If I recall my Newtonian physics correctly, "an Object in motion remains in motion unless acted on by another Force." If I were to throw a ball at 30 m/s in space, the ball would fly at 30 m/s "forever", until some other force changed it's direction.

It's based on this principle that I find the current Turbo design flawed. If I can floor my ship to 235 m/s with Turbo, it should still travel at 235 m/s after I release Turbo, and not suddenly jump down to 64 m/s. This only applies to forward motion, 'turning' would involve another force. In that case, my ship should definitely slow down (unless I have Turbo engaged).

Oh and about gravity. Sure this has implications when you get close enough to a planet or star... but since you can't get all that close in VO, gravity is nearly neglible. However, it could be that 'other force', in some circumstances that I haven't thought of.

LOL this is a game and there are many things that arent real.

Lets just say that these issues are an adverse affect of using gravitational drives. These gravity provides a sort of friction so it decelerates back to a certain point of speed.

I suppose that is a good enough explanation since this is a game and there will need to be balancing factors.

oh yeah, and you would also accelerate forever, and you wouldn't be able to hear blaster fire, the engines would technically not even work at all, all the asteroids would move, we can't actually warp though wormholes, or even warp at all, our ships should continue to roll around all three axes, mining beams wouldn't exist, we would have died of so much radiation. gosh, this is a sucky game. it's like, they simplified the universe so that i can actually control my ship, and also i can do impossible things. thats so fricken unreal!

You wouldnt accelerate forever since the ship would hit its maximum velocity simply due to its thrust capability.

Radiation can be avoided with ease. The engines... Yeah I cant really think of how that would work. Shooting rockets would pose an issue on movement. Our ships wouldnt continue to roll since it only takes a simple stabilizer.

But to make the game realistic it would be like a submarine simulator with its difficult increased ten-fold.

I also think it would be nice to have moving asteroids (we only have rotating ones).

I still find it funny we have "windshields" on our combat spacecraft.

"I still find it funny we have "windshields" on our combat spacecraft."

Think of them as port holes for viewing space, Vismetal.

there are already great threads that discuss this topic and give great reasons why real physics should not be used. Try reading some of those.

"-You wouldnt accelerate forever since the ship would hit its maximum velocity simply due to its thrust capability-"

WRONG!!

without interaction from any other forces (ya know, like gravity) in deep space acceleration is a constant limited only by the amount of fuel. thrust is the amount of force exerted in one direction to propel your ship.
Thus if i were to get to deep space where there is 0 gravity, and my ship would thrust at a rate of 1 meter per second, 1 second later i would be traveling 1m/s
2 seconds later, 2m/s
3 seconds later 3m/s
1 minute later 60m/s
10 minutes later 600m/s
1 hour later 3600m/s

as long as I had fuel to continue thrusting, my speed would continue to rise.

Actually, If i were burning fuel, as time passed my ship would accelerate at a higher rate because while the thrust remained a constant the mass of my ship would be decreasing (i'm getting rid of all that fuel after all)

science lecture over for the day.....

kihjin: the reason the top speed is set and reduces after turbo is to make the game more interesting. At one time way back when in the alpha we had no top speed, and combat was impossible because ships passed each other faster than human reactions could manage. at 235m/s 2 ships closing towards each other starting from 2000 meters out cross paths in the middle in just over 4 seconds, not a lot of time to aim and fire.

Word.. The only reason that say, an aircraft, or a car slows its rate of acceleration is because of its power and efficiency at a higher speed (RPM). and power only really matters for acceleration if theres a force working against you. there is no such thing in vaccume, so power matters not. Velocity really means nothing in space, it's all relative.

First, I want to thank Daikaze for reminding me that this was a game.

It's understandable that such a physical restriction would be implemented to make the game more interesting, exactly for the reason that Spellcast indicates.

Oh well.

if your going to get technical, you have to consider relativity, because it is physically impossible to attain speeds faster than light, because the energy needed to reach the speed of light it infinite because your mass goes to infinity as you approach light speed. thus infinite mass means an infinite force is needed to accelerate.

Spellcast, forgetting about the speed of light? ;-)

Oh, and...
"the engines would technically not even work at all"
Eh? Why?

The engines wouldn't work because we have no reaction mass...

And since we're already bending gravity, why not just imagine away inertia and allow for FTL travel? That would be fun... trying to engage someone at .9c :D

Starfisher: I know you're joking, but just for the sake of my sanity, let me just say that if two fighters are approaching each other at .9 c, even if they started at opposite ends of a large asteroid field, they'd pass each other before their brains could process the information and tell their finger to click the fire button.

And yea, roguelazer's right, unless the fighters operate on some sort of magic-o-field, there's otherwise no reaction mass with which to propel them.

"-if your going to get technical, you have to consider relativity, because it is physically impossible to attain speeds faster than light, because the energy needed to reach the speed of light it infinite because your mass goes to infinity as you approach light speed. thus infinite mass means an infinite force is needed to accelerate. -"

this is true, but to accelerate to even a significant fraction (3/4ths or more) of the speed of light requires either such a large acceleration force that you would be crushed, or such a significant amount of time as to be impractical in the current argument.

Even if you allow enough time using my prior example however; it does not negate the statement i made earlier, because as you said, the mass approaches infinity. In the above example the thrust will still remain constant, so the acceleration will decrease to 0 in an inverse curve relative to the mass of the ship.

And no Tyrdium, i did not forget the speed of light, I simply did not mention it because for the numbers i was using it wouldnt begin to show an effect until....... hmm several millenia at an acceleration of one meter per second per second. someone else can do the exact math if they are bored and/or want to write a quick bash script to do it. the quick and dirty logic is:

V1 = 0 (velocity last second)
A = 1 (acceleration, in this case a constant 1 M/s/s
T = 0 (time elapsed in seconds)
Vc = 0 (current velocity)

while (Vc < ####*) {
V1 = Vc
T = T + 1
Vc = T x A + V1
}

Output Time in seconds to reach #### = T;

*(whatever the speed of light is in m/s, i'm too lazy to do the conversion at the moment.. hell you can make it half the speed of light if you want)

the curve out never *actually* reach 0 though, so you would keep accelerating...just not appreciably

thats ok tho soul, since the mass will never reach infinity either. :)

I think the main thing here is that the ships are actually using a kind of 'gravatic drive' which might well have a maximum speed limit (theoretically that might be the case) as was mentioned earlier.
This would also explain the lack of needing fuel, as this kind of system would only ever need electrical power, which would be provided by either an on-board fusion reactor (fuel lasts a loooooong time) or some combination of solar cells, etc. Maybe even antimatter energy generation (welcome to star trek).