If I drop down to a two ton tank and use a light FSD, the new drives on my Courier let me do 815 with six tons of weapons and eight or nine tons of armor and shielding.
I bought an iEagle...how fast can it go?
- Thread starter GreyAreaUK
- Start date
If I drop down to a two ton tank and use a light FSD, the new drives on my Courier let me do 815 with six tons of weapons and eight or nine tons of armor and shielding.
fast ships are handy for when frontier wants us to brute force planets to find use full things.....
also great fun for harassing player who think blowing up transport t9's in a god rolled ferdi is a fair fight. (interdict run jump interdict repeat over and over)
also great fun for harassing player who think blowing up transport t9's in a god rolled ferdi is a fair fight. (interdict run jump interdict repeat over and over)
Deleted member 110222
D
As fast as a DANG heckin' FAST doggo doin' a ZOOM.
And here she is. Currently got her boosting to 710,ish, which is fine for my purposes:
I started with an iEagle as my speed build which was about the same as yours, then swapped the modded drive into a stripped down courier and got 809 boost. Pretty average roll on both good and bad.
It might be worth trying that at a shipyard just to see what you can get out of it.
iEagle? Fast? Nah mate. Viper....
According to Coriolis.edcd.io, both the iEagle and the Viper Mk3 tie for top speed at 832m/sec with the iCourier trailing behind at 790m/sec when fitted with Enhanced Thrusters and absolutely engineered for the lightest possible weight.
iEagle - https://eddp.co/u/6NB8ReGV
Viper - https://eddp.co/u/v6yGFWFr
iCourier - https://eddp.co/u/hSoghS9A
It should be noted though that you can actually change the FSD to 3A on both the iEagle and Viper and the top speed apparently doesn't change until you start adding other things like shields. As noted in the screenshot in Supermoose's post, it's still possible to get higher than 832m/sec boost speeds with godroll secondary effects to the Optimal Multiplier, and with gravity assists from high-g worlds.
iEagle - https://eddp.co/u/6NB8ReGV
Viper - https://eddp.co/u/v6yGFWFr
iCourier - https://eddp.co/u/hSoghS9A
It should be noted though that you can actually change the FSD to 3A on both the iEagle and Viper and the top speed apparently doesn't change until you start adding other things like shields. As noted in the screenshot in Supermoose's post, it's still possible to get higher than 832m/sec boost speeds with godroll secondary effects to the Optimal Multiplier, and with gravity assists from high-g worlds.
The main issue with the performance enhanced thrusters is that they are very sensitive to the optimal mass penalty from the mods and because of the way the optimal mass works for these thrusters the minimum mass cutoff actually occurs around 80% of the listed optimal mass (this varies by thruster size) rather than 50% minimum mass cutoff for normal thrusters. This means if you have a mod that has a slightly lower optimal multiplier but a better optimal mass you can often do better with the mod that keeps your optimal mass as high as possible. I have a fully engineered Sidewinder with a grade 3 dirty drive mod on the performance enhanced thrusters and the optimal multiplier bonus was a modest 18.5% increase. However, it also got a secondary effect that improved the optimal mass penalty to the point that it is only a very minimal penalty of 0.1 tons that is close to zero. The stock thruster has an optimal mass of 60 tons and the mod reduced this to 59.9 tons, and because of the way performance enhanced thrusters work with optimal mass this means the minimum mass cutoff for weight penalties went from 50 tons to 49.9 tons. My ship's total weight is 49.4 tons meaning I actually have an extra 0.5 tons to work with before the weight starts affecting the ship's speed. It currently has a boost of 607 but is fully armed and armored with military alloys. There's no point in trying to cut the weight down on my build because it's still slightly below the minimum mass threshold for the thrusters even with full weapons and armor which means I basically have a fast armed and armored combat Sidewinder.
As an example of how sensitive the ship is to the optimal mass, as soon as I get above the 49.9 ton minimum mass cutoff it drops the boost speed dramatically. I lose something like 15 m/s of boost speed for every ton above 49.9 tons. Even a small mass increase, such as swapping out a PD for a chaff launcher, which only brings my weight to 50.2 tons which is 0.3 tons above the minimum mass cutoff means that my boost drops from 607 to 601. If it didn't have such a good optimal mass secondary I wouldn't be able to keep the ship fully armed and armored because any optimal mass penalty beyond this would have easily driven the minimum mass threshold well below 50 tons.
