the co pilot.

 

[XanderVekk]

You just have to suspend disbelief a little in any space dogfighting game.

In a Newtonian model the only difference between two ships is their rate of acceleration, speed is only limited by how much fuel you carry. If you get up to speeds much higher than what we have now, you don't have a cool spaceship dogfight video game anymore.

You get a game where two objects pass one another within weapons range for a tiny fraction of a second at relativistic velocities, and the computers do all of the firing and maneuvering. The computers would also have to account for time dilation, which becomes significant at 0.1c. That's not a fun video game however, so let's enjoy the good bits that we have shall we?

 

[CMDR Corlas]

All the questions about "drag", slowing down after boosting, max speeds, and everything else are, lore-wise, entirely tied to the flight computers in our ships.

We don't decelerate after a boost because of spacedrag. Use the external cam, and you can see that rear-thrusters fire to slow us down. All these limitations are in-universe limitations as well. Yes, it's probably in place for gameplay reasons, but they're all also reflected in lore.

Frontier understands physics just fine. We're just not in ultimate control of our ships, our flight computers are.