Ship and Combat balance?

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.

FFE made you relative to the closest (or largest) cosmic body (star, planet, moon, station, ect).

So if you are clickin' along at 20000 kps in deep space, that speed is relative to the closest cosmic body. Your ship's laterals won't do much to change your vector at that velocity. They will, over time and distance, but not really very noticably ( unless you kick in the star-dreamer and accelerate time).

Now, if another ship closes into combat distance, then they are also flying at 20000 kps ( relative to the closest cosmic body), and then thrusters are useful in changing orientation to that incoming ship.

That's what I meant. If you're flying towards, say, Lave in a Cobra Mk3 and you're intercepted by pirates, they're also travelling at the exact same speed towards Lave that you are, so the only real movement you have to be concerned with is how fast you're moving relative to one another.

In EoC (and Terminus), everything moves relative to the solar system reference point (i.e., the star), and it just feels a little more "sticky" to me.

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

In EoC (and Terminus), everything moves relative to the solar system reference point (i.e., the star), and it just feels a little more "sticky" to me.

Which make lateral thrusters even more important, because of where you are pointing the nose of your ship, changes your velocity indicator and alters the onboard flight-assist. With extremely weak laterals, flight becomes an exercise in frustration.

I liked your explanation about combat though. Exposing your flank in order to close to a target is not a very sound combat tactic.

{EDIT}

I just made these changes to the tug.ini file.

Maximum linear acceleration as a vector (m/s/s)
acceleration=(150, 150, 450) Alot higher then the (5, 5, 150).

Ok, looking at the values in Terminus, the accel is in meters per second. So forward accel is 568m/s. That is just huge compared to EoC. Nothing accelerates that fast. The advanced patcom is by far the highest, with 350 m/s.

Take a look at the standard EoC values for a better idea of normal. 150/50 is more the norm for fast ships. Player ships are better at lat movement. Nearly 1 to 1 with forward thrusters. (and still the darn tug can't dodge a rock.) The bolt speeds need to match the weapons carefully. And missiles were always the tugs great weakness.

JT raised a very pertinent point regarding the lack of an indicated vector of travel. That may make sans-lateral flight model fairly difficult for most people.

In regard to Terminus, GrandpaTrout, as your calculations surmised, the ships accelerated very VERY fast. Combat as I recall it involved tiny blips zooming past each other. So I don't think we are going to need to make our model have speeds that are faster than stock Iwar or Iwar2.

My beef with that is that any TUG would, by its very nature, have inordinately beefy lateral thrusting systems. Just take a wet-navy tug as an exmple; they can move sideways with nearly as much power as forwards (or reverse - lol). In fact, many newer models have their propulsion on "pods" that can swivel 360 degrees, much like several spaceships in the game... Jockeying massive, bulky cargo in tight situations (for example, docking) where you CAN'T use your main thrusters/flip axis just plain requires this. You should watch tug races sometime!

The main differences tugs should have compared to "true" combat ships should be:
- Avionics
- Armor
- Weaponry
- ECM/ECCM

These differences should translate into definite upper limits that can't fully compare with "true" combat ships' max loadouts. After all, there's only so many hardpoints you can jury-rig or advanced sensor suites you can cram in, no? A lot of any tug's internal space would be occupied with power and fuel subsystems... A possible workaround might be external (and thus, fragile) systems.

Making the tug "logy" is, in my opinion, completely unfair if you look at historical examples. In fact, tugs are incredibly fast and maneuverable for their size class. This shouldn't be surprising, since they're essentially fuel tanks with engines!