This is the situation I'm currently in with my Sidewinder because of how good the optimal mass is on my current mod. If I were re-rolling mods to try to improve on the build I would basically be looking for another lucky roll that preserved the optimal mass as much as possible but in this case it would be very hard to improve on an optimal mass penalty of only 0.1 tons. I could try rerolling some grade 5 rolls but I doubt I would ever get another roll with a nearly zero optimal mass penalty so I'm probably going to keep my fast armored Sidewinder the way it is since a boost of 607 is more than enough for a fast combat build. It's also quite fun to fly and with overcharged incendiary multicannons it can do enough damage to smaller ships to be useful in combat as well.
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It's all in the reflexes
I know a guy Jack Burton, he's always saying that [yesnod]
I am in split minds with this notion.
1 - surely the Einsteinian model would limit speeds well below the speed of light, trumping the Newtonian model?
2 - the time distortion at high speeds is impractical in a multiplayer game (fuel to the fire of the large number of people in this forum who'd prefer solo only)
3 - if the engines were unshackled, we'd be constantly crashing into planets and stars. So it makes sense that unhacked engines would continually reverse thrusts to limit speeds
Now - if there were an engineer to bypass the engine safety...
To be fair, the Alpha and Beta stages of the original game followed Newtonian rules, and didn't have a cap on the top speeds of any of the ships. But people quickly learned how to use FA/off to abuse it, and were approaching speeds close to 0.5c in normal space (IE not super cruise). Personally I preferred it that way. It forced us to learn how to actually maneuver in space. But the people who abused it pretty much killed any chance of it going live.
But let's be honest, if Elite were trying to simulate real space physics, we couldn't have spacecraft that behave like fighter jets. The maneuvering thrusters just to allow quick hairpin turns would in reality need to be larger than the main rear thruster just to cancel out any momentum in a reasonable amount of time.
If and when we actually start populating space, the quick nimble fightercraft that are rampant in every possible Sci-Fi franchise would not be a thing.
But let's be honest, if Elite were trying to simulate real space physics, we couldn't have spacecraft that behave like fighter jets. The maneuvering thrusters just to allow quick hairpin turns would in reality need to be larger than the main rear thruster just to cancel out any momentum in a reasonable amount of time.
If and when we actually start populating space, the quick nimble fightercraft that are rampant in every possible Sci-Fi franchise would not be a thing.
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Didn't even need FA off, just appropriate combinations of thruster and rotational input.
It's actually pretty plausible, and consistent with the laws of physics - as i've already pointed out, technically, the ship is not 'flying through space' - rather, space is moving around the ship (around the warp bubble the FSD creates), and the ship itself is practically stationary within that bubble... or to put it another way, the FSD is accelerating the spatial reference frame to which the ship's motion is relatively stationary.
Yes, it's still sci-fi in the here-and-now, but far more consistent and plausible than the notion that future spaceships will no longer be able to apply basic thrust.
Certainly, the basic laws of motion may be refined in the future, but only with regards to things like MOND and scale invariance - the actual laws of physics themselves won't change in the future! Conservation of energy and momentum will still apply.
This idea that the super high-performance space fighters of the future won't be able to apply basic thrust is just utterly hat stand. Ripping out a perfectly good engine and replacing it with a more powerful and expensive one, just so that it'll cut out again at a very-slightly-higher slow taxiing velocity, is just peanut brittle.
Ultimately, what's the attraction of a 1st person spaceflight game supposed to be if it's incapable of basic spaceflight? Space is big, and a vacuum, so space ships go 'fast' because there's nothing to slow them down, and they need to cover big distances quickly.
The FSD is a fantastic compliment to basic spaceflight, not least as an alternative to time-acceleration in a MP game. But as a wholesale replacement for the thrills of basic unhindered motion, it's just no substitute.
In deep space, you've little way of knowing how fast you're going anyway - aside from how fast a target meter is ticking down. But where it really matters is precisely where all the fun of a spaceflight game resides - principally when close to other objects, such as planets, stars and other ships etc. Especially when realistic gravity is thrown into the mix. High-diving alien landscapes and white dwarves etc. etc. In ED, all of this really cool, central gameplay is off-limits and impossible, due to the space speed limit. You can't even free-fall naturally, since that would mean accelerating past your ship's designated speed limit. It just rips the heart out of the whole game, making everything else in it utterly pointless and bereft of purpose and context.
