Why is there a speed limit for ships in the game depending on the engine type? In space, even modern engines can achieve speeds close to the speed of light. Moving fleets feels like you’re driving a taxi on Earth. I understand it’s a game convention and everyone does it, but then it’s not really space at all. You could make acceleration depend on engine power, and ships would need time both to accelerate and decelerate. Ideally, of course, you’d take orbital motion into account, like in KSP, but the engine probably can’t handle that.
For example, a scenario like this could happen: a ship is moving toward Earth. Its engine breaks down. If the player skimped on maintenance, the ship continues moving by inertia and crashes into the planet.
Or say, one fleet is chasing another with the intent to destroy it. The attacked fleet detects this with sensors, moves out of the collision trajectory, and buys time before the next approach while the enemy fleet adjusts its speed and brakes. Or it might even accelerate to break away.
There was a time, at least 10 years ago I think, when Steve did some work on implementing this kind of ship physics. It was called Newtonian Aurora. He ended up setting it aside after a while because it added a lot of complexity without adding much to (or even hurting) the strategic, logistical, and operational gameplay.
IIRC, Steve wrote his conclusion that it would make for a fun and engaging tactical simulator, but Aurora is not really a game about detailed combat tactics to the degree that many other games are.
I think the in-universe explanation is that all of the trans-newtonian elements exist in both our dimension and others at the same time and the other dimension(s) create drag or something, right? I seem to remember reading something like that on the old forums somewhere.
Too bad. The only games where this has been implemented are KSP and SpaceEngine. After all, this is what distinguishes a space simulator from a four-dimensional taxi simulator. So much fun is actually being lost. I believe the developer of SpaceEngine plans to make exactly such a physically accurate game. But it’s unlikely to have the ‘engineering part’ of Aurora.
I’ve reposted the Aurora Lore post from the old forums to explain the ship movement.
I invested quite a lot of time into testing Newtonian mechanics. You can read about some of it here:
It’s more realistic, but Aurora is a game, not a physics simulator. Ultimately the problem is that Newtonian movement can make for an interesting tactical combat simulator, but its far too tedious for an operational and strategic level game - which is probably why no game of that scale uses ‘realistic’ mechanics.
The movement mechanics for Aurora are based on what works for the most interesting and fun gameplay.