Ship and Combat balance?

Actually, despite being called a tug, I have never seen it being used as a tug. I wonder whether originally it was planned to use it to move pods back and forth between cargo ships and the pod spewer? By it's design it was meant to pull things, but nothing too big, or the thruster exhaust would burn up what ever is being towed. Dock a tug to most ships and you can see the problem. However, a cargo pod tucks in nicely between the four engine nacelles

Weapon Linking:

I was a bit wrong about weapon linking. I went back to look at what had been discovered and found that POG can link weapons. However the function is broken, and if you have beam weapon mounted on your ship, it crashes. So, at the moment, there is no way to have linked weapons and beams at the same time.

Well, no easy way to have both. What could be done, since this is only applied to the one player ship, is when a new weapon is mounted, remove any beam weapons currently in place, link the non-beam weapons, then put the beam weapons back in. A bit messy, but then it might be possible to have both. Although, I don't know what that weapon link might do if you remove the linked weapons because I have not tried it.

I should have done these calculations long ago, but I am an idiot, so I didn't.

Minimum Ship Acceleration:

Ships drop out of LDS at 25km from a station. Assume the station is 5km in radius (not unusual for large asteroids) for a total travel distance of 20km.

Ships drop out of LDS at 1000m/s. To stop they must reach 0 m/s for an average speed of 500m/s

20km/500m/s = 40 seconds of time to decelerate.

1000m/s/40 seconds = 25m/s acceleration.

Thus the absolute minimum accleration that the game supports for any ship is 25m/s otherwise that ship will face plant on an asteroid when it drops out of LDS. Even super gigantic mega freighters and cruisers must have an accleration larger than this value.

Shane discovered this by trial and error, but this calculation makes it formal.

What is more, 25m/s is the accleration of the transports, after being fully loaded with cargo. This means freighters will need values up in the 50m/s range or higher.

After running the calculation, I tried it and sure enough. A fully loaded freighter smashed nose first into an asteroid. A capital carrier did the same. So the game physics are pretty close to true. And I should have done these calculations months ago.

I guess this begs the question, can the minimum exit speed from LDS be adjusted, or can the distance at which ships drop out of LDS from their target be adjusted?

Not to my knowledge. Capsule space has an exit speed in Flux.ini but LDS does not. There is no reference to distance that I have seen. There are very few controls for the AI in general. Seems a black box.

What is more, 25m/s is the accleration of the transports, after being fully loaded with cargo. This means freighters will need values up in the 50m/s range or higher.

Are these numbers forward thrust accel rates or what? I noticed that you still have laterals in 11.2 at 17 (for the tug) and 15 (for freighters).

For a 10pod freighter you have these values: Maximum linear acceleration as a vector (m/s/s)
acceleration=(15, 15, 25)

For a 20pod freigher the values are: Maximum linear acceleration as a vector (m/s/s)
acceleration=(15, 15, 100)

How does that work?

I still think minimum lateral thrust should be 25. Minimum forward thrust should be 150, with the tug being (35,35,250)...and everything set off of that benchmark, as the tug tends to be the "starter ship", and it makes the tug a little more responsive and easier to fly for newbies, more survivable, and just more fun (IMO).

I know I said I like the old EoC set speeds of 750-800, but JT was right in that, if the AI is reduced to those speeds, the player can practically fly circles around them with overrides. So I was thinking of a compromise of 1000 low-end freighter speeds to 2500 higher end interceptors.

With the distances in the game, a little higher velocity shouldn't be a problem and it does lengthen out combat distance a little more, to make missles a long-range weapon instead of a short-range bludgeon.

[EDIT]

Yep, with 25 lateral thrust, freighters no longer have any problems with docking or formation flying...and it no longer looks like they all got kicked out of flight school.