Elite Dangerous | Corsair

[Dillon Fallon]

I think what we're really seeing is why class 7 thrusters are for large ships. Unless it's incredibly fat, you just can't exceed the minimum mass. 600 m/s seems like an arbitrary number that means there's nothing faster with the same level of utility.

 

[Urbansparx]

The Viper Mk3 max speed is 932 m/s. To get to this speed (boosted) it is a quite the task and does compromise the ship for pretty much any other task other than canyon racing really. Imperial ships have generally been fast compared to others. I had just hoped that the Corsair, via equipment choices, load out and engineering would go a little faster, but to be fair as noted by Helmut, you can add a lot of mass to the ship and still maintain this 600m/s, or thereabouts. Perhaps Fdev will have a tinker with it, but if not it is still a great ship and we have another three ships coming this year, so what does it matter really. Perhaps one of those will be a medium racer, hot rod.

 

[Jumpin' Jack Flash]

Hi

. Perhaps one of those will be a medium racer, hot rod.

'Cough'....or a Very Large (Panther Clipper) racer hot rod! ...just joking...mostly.

Jack

 

[Elyssaen]

Another way to look at the Corsair is that the Size 7 thruster is entirely optional. It actually causes the ship to have more power issues than the Python or Krait, so all things being equal you'd prefer not to use it. If you think of it as a Size 6 thruster ship with the option to step up, then you get:

1. About 450 m/s and 570 m/s boost on an engineered multi-role loadout of around 765t.
2. 473 m/s and 600 m/s boost on a light loadout of around 600-630t.
3. Dropping to 444 m/s and 562 m/s boost on a heavy combat ship of around 820t.
4. A reliable 473 m/s and 600 m/s boost if you opt to fit Size 7 thrusters.

The top speed and top boost speed seem fine to me, I don't think it should be faster and I don't want Frontier to make a heavy loadout slower either. The only thing I'll say is the marketing around it could've been clearer for players. The thruster size was bigged up and used to give the impression that it implied the ship would be remarkably fast or agile, when that's just not what thruster size means in practice. Instead, they could've said the Size 7 thruster guaranteed the maximum performance from the chassis with any loadout, and potentially cut some of the confusion off at the beginning.

 

[Markov Chaney]

Latency has remained mostly unchanged because there hasn't been a 16x increase in the speed of light, though, and that's the bit where moving too fast per update starts to break things.

The primary cause of latency (and jitter) on consumer-grade equipment in a domestic setting has not been speed of light considerations since before ADSL. The quality of on-premise equipment has exponentially increased and that has brought the commodity ping time down to under 20ms. You are right that nobody pushed Cambridge closer to London, but even if they had it would make no practical difference; that is less than one millisecond of the end-to-end time.

Of course the top 1% of all gamers out there had 20ms times ten years ago anyway because they were already on (expensive) fibre and often using alternatives to the ISP-provided Ethernet gear. But NOW you can buy broadband for £20/month and get 20ms out of the box, wireless an' all.

And in fact one could argue that is partially due to an increase in the speed of light, because the speed of light in fibre is higher than the speed of light in copper. ;-)

Anyway, in thinking about your challenge to my original point, I'm now thinking jitter is more the problem anyway, because we already know some physics in this game engine is tied to frames instead of a wall-clock tick ...

 

[Jinx Chrome]

The primary cause of latency (and jitter) on consumer-grade equipment in a domestic setting has not been speed of light considerations since before ADSL. The quality of on-premise equipment has exponentially increased and that has brought the commodity ping time down to under 20ms. You are right that nobody pushed Cambridge closer to London, but even if they had it would make no [...]

It is very likely (I found some sources but no direct statement) that FDev is running their games in the AWS cloud and not on premises.

 

[Elyssaen]

Anyway, in thinking about your challenge to my original point, I'm now thinking jitter is more the problem anyway, because we already know some physics in this game engine is tied to frames instead of a wall-clock tick ...

It's an interesting topic, but I think you've barked down the wrong tree here generally. The Corsair's 600 m/s boost speed limit isn't the result of some legacy code restricting ship speed for performance reasons. It's the same as every other ship's speed limit, several of which are significantly faster.

It's not even unusual for it to be easy to hit the cap. While the Viper requires significant lightweighting to hit its 932 m/s cap, if you take a stock Orca, give it a 6A thruster and engineer it you'll hit its 642 m/s cap immediately. It's then almost as difficult to make it heavy enough to drop that as it is with the Corsair.

 

[DemiserofD]

In practice, being able to hit the cop more easily does increase your average speed over time. Most ships take a little while to get there, which means they spend more of their time below that point, which means their average speed is, in practice, lower.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You are right that nobody pushed Cambridge closer to London, but even if they had it would make no practical difference; that is less than one millisecond of the end-to-end time.

Sure, if everyone in the instance is in the UK, latency isn't necessarily such a big deal. The UK isn't very large.

Worst case is well over 1/8th second, though, even at lightspeed, for people on opposite sides of the planet. At 600m/s you can already move your ship's entire size in that time. And I've certainly been in India-Europe-US joint instances before, which would be approaching that level of spread.