Ship and Combat balance?

m/s = meters per sec, as far as I know.

1/3 thruster to main engine, I think, is pretty much industry standard. JJFFE has thrusters at 1/3 of main as well.

I'm curious though. what is wrong with the normal EoC model? It seems anyone who plays this mod/conversion would be used to playing EoC, so would be used to the original stats. Yes?

Well, the engines in Terminus are rated in Newtons of thrust. And so the acceleration is dependent on the mass of the hull and equipment. I have never played, so I have to guess at what a typical loadout looks like to get actual meters per second values for acceleration. But the ratio holds no matter what the ships final mass might be. I am just curious about how fast the ships could acclerate. Any specs on what a "typical" loadout might look like?

Any specs on what a "typical" loadout might look like?

Hmm.. are you wanting "loadout" as far as what equipment is installed, or what the final numbers are (Accel, Hull, Mass, Stress limit, ect)?

yeah, equipment installed. Maybe what starting gear is like, and then what an upgraded ship might have in it.

OK.. basic loadout for a Talon-class:

Propulsion: TA Avmex III (x3)

Thrusters: Cosmos STD (x2)

Armor: Standard

Avionics: Mangala 64 (scanner)
Mangala DS64 (detail scanner)
Floodlights

Equipment: TA R150 (class A computer)
Life Support
Com System
Distress System
Wheltraum 6900 (fuel system)
BCM 145S Battery
Sol Standard Heatsink
TA Surge Cell A
Cargo Scoop

Weapons: Rupture Cannon + 500 rounds ammo

With this loadout:
Lateral Accel - 189
Rotational Accel - 114
Forward Accel - 568
Reverse Accel - 568

Max velocity before over-stress is 17.9K

The primary problems with pure "main-booster-only" flight in Torn Stars are the lack of an indicated vector of travel (the HUD lines are rarely useful), the lack of a velocity indicator that isn't dependent on your ship's facing, and the lack of a pilot helmet-look control to adequately look in any direction you need to in order to spot ships relative to you. The ORB doesn't give sufficient vector data to be adequately capable of pursuing targets. FFE's scanner didn't give sufficient data either, but since everything was relative to one another instead of relative to some kind of zero-velocity relative to the system centre, ships could easily slow down and accelerate relative to each other.

Another big problem with weak thrusters is the fact that Edge of Chaos has a built in limiter where, when your velocity along one of your axes approaches zero, your thrusters along that axis scale down in power. Thus, dodging is nearly impossible with weak thrusters. I can't tell if PS did this as a balance concern or whether they did it in order to make flight seem more smooth, but it's really a pain in the butt.

To try out the combat model, my group of pirates flew through the Hoel L-Point in Bumpy's Star. There was a Lindevaal-family pirate toll at the gate. They didn't see any cargo worth lifting, so they told me and my four wingmen to scram.

When asking a heavily-armed patcom and his posse of heavily-armed wingmen to vacate the premises, it's usually wisest to exercise discretion in your wording. Suffice it to say that I wasn't impressed, and my Deadshot missile wasn't very impressed either. A micronuclear explosion caught them and walloped them in an EMP field, and the collective blasts of all of my wingmen concentrated on one of the targets, shaving him down to one-half health after quite a long barrage.

The ships managed to counter their disruption and begin shooting back. Both of the Lind IFFs were shooting at me in preference to anyone else.

The thing that struck me most immediately was that it was nearly impossible to line up with one of the enemy ships without exposing my flank. A system that mandates turning your ship entirely in order to face your main booster for the optimum vector is plainly lethal. I didn't expose my flank and as such, most of the battle was a strange strafing battle, either of us getting only two or three actual hits on any given pass (certainly not enough to penetrate a shield). Eventually my target started focusing on another of my guys and this gave the opportunity for me to catch up to him and match vectors. I was quite literally breathing on him in my viewscreen, and doing my best to keep him there, and he just wouldn't die. It took the sustained fire of most of my wingmen and a TRI-overloaded gatling cannon in order to treat him to a steadily declining health meter, and well before he was destroyed he managed to bug out.

The other target was a bit easier to pick off (after a similarly lengthy struggle) because his LDS must've been destroyed in the ensuing struggle. He went into LDS and only maintained 9999 m/s. I easily caught up to him, blasted him with an LDSI, then shredded him into scrap along with my wingmen.

On at least one occasion, I had suffered enough subsystem damage to render my ship unusable for combat -- on one occasion, my main ring got knocked out for 30 seconds or so, so I couldn't recharge weapons, and on another occasion every single one of my weapons was disabled.

Overall, it was a mixed bag. I somewhat liked the higher speeds of the combat (a considerable improvement over EoC, where ships usually drifted around at 600-800 m/s on conventional thrusters while the player zipped around at 1500 m/s on thruster override), but disliked the flight model. The weak lateral thrusters made it very difficult to catch up to anything. I had no complaints about the actual damage-per-second ratio, which seemed just right: ship survivability had improved considerably.

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This is a public service announcement: Please look through all six degrees of freedom before crossing the L-point.