Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[JonMacLeod]

Wenin said:
I'm currently playing the Imperium Verus Mod, and it made Solar sails only work for 600Kt (Frigates in the mod) sized ships. You also can't have a Solar Sail with any other engine. The top of the line Solar Sail gives movement of 8, using only 1 supply unit per movement. The other ships use QNP engine system, though their speeds can get up and past 10 per turn they won't have the range.

So in this system the FGs are still nice ships late in the game.

The movement on the ships isn't quite Quasi-Newtonian. I call it Improved Quasi-Newtonian. Quasi-Newtonian propulsion is based on the idea that it takes a proportional increase in thrust to move a proportionally larger vessel (a little artistic license must be allowed as thrust would actually affect acceleration rather than speed directly, impossible given the hard-coding of the game). This premise with the stated license is correct. However, the thrust of proportional rockets only squares as mass cubes, (thrust is largely a function of the cross-sectional area of the rocket nozzle). Thus: proportional, but larger, ships would accelerate slower. I have simulated this by having larger ships require more movement points even relative to their size. The end result is that smaller ships are generally faster, but weaker pound for pound.

I hope that's helpful