So, they care so much about people's safety, they would implement rigorous safeguards to maximum speed, which are somehow uncircumventable even though every part of the ship can be tweaked and upgraded, otherwise.
Then equip the ships with powerful weapons with no safeguards whatsoever, specifically so people can murder each other on a whim.
Then change that top speed on different ships for no discernible reason, other than apparently to give people with more money an advantage, so they can more easily murder the poor people.
This is also a universe where the punishment for loitering over a landing pad for a couple minutes is ACTUALLY DYING. As in the death penalty. As in they KILL YOU.
FOR LOITERING.
I mean, we're making all this stuff up anyway, and there's definitely a few awesome theories in here. The idea is suspension of disbelief, for the sake of our own immersion! That's why I say 'i'm not buying it,' as in, in my mind it only makes the whole thing even more unbelievable.
So, sorry for the harsh tone, not intending to be insulting, just funny! I'm just trying to highlight the humor in how ridiculously unforgiving Elite is. I really don't think this is a universe where the safety of pilots is really of anyone's concern, whatsoever.
No no no, you're right about the law enforcement, and that is totally stupid every time I see it! Especially blasting a ship INSIDE the station, without regard to what the debris is going to do when it collides with the rotating barrel OR, in my case, who else may be in the way of those rutting lasers when they start shooting! Even the soldiers in Skyrim give you a warning and a chance to pay your fines before they start swinging!
HOWEVER, you're looking at it from the aspect of 'personal' safety, when I never said 'personal' safety. I'm more inclined to think they are interested in the 'public' safety than they are in the 'personal' safety. In a universe where the population of earth (still measured in billions) is now a FRACTION of the total population of humanity, maybe they got to a point where they said, "yeah, you know, one person's life isn't that important anymore. Not every child is precious." I don't know, I can't account for society or humanity--I never can! I'm a physicist, not a psychologist. If viewed from that standpoint, though, a ship colliding with a station at 400 kilometers per hour is carrying WAY LESS kinetic energy than one hitting a station at a kilometer per second. Shields shrug off a fifty-ton Cobra ramming it at 400 kph, but can it shrug off an exponentially higher impact? Hole in station kills how many people? And we've seen in the real world how devastating an object the size of a Cobra could be if it enters an atmosphere wrong (I think the Russian meteor was roughly that size). And since Cobras are made to survive entry, they'd quite possibly hit the GROUND instead of causing an air-burst. City blocks worth of people, gone.
What I CAN tell you is that, in a world where space travel is common place enough that the general public are behind the sticks of ships like this and are forced to interact with one another--without much in the way of traffic control, on top of it--that there is only so much information the AVERAGE human is capable of handling at any one time. You see it TODAY--how often do people say that speed kills? Lower the speed limit! Drive slower! Because the faster you are going, the less precise your ability to judge things like distance, rate-of-closure, and the vector path of another driver becomes. The faster you are going, the more space it takes you to stop or turn. The faster you have to process all that information. NASA has a STAFF of people helping control a single spacecraft in relatively un-occupied space because fractions-of-a-second count. Now you have a hundred ships an hour coming and going from Chango Dock, and the extent of space-traffic-control is 'you can dock' or 'you can't dock.' No marshal points to wait your turn, no lanes of traffic entering or exiting the mail slot, no flaggers telling ships when they are clear to lift off of their pads. The power to make decisions has to rest somewhere, so if you can't standardize the rules across a thousand star systems, then you need to empower your pilots instead.
