What causes speed to be limited?

Amargosa

A
There's no reason for a limited speed, assuming flight assist is off.

The reasoning that the thrusters are programmed to stay within a limit doesn't fly, because after shutting off the thrusters while descending towards a planet, a ship should keep gaining speed at a constant rate until impact, yet it is still staying limited.
 

AlexAndTheDJ

A
Amargosa said:
There's no reason for a limited speed, assuming flight assist is off.

The reasoning that the thrusters are programmed to stay within a limit doesn't fly, because after shutting off the thrusters while descending towards a planet, a ship should keep gaining speed at a constant rate until impact, yet it is still staying limited.
Click to expand...

Also, how can you pilot a ship from your living room, with 20kLy between you, and have no button delay?

Madness!
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
I'm curious to see if there are any adavantages suggested to not having a speed limit. I'd be surprised if anything practical comes up.
 

DeathFish

D
Amargosa said:
There's no reason for a limited speed, assuming flight assist is off.

The reasoning that the thrusters are programmed to stay within a limit doesn't fly, because after shutting off the thrusters while descending towards a planet, a ship should keep gaining speed at a constant rate until impact, yet it is still staying limited.
Click to expand...

Even between planets, once the initial thrust is given, speed should continue to increase with FA off and the throttle chopped. There is no friction in space.

But if this didn’t happen, half of the need for engineering would go out the window (-:

Elite tramples all over physics in order to make space flight into a game. If it didn’t, the we wouldn’t be able to hear asteroids blowing up, all faster than light straight lines would be curved, we would be crushed flat accelerating to light speed in four seconds, and after doing a multi light year jump and back on a contract, the people who paid us for it would be centuries dead.

On the whole I am extremely glad that Elite obeys Newtonian physics instead of Einsteinian. Well, more or less.
 

Kzak

Kzak
Guess FDev saw what non-limited ship speeds led to in Elite 2, for example - jousting-type combat in which two (or more) ships flew towards each other at a significant fraction of c, being in weapons range for a fraction of a second before having to turn and go for a new round of jousting, which could take quite some time to bring ship combat to its conclusion.
 

IndigoWyrd

IndigoWyrd
DeathFish said:
Even between planets, once the initial thrust is given, speed should continue to increase with FA off and the throttle chopped. There is no friction in space.

But if this didn’t happen, half of the need for engineering would go out the window (-:

Elite tramples all over physics in order to make space flight into a game. If it didn’t, the we wouldn’t be able to hear asteroids blowing up, all faster than light straight lines would be curved, we would be crushed flat accelerating to light speed in four seconds, and after doing a multi light year jump and back on a contract, the people who paid us for it would be centuries dead.

On the whole I am extremely glad that Elite obeys Newtonian physics instead of Einsteinian. Well, more or less.
Click to expand...

More accurately, speed should remain constant. Acceleration may well cease at a certain point, based on the amount of thrust applied, and that make sense. But once that peak is reached, it should not continue indefinitely, but momentum should continue without the need for additional thrust.
 

Bowak

B
Amargosa said:
There's no reason for a limited speed, assuming flight assist is off.

The reasoning that the thrusters are programmed to stay within a limit doesn't fly, because after shutting off the thrusters while descending towards a planet, a ship should keep gaining speed at a constant rate until impact, yet it is still staying limited.
Click to expand...

The reason is Frontier - as in Elite 2. Dogfights at a fair chunk of lightspeed were protracted to say the least.
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
Kzak said:
Guess FDev saw what non-limited ship speeds led to in Elite 2, for example - jousting-type combat in which two (or more) ships flew towards each other at a significant fraction of c, being in weapons range for a fraction of a second before having to turn and go for a new round of jousting, which could take quite some time to bring ship combat to its conclusion.
Click to expand...

It's this that makes me rationalise this in my head as the ship's computer cutting out further acceleration once the limits of workable manoeuvrability are reached.
 

DeathFish

D
Deejayeff145 said:
I'm curious to see if there are any adavantages suggested to not having a speed limit. I'd be surprised if anything practical comes up.
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If you could go infinitely fast, then it would take a long while to slow down. I can just imagine some noob dropping a bit early out of supercruise, thinking, hey, I’ll just point it at the station, open the throttle and wait a bit... then the door bell rings and he forgets, leaving his ship to go through the slot at 17 billion miles an hour and spilling my beer when he turns his sorry self to wallpaper paste on the back wall (-:

It would also make it tricky catching other players in combat, because even with less thrust than you, they wouldn’t need much of a start to make it difficult to catch them up any time soon if they boosted out and kept accelerating. And if you did catch them, the speed you were both doing by then would make it problematic to get in more than one shot, because any speed mismatch would play havoc with turning radii?
 
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