Engine Functionality Suggestion

[KonaAI]

I would like to suggest a change to the way engines function and affect maximum velocity when placed on a ship. Currently, it seems that engines affect your maximum velocity by giving a larger max velocity the larger an engine block is, regardless of the size of the ship it's moving. Consequently, the actual mass of the ship doesn't seem to factor in at all, so a large ship with a single 10 x 10 x 10 engine would always seemingly be the same speed at max velocity of a tiny ship with the same size engine. This means it will almost always be better to build bigger ships since bigger ships will almost always be able to outrun smaller ships once they accelerate to max velocity. The biggest appeal to small ships is typically their speed and nimble nature - they can't generally stand up directly to large ships, but can avoid them or fight them indirectly by being faster and outrunning the larger ships. This means larger ships have a speed  advantage over smaller ships which would otherwise rely on their speed to flee from or harass larger vessels. Larger ships can always outrun smaller ones, catching up to them and using their superior armor and firepower to rip them apart. This has fundamental issues regarding ship and general fleet designs, as large ships will always have an advantage over equally expensive numbers of smaller ships. My suggestion is to make max velocity gained from engines also take the ship's mass into account, with the calculations for max velocity being based on the mass of the engines themselves versus the ship's total mass. This would allow smaller ships to benefit from a lower mass and be generally faster at max velocity, but would still allow high mass ships to compete as long as they dedicated a proper relative amount of engines to their own ship (e.g. a ship with 25% of its mass made up of engines would always travel at X max velocity regardless of it having higher or lower overall mass).

[Sir Charles]

I think ist is totale Levit for large ships to be was faster than small ones. That is simply the reality (remember we are in space).

When it Codes to acceleration and Turbine Speed however, big ships in Avorion are overpowered as ****.

 

If you are interested in additional thoughts about this, this topic might be interesting for you:

https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,5420.0.html

[KonaAI]

Thanks for the link. I am aware that space works differently than in-atmosphere flight, but I do believe balancing should take priority over realism in this case because the way engines work currently restricts the creative freedom of ship makers by making small ships of any type completely obsolete. They already have fewer system upgrade slots, less hp generally, and less effectiveness overall due to the way volume works. Without speed to at least make them somewhat viable, there is no reason at all to even use them when in both real navies and sci-fi navies, smaller ships like corvettes and frigates are important parts of fleets. In Avorion, larger ships being faster just because of engine scaling not being adaptive based on overall mass makes small ships pretty much useless. Why use anything smaller than a dreadnought when that dreadnought can somehow outrun anything smaller just by game design? Besides, I don't think Avorion takes space physics into account much anyway. As you fly around, you gradually slow. This points to resistance/friction of some sort, but space has little to no resistance in the first place.

[EVWeb]

I really like your suggestion KonaAI.  I think it would help with ship variety.

[FuryoftheStars]

While I believe that it is legitimate for the larger ships to have a higher max speed, for game balance purposes it should probably be reconsidered and reviewed.

[Wanderer]

I agree with the idea, as long as absolutely tiny ships dont get overpowered because they're so small and fast