You mentioned KSP. I play KSP too, so consider for a moment how hard it is to organize a SINGLE rendezvous between two ships. Start two ships on the same side of the planet, in line-of-sight with each other but two or three thousand kilometers away from each other. Even if they are on exactly the same inclination, it takes some work and patience and at least 1 full transfer-orbit to get them within 20 kilometers of each other, doesn't it? It's even harder if they are on different inclinations or vastly different orbital altitudes! Try sending them to Duna and doing it there, instead of Kerbin! Now you have even more work because it's almost impossible to get two ships launched at two different times to hit the same orbit right from the start without LOTS of pre-calculations beforehand. Imagine how much easier it'd be if you could just get in the neighborhood and just drive *straight* at the other ship, and let your onboard computer handle the rest! It calculates your relative motion to what you're locked onto versus your *actual* motion relative to the planet, and when you get close, it optimizes your HUD (something KSP does too, point of fact) so that the only information you need is what you are interested in--what is that other ship doing, and what am I doing relative to it? Computer already knows exactly what your thrusters can do, so it gives you a 'speed limit,' the *relative* velocity that you can be moving but still have enough thrust in your maneuvering thrusters to alter your course in a reasonable amount of time. Apply more power to your engines? Oh, look, your speed goes up because now your thrusters are able to produce HIGHER thrust and, thus, counteract your inertia more effectively. Alright, now you're getting close, let's dock. I'm going to have to fire my engines for...five minutes to slow myself down to the same relative speed as my target? Nope! Don't worry about it, your thrusters are powerful enough to slow you down within a few seconds because your computer imposed that 'arbitrary' speed limit based on what your engines could produce!
Let's do some numbers. I don't have any hard numbers here, so we can make some up. We can factor the mass of the ship out by talking about 'Delta-V per second' instead of 'thrust.' So if my main engine has a Delta-V per second rate of 10 meters per second per second, that means that my velocity increases by 10 meters per second for every second they are lit. My 'belly' thrusters, combined, produce 2 meters per second per second because they're smaller and weaker than the main, because, well, this isn't a Babylon 5 Starfury we're talking about. So for every second they are burning, my velocity will increase 'upward' by 2 meters per second every second. If I am moving in a straight line, forward, at a rate of 2 meters per second, then decide I want to be moving 2 meters per second in a different direction, 90 degrees perpendicular to what I am doing right now, then I pitch up 90 degrees and start turning, right? In Elite, with assist on? So what happens? Main engine pushes at 10 mps/s in the new direction while the belly thrusters push against my previous momentum at a rate of 2mps/s. It only takes me 1 second to settle onto the new heading because it is well within the limit of my main engine and well within a reasonable speed for my belly thrusters to kill my previous momentum. But what if I am traveling at 10 mps? I'll be moving at a fourty-five-degree angle compared to what I was originally doing after just one second, because the main engine is pretty powerful, but the belly thrusters take 5 full seconds to kill my previous momentum to the point where I'm traveling in a straight line again. 20mps? The same turn takes 10 seconds. 100mps? Now even my main thruster is having trouble making a change in my direction at any reasonable rate, and the curve of my path through space becomes more shallow the faster I am going. What I'm suggesting is that the computers onboard are trying to make it easier for you to go *precisely* where you want to go because driving a car is more intuitive to human instinct than flying in a frictionless vacuum. They slow the pitch-rate down so that the thrusters can better cope with the change in vector AND as feedback to the pilot that they are not in the optimum relative velocity for their maneuvering thrusters to do what they want them to do. There also might be some attempts at synchronicity, too, since the same ship flies in both vacuum and atmosphere, and they want the pilot to not feel like he's in a completely different vessel if he makes the transition from one to another--the same ship handles in relatively similar ways, for simple ease of navigation.
You could say, even, that FRONTIER are designing the computers along the same lines as the potential future-society--the reason Dangerous isn't full Newtonian is because Frontier believes it is not as fun or as easy to fly, and thus, would not appeal to as wide an audience as they want. After spending as much time in I-War 2 as I did, I don't think they're wrong, either. So just as FRONTIER are designing for a wider audience and making it more 'intuitive' even if it could be considerably more COMPLEX and FLEXIBLE for players--like me, by the way--who would like more Newtonian physics rather than less, they are catering to a lower barrier of entry. And given the number of STUPID, MORONIC warning-signs I see on things in the real world, this doesn't seem like an unrealistic path for future-humanity to go down. Sadly.
This doesn't explain why your pitch rate is SUPER SLOW when you are at relative-zero velocity or when you turn off your flight assist, but those are purely gameplay decisions. Which is an important thing that we must always keep in mind--this is a game, not a thesis on what space travel SHOULD or WOULD really be like. There are just some things you have to ignore or make up on your own
Now ask me how the shields work. Because I don't have the foggiest idea what kind of real-world science I could apply to explaining those!
