This is something I posted a little bit ago. I'd really like to know if anyone at CIG has tried something similar to this or is the game engine incapable of doing this? As the current failed approaches to the speed cap is, well, terrible. Putting it politely. And I am remarking at the 3.9A High Speed Combat card and previous iterations of adjusting ship speeds. TL;DR Removing the speed cap and giving the players the ability to see their speed relative to another will enhance space ship combat. Ship Speed Cap: It’s an artificial limiter that really hinders meaningful flight and combat. With combat occurring at higher speeds as ships approach an artificial speed limiter that creates a ceiling/wall that ships cannot pass. In space the relative speeds between two craft is all that matters. Not the overall group velocity. Being at 1000 m/s or 100 m/s relative to the star Stanton should have zero impact on how projectiles and ships move. It’s all about accelerations. Proposal: Remove the speed cap Replace Match Target Velocity with Match Target Reference Frame Implement Quantum Drive breaking mechanism HUD update to show relative velocity to target and velocity to Star Stanton. Bit of an explainer to reference frames. Your movement speed is calculated with respect to the target. I’ll use an example to help explain this. Say target A is moving at 500 m/s any direction. You are moving at 550 m/s in the same direction as target A. You then set the target as your reference frame. Now the speed of you with respect to the reference is 50 m/s and the reference is 0 m/s. This is all relative to the target A. If you bring your throttle to 0 your ship behaves like the original match target velocity function. Only your indicator would read 0 m/s With respect to the star Stanton the both of you are still moving 550 and 500 m/s respectively but is not information either of you two need. With this ship combat and general ship flight can take place dynamically over any speed range. It is also very helpful to pilots to know how fast they are approaching another target. This should greatly stop the inadvertent jousting in space (as this mainly stems from players overshooting targets by accident - repeatedly) However, many of you probably have thought. Well these ship thrusters are not powerful enough to stop a ship before say running into an asteroid, another ship, or a station when traveling at 10km/s or even 100km/s. Thus, a proposal to have the quantum drive have the ability to break to 0 m/s with respect to the star Stanton, or a space station, moon, etc. Quantum Breaking: Spooling the QD with respect to another reference frame brings you to the same velocity of the said reference object. Thus, if you are approaching a space station at 100km/s spooling the QD drive will bring you to the space station at its velocity. Emergency Quantum Breaking: The QD rapidly brings the ship to the same speed of the reference object. The QD drive suffers from severe wear and moderate damage to the drive. It’s a one-off use that will require the drive to be repaired. Quantum Jumping: (as in game) now brings you not only to your target but it’s reference frame speed at the time of exiting jump. This is partially in game. If anyone has noticed that jumping into Yela’s asteroid belt you are orbiting the moon. Your speed is 0 to you and players near you but you are certainly not zero with respect to the Star Stanton. So, seeing that this mechanic is partially in game I have hopes that it can be implemented for ships. What is the point of changing the speed cap this way? That speed ceiling will forever interfere with good space combat. Ruining it essentially. I’ll define a scenario to highlight this. 2 ships are engaging each other in decoupled mode. As they accelerate around each other, dodging, breaking, etc their overall velocity is increasing. To the player it becomes very difficult at higher speeds to judge how fast they are approaching their target when their speed indicator is listing 1000m/s and are actually only closing the distance by 50 m/s. The change to matching the reference frame for the speed indicator to the target allows a player to see and understand how quickly they are closing the gap. Thus, preventing players at higher velocities from entering a jousting match not by choice but by accident as they are unable to correctly match speeds with their target. This also prevents ships with high speed caps from forever staying out of the range of other ships by going to and sitting at max speed. Instead it is defined by the ship’s acceleration. Whomever can accelerate the fastest can now escape or gain on another target. Now ships who want to escape / keep distance from others must always be accelerating. No longer is there an invisible speed wall to worry about.