One of my friends shared a post @YogiKlatt-CIG made on Avenger_One's discord describing the rationale for the MM trichording limiter. I wanted to address parts of that in a space where more folks can participate. Consider a ship that goes 10G forward, 10G up and 10G to right. By multiplying those vectors using Pythagoras you can actually achieve 17G in total. Since 3.23 we're limiting you to 10G max so you cannot combine the axes anymore to get an advantage. For clarity, the math applied here is (forward/up/right) 10G² + 10G² + 10G² = √300 = ~17.3G. Okay, sure, nearly doubling your acceleration is certainly a problem. But simply reducing lateral strafes makes a tremendous difference: 10G² + 5G² + 5G² = √150 = ~12.3G. Other posters on Spectrum have also pointed out that part of why MM feels so terrible is that accelerations are altogether too high relative to our speeds. Hitting maximum speed within a few seconds seems like flying with shackles on and makes the lower speed limit more obtrusive than it needs to be. Obviously, globally reducing accelerations would further mitigate the impact trichording has: 8G² + 4G² + 4G² = √96 = ~9.8G. Much better, right? Therefore, the lingering question is how trichording can be "unfair" when it's as simple as holding down 3 inputs (4 with boost) and literally any ship can do it. That is what the trichording discussion is about. It is often framed as "they took away trichording" when in fact we only took away unfair trichording advantages. Unrestricted trichording is unfair because the more acceleration you have in every direction, the more you benefit from those advantages. I.e. agile fighters even agile, etc. Ah. As illustrated above, this is a problem with CIG's balancing, not the underlying mechanic. I'd also contend that trying to balance larger ships against fighters in terms of agility is a mistake from the outset. There are certainly several other levers available for making further adjustments: Setting G-force blackout thresholds such that the most agile ships can't trichord sharply for long. Giving larger ships higher accelerations but longer thruster ramp-ups, allowing them to derive similar benefits from trichording without improperly matching fighter agility. Giving larger ships a snowball's chance in Hell of hitting more agile ships. To expound on that last point: the problem is that attacking fighters can sit at ranges where ships relying on turrets can't hit them, yet which are still within their effective weapons range for dealing damage. Some straightforward solutions to this would be: Flak weapons, sooner rather than later. (Less ideal, because then flak becomes mandatory on all anti-fighter turrets.) Increasing gun range and velocity proportional to gun size, so that fighters can't attack with impunity. Adjust hardpoint sizes as needed. (Preferred, because it benefits all weapons.) For example, light fighters should cap out at mounting S2 guns and the range on S2 guns should be short enough to put them within striking distance of S2 (or larger) turrets. To prevent oversized weapons (S5+) from being too effective against light fighters, you already have several tools: weapon spread, aim assist strength, and turret/gimbal rotation rates. Something like the S2 turret on a Freelancer might not out-range a Vanguard's S5 main gun, but that's less of a problem because the Freelancer pilot should have less difficulty engaging a Vanguard as opposed to a Gladius. The best equivalent from other games is bunny hopping which was pretty dominant in 90ies games until game developers abolished it. No, bunny hopping is more directly analogous to PIP wiggling. Funnily enough, reducing lateral strafes and adding more prominent thruster ramp-ups would also mitigate that particular issue. There is the odd discussion surround realism and an "arcade FM" which is a bit odd given that we're talking about spaceships that have insanely high lateral thrust to weight ratios. So the explanation to go with here is that the engine system of a ship can produce x amount of thrust and then redistributes it across the thrusters that need it (also called shunting). I'm not going to argue from a point of realism, but acknowledging that SC ships have "insanely high lateral thrust to weight ratios" further begs the question as to why CIG has gone so far out of their way to preserve them. Why not just... reduce the lateral strafe accelerations? As for why I'm opposed to "shunting," it's the reason backstrafing became a disproportionately effective tactic. @CaptainKillgore wrote a fairly comprehensive thread detailing the problem a while back: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/removing-excess-tri-cording-g-s-was-a-big-mistake-/407678 EDIT: Also these. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/maneuvering-thruster-have-absurd-amount-of-power-n/413124 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/mm-now-requires-esoteric-knowledge-due-to-lack-of-/428207 If CIG already has a separate solution to that particular problem, I'd be very interested to hear more about it.