UPDATE: Amazing job CIG! I'm loving the new afterburner speeds for ships like the Constellation, Caterpillar and Starfarer! Now they may be able to escape combat if a captain is attentive to his surroundings. Thank you!! Original post follows: The current speeds are game breakingly slow and a simple explanation is not enough. It seems that CIG (or CR specifically) are the only ones who are not seeing what a bad state they put larger ships in. Pros Pirates will appreciate the loot pinatas Cons/fallout First and foremost, this is a videogame and needs to be fun. At their current speeds, flying a Starfarer, Caterpillar or even a Constellation is the cure to insomnia. I'd be extremely insulted if someone labeled my product this way and my goal is not to insult anyone. CIG devs, please fly one of these ships for even 15 minutes without drinking coffee and try to stay awake. In the unlikely event you didn't fall asleep, come back to read the remaining cons. See the loot pinata pro - no one wants to be forced into a fight every single time a pirate is nearby because, despite the captain's best efforts at detection, his ship is too damned slow to ever escape. It doesn't feel right. These ships have more in common with planes than boats, and even a Boeing 747 which has roughly the same weight as a Starfarer can travel at 274 m/s (3x the Starfarer's SCM speed!) despite having to contend with wind resistance and and 900 year old technology. The engines on these ships are massive, easily to scale with smaller ships vs their own engines. Therefore there is no explanation as to why the output on such beastly things would be so weak. Pitch and yaw are too slow, forcing players to use gimbals and screwing over HOTAS and HOSAS users. If a ship was designed with pilot controlled guns, there is no good argument that can justify why he should not be able to use them. Having an escort isn't a justification; it will only amplify the problem. If I'm flying a caterpillar at 100 SCM and a Buccaneer is escorting me, we will both be annoyed, communicate our boredom to each other and realize we're better off playing a different job, or a game that isn't trying to bore us to death. If you break a game, game players are quick to move on to other things. Case in point: For Honor with it's laggy, broken P2P matches bled 50% of it's user base in 2 weeks. https://www.vg247.com/2017/03/07/after-just-2-weeks-for-honor-lost-50-of-its-player-base-on-steam-the-same-rate-as-the-division/ This type of ultra slow gameplay will only appeal to a very small segment of super hardcore players. Meanwhile, the majority of players will not want to pilot the ships that are meant to be the backbone of the UEE. Many players who plunked down $300+ (or XX million UEC in game) are already feeling ripped off and regretting their purchases (see: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/370913/2-6-1-caterpillar-speed-slower-than-a-dead-snail/p1) Those who aren't regretting it yet are hopeful that CIG will fix this huge mistake, and while my tone appears negative, know that I'm hopeful too. Note: If an Idris really ends up with the rumoured 5 PRE 50 SCM 100 AB speeds there will be an absolute backlash the likes of which the forums have not yet seen. TL;DR: People play videogames for fun, and the current speeds of larger ships (speed, pitch, yaw) is the definition of absolute boredom, while equally suffering from an extreme lack of realism. I'll continue to add pros and cons that others come up with to the OP as they appear in the comments. Please upvote if you feel the same, as CIG needs to fix this. EDIT: I'm not asking for big ships to be faster than fighters. @VelJharig stated the fix very well: One very simple example of another balance option used to be proposed about a year ago... give everything the same top flight speed and adjust acceleration to get to that speed for each ship. That way large ships can't "outrun" small fighters, but using a large ship isn't painfully frustrating when at sub-quantum speeds the rest of the time. We're supposed to use these ships to explore full planets. Think about that gameplay for a moment at current ship speeds. With this in mind, a vigilant captain can scan frequently and spot pirates early. This will give them enough time to slowly accelerate to top speed and evade the fight without needing to quantum jump out of the zone they're working in. By that same logic, an inattentive captain will be caught unaware by pirates and will never be able to reach the necessary speeds to evade them, forcing them into combat. Current balancing puts even the most attentive captain at the mercy of the loudest, dumbest pirate. EDIT 2: I like the way @Data put it: Top speeds should be the same or very close across ship types under equivalent flight modes. It's acceleration that must vary wildly. How many years have we been saying this now? You can apply this to turn rates too. The game already restricts your turn movements when you're in afterburn/cruise mode. If it's an issue with big ships being too maneuverable in cruise then nerf the turn rates (but otherwise don't touch them). They should still be able to reach equivalent speeds. The ships can feel heavy and still conform to reasonable levels of immersion and physics -- namely that, given enough time and fuel, a supermassive ship should be able to reach the same relative peak velocity as a small fighter in the real universe.