[DIO]

While I love these games, I always couldn't undertstand why the ships in game is slower then WW2 airplanes.
Is there any logical explanation to this?

[aceofspades]

I'm not an expert, but if you're referring to capships, then those are actually quite big. Think about it - they often have to support thousands of crew members for months (weeks?), & they have to carry jump drives in addition to normal engines.
As to fighters/bombers (this applies to all spaceflight though), you should consider that planes can carry just combustible fuel and let atmospheric oxygen do the rest. Using combustion for spaceflight would require to carry the oxygen as well. The ships would either have to be huge if the oxygen was low-pressure, or have very compressed oxygen sitting somewhere ready to explode. And either way, the risk of catastrophic fire would be important.
Not to mention that combustion probably wouldn't be nearly as maneuverable as the ships in FS are. I think a big reason why they are so slow is, ironically, that having such engines with the maneuverability-power we see ingame all the time would make them very big and slow down the fighters/bombers.

[Blue Lion]

If they ships went faster, you'd have bigger "maps" with ships all over the place. You'd have to increase beam ranges.  Convoys would have to go farther. Yadda yadda yadda.

Basically you can make the ships faster, but you'd have to make everything else change to keep up with the pace. I wouldn't want to play a freespace game where you're flying around 10 times faster than you are now.

[StratComm]

Actually the FS fighters top out at around 120 MPH with afterburners, IIRC.  I'm not doing the unit conversion tonight.  The point is that if you go too fast, things are harder to hit, harder to see, and harder to appreciate.  Freespace has the WWII fighter sim in space thing going for it, so the fighters have to be relatively slow to stay true to that feel.

[Carl]

Indeed. FS2 is supposed to feel like WW2 dogfighting. Also, to them travel as fast as modern jet fighters you'd need to make them go over 340 meters per second (speed of sound) instead of 120 meters per second. And that's only if you want them to go as fast as modern fighters. Fighters 300 years in the future should go much faster. basically, it would be unplayable without a completely new combat system.

and aceofspades, Freespace ships use nuclear fusion for power, so oxygen doesn't matter.

[karajorma]

There is a mod somewhere that increases the speed of everything in the game. Might be worth taking a look. IIRC it's the velocity mod and was available on the old VolitionWatch Archives.

[DIO]

Is it possible that the ships/objects is magnified by the onboard computer and the ships are actually moving much faster?
For example, distance of 2000 is actually 2000km not 2000m but to give the pilot a better understanding and reaction the computer renders the view magnified.

[aceofspades]

Carl, that was my point. I meant that in-atmosphere flight has the advantage of being able to exploit the atmosphere. Having fusion drives places a certain minimum on feasible propulsion efficiency of a small craft.

[Wanderer]

I think 'realistic' space combat would be rather boring with FS2 type engine.. objects moving at near relativistic velocities firing weapons with range far beyond visual range (say 5000 kms). All targetting would be handled via onboard targetting cpus kinda like in I-Wars against targets that you cant see or even properly aim the weapons at without CPU assistance.

[Shade]

One could always go for the excuse that the speeds displayed are simply relative to whatever is in the nearby area of space, and not a true speed reading. Sorta like when you drive your car - The speedometer may read 60mph, but it doesn't tell you that you're also moving sideways at over 500m/s due to the earth's rotation, or moving even faster in some other direction due to the earth's orbit around the sun, etc.

So everything could really be doing 3500m/s in more or less the same direction, and all the manouvering we do, while it feels awesomely fun, is really just miniscule alterations to the primary course and speed when seen from afar.

[Mars]

I've always wondered how Freespace ships are supposed to orbit planets: they're not going nearly fast enough. I belive Derelict always called the "meters" in Freespace 2 "kilometers" which effectively makes everything go faster, but logically unstable, as long as you don't think about it (the pilot is 60 feet tall) then it's fine. If you ended up making things too fast, people would start asking why they can't go to the background planets are unreachable (I was going 90% of the speed of light and I can't go to the moon  ?)

[Flipside]

I think it only really applies to smaller ships as well, larger ships go at around the same speed (30m/s) as their modern equivalents. I think the problem was the AI, fighters have enough trouble getting out of the way of large ships already, can you imagine what would happen if those ships were going 10x faster?

[NGTM-1R]

Is it possible that the ships/objects is magnified by the onboard computer and the ships are actually moving much faster?
For example, distance of 2000 is actually 2000km not 2000m but to give the pilot a better understanding and reaction the computer renders the view magnified.

People have actually measured this. The Colossus is six kilometers; it takes the proper amount of time to fly past it from one end to the other at 100m/s. So no.

[TrashMan]

FS2 fighters dont' need to go faster - they have jump-drives

And I played som game with realistic speeds and physics...utterly boring..flyng at 10000000km/h makes it impossible to realyl see of hit anything.

[Carl]

One could always go for the excuse that the speeds displayed are simply relative to whatever is in the nearby area of space, and not a true speed reading. Sorta like when you drive your car - The speedometer may read 60mph, but it doesn't tell you that you're also moving sideways at over 500m/s due to the earth's rotation, or moving even faster in some other direction due to the earth's orbit around the sun, etc.

So everything could really be doing 3500m/s in more or less the same direction, and all the manouvering we do, while it feels awesomely fun, is really just miniscule alterations to the primary course and speed when seen from afar.

That doesn't really solve the problem of why ships can't go very fast.

[Shade]

Indeed. There's a reason I said 'excuse' and not 'explanation' Though I'm sure there's some awfully boring, long-winded, technical and full of big-important-sounding-words and a new-matter/particle/dimension/gizmo explanation for it (well, at least that's how it always goes on Star Trek).

[aceofspades]

Never say 'big-important-sounding words'. Always say 'Seqsuipedalian' *coughs in the general direction of sesquipedalian*, since it is itself a big-important-sounding word aka a sesquipedalian word.

[Jopi]

There are games that feature a realistic physics engine. Space combat is very different in those games, because you have to watch your speed all the time. Freespace is an arcade space-fighting, and a very good one. It has sacrificed realism for fun.

[Roanoke]

Modetn fighters rarely dog-fight and are more likely to be firing missiles with ranges of up to 100 miles. I'd imagine "real" space combat to be much the same.

[aldo_14]

The obvious reason is gameplay.

 A made-up reason could be that (to elucidate on what TM said) there's not only no need for very fast travel with the provision of subspace jumps, etc,  but thatthe current speeds are the best combination of acceleration, control, speed, maneuverability and engine efficiency for short-range combat.  Or maybe the control systems used to make the fighters, etc, use the non-newtonian physics have a big effect on reducing how much power is available for the engines.