What force is reducing speed

The force of game balance.

Seriously, if we could accelerate constantly then the ship with the fastest acceleration would escape any scenario with zero effort (aka pressing boost button) all the time.
 
Use the new camera system and WATCH your ship's thruster behavior when you throttle down to zero. It will put full reverse thrusters on until your velocity is zero, then shut down.

You can see the same type of thruster behavior if you engage the Docking Computer and watch the ship perform using the external camera views. Pretty cool to watch actually! Never realized how many thrusters these ships actually have, and all are fully animated!

Pretty cool, and one of the nice attention to detail features of Elite! :)
 
My personal headcannon is that the frame shift drive keeps us 'locked' into the current 'reference/instance' and the thrusters can only power an acceleration up to the values shown in game. Like, the FSD generates a hidden mass almost which is why we do not accelerate indefinitely and is why our thrusters continually burn, rather than burning up to 500m/s then shutting off as you do not need constant thrust under newtonian physics.

It's a stretch, but in absentia of any actual lore explanation by Frontier, it's what I use to justify it.
 
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