Combat at cruise speeds is a bad idea. with the low mav to mains thrust ratio, thrusting past a ships rated SCM speed increases the distances to target most often beyond weapons range. I see this constantly in PvP, enemies will be either: jousting me at high speeds: flying off for 8-12km while they negate their inertia, build up speed again and fly off in the other direction... circling at 2,000m+ continuously firing at me... Only when the other pilot basically agrees to a fly at lower speed does a fight actually occur, and that is most "fun"/effective at SCM speeds. Also, the positional desync/update is not reliable enough for combat at high speeds (and likely never will be), while fighting at 1,000m/s your target randomly teleports 10's to 100's of meters toward and away from you. I'd love to see evidence of this improving in future but right now it's very hard to imagine. TLDR: Combat at cruise speeds is not viable within the game design weapon or possible with existing/near future networking capabilities. Cruise Mode A relatively popular solution on our discord is to bring back a separate "cruise mode" for speeds higher than a ships rated SCM speed. Features of a cruise mode: Delay the change in velocity above SCM speeds Only be available in forward direction (no decoupled reverse cruise speeds) Enable high speed travel (potentially faster than the maximum cruise speeds now?) Combat should basically be unviable in this mode Limited angular accelerations (limit pitch/yaw rate based on velocity) Rather than adding a new mechanic @Whitesnake proposed to "...add a middle travel mode that uses QT to accelerate to high speed (1000 m/s+) but is limited just as QT is in terms of spool, cooldown, heat, power, etc." which I think fits and uses an existing mechanic efficiently. Thoughts?