Attitude control is completely independent of linear velocity in space, because there's no fluid flowing over 'flight surfaces' or the hull. So your flight vector and heading vector can be controlled separately. I fly FA-off exclusively in Elite 3 (FFED3D) and it's totally intuitive and natural without much practice. Rotational damping is still applied, but not linear damping. If you switch FA-on then both angular and linear damping is applied, and it'll take equal time to decelerate as accelerate in any given direction, but you can still freely rotate unhindered, because there's no atmosphere in space!
That reminds me ... my iEagle settles dust. Canyon racing anyone? With fixed weaponry (including mines, no lasers or rails) optionally for the fun - boom alongside?
The aerodynamic shapes also waste a lot of space you could use in an environment where aerodynamics don't come into play. A transport vessel that was built in space would take advantage of size. I recall in one of the space sims I built a cube that worked well, and the thrusters were the same size on all sides. It doesn't need to "land", but it needs to dock with a hatch just like modern craft do. Landing in space doesn't make a lot of sense.
Relativity includes and encompasses the 'Newtonian model' (or rather, the basic principles of motion). Relativity doesn't only kick in at ludicrous speeds - all motion is relative, all the time everywhere. Except in ED, where motion is absolute with respect to coordinate space (ie. as if things move with respect to space itself, which is a ludicrous and illogical notion we discarded centuries ago).
Again - please - nobody's suggesting we get rid of the FSD, and try replace it with time acceleration. For fast travel, FSD's fine (could be tweaked here and there, but that's another conversation). What some of us find bafflingly incongruous is simply the space speed limit in "normal space". Many here, like you, think of this as "full Newtonain", which really is just needlessly overcomplicating the issue. It's incredibly simple - spaceships don't have speed limits. If you have fuel, and a working thruster, then you should be able to accelerate or decelerate until either or both those conditions are no longer true. In addition to having FSD, not as a replacement for it.
You wouldn't be able to carry enough fuel to get anywhere near relativistic speeds anyway, so time dilation and length contraction effects needn't be an issue. The kinds of speed ranges we're currently missing out on are those wherein all that is fun and appealing about free spaceflight arise - ie. when playing with gravity around stars and planets.
Besides, we already have superluminal travel, as well as black holes, yet there's virtually no relativistic effects implemented for these situations either! We have a dumb "galactic time" zone that doesn't even take into account day / night cycles on local planets, let alone allow for clock drift between clients.
There's a great discussion to be had on the practicalities of including these effects in a MP game (as opposed to a blanket dismissal of such fantastic gaming elements) but again, that's not the discussion here. Relativistic effects aren't gonna stop you high-diving through Jupiter's cloud tops or buzzing the comms tower at a moon base at mach 10.
How and why would you be anywhere near the controls of a spaceship if you couldn't help crashing into a planet? Besides which, skimming the surface - basically, a scarecely-controlled near-miss - is hugely entertaining! Ever been catapulted off a white dwarf at 30 km/s with your hull vaporising as warning sirens scream from your astrogation console? In Elite 2 and 3, this kind of lark was your bread and butter gameplay. In Elite 4, it's entirely absent.
Of course you should be able to CFIT! (Pilot-speak for controlled flight into terrain.) The thrill of getting it wrong; the potential hairs-breadth difference between that, and scraping the top of a mountain ridge as you desperately pitch up and give it everything she's got, cap'n, glancing back to see your spreading trail of engine vapour arcing down to the surface and mixing with the clouds of shattered rock dust you've just kicked up... that is living the Elite dream...
Compared to simply crashing out of "supercruise" into "orbital cruise" or "glide mode", with its absurd and pathetic optimum pitch angle restricting even your basic freedom of rotation... it's just naff rubbish in comparison! "Oh whoops my shields and hull took a slight hit, gosh darned it".. yeah, proper hardcore thrills right there eh?
'Unlockables' - especially with regards to basic piloting freedom - are one of the blasphemies i hoped we'd never see in an Elite sequel...
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The issue here is that all of the player-controlled ships are supposed to be capable of flying in atmosphere and landing on planets with atmosphere, we just don't have that functionality in-game yet. Having aerodynamic fighters or lift/control surfaces would greatly enhance maneuvering and flight efficiency on atmospheric worlds. The larger capital ships that don't land could be optimized for space-only maneuvering of course but it does make sense for the player-controlled ships to resemble atmospheric craft.