Over on the Spacebattles Vs. forums, the most vile pit of insanity I've ever found, Freespace has recently been a contestent in several battles. Quickly, its been declared the loser because its too damn slow. And it got me to thinking: Why?
Why are Freespace ships so damn slow? And then, another question came to mind: Are they really that slow? I'll get to that one in a minute.
So why are they so slow? I can think of only three reasons: (lots of colons today)
1) Volition balancing. When they were making the game, they tried to come up with a speed that would balance the game. Reasonable, of course, it makes the game loads of fun. I'm more than willing to accept that explination.
2) Volition made a mistake (!). I know, blasphemy. But maybe, just maybe, they didn't grasp the ideas of the metric system, and thought that 80 m/s is actually quite fast (in fact, its about 200 miles an hour, slow for a fighter). This is understandable, sense Volition is made of Americans, who generally can't stand any damned European system screwing up their speed limit signs.
3) In game reasoning. Meaning that for reasons that are hard to understand, the GTA, if it was real, made the ships slower on purpose. The only reason I can see this making sense is that as the 14 Year War draged on, more and more pilots were dying, and less experianced pilots were put in the seats. So, to prevent these pilots from blacking out and crashing into the side of an Orion, they lowered the speeds of the fighters. This also allowed special breaking thrusters to work easier. On some level it makes sense. What doesn't make sense, is why the Shivans were moving at such speeds. Of course, that's balancing.
Well, those are the only three I could think of, I'd be happy to entertain more. But this line of thought lead me to the interesting idea: (more colons) Freespace ships may not be that slow.
Those speed numbers have never been given a unit in game, they're just 0-100+. No m/s, km/s, miles/hour ect. Now, we've basically assumed that it is m/s, and I suppose it works, but is it true? Well, it isn't the easiest thing to test, of course. We'd have to set up a mission to act as a time trial or something to test it, and I'm not sure how to do it. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and they really are going m/s. If so, no biggy, we'll just head back up to the original three reasons why. But if they are going at a different speed, it would be nice to know for the future (and so I can smeer those assholes on SB, so I'm insane too, bite me).
Any thoughts?
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I know there is a method, but all I see is madness.
