Any plans on working out thrust to drag ratios for ships?

[kevinTOC]

To maintain a constant velocity, and to waste the least amount of fuel (energy) for maintaining that speed will be of extreme benefit for players and ship builders that want to perhaps make some form of autopilot that maintains a certain velocity.

I can think of one way to do this cheaply and efficiently:

1. Using YOLOL to set and maintain a certain level of thrust that negates the force of drag.

Calculating the ratio between Thrust and drag is simple: ratio=F/µ (F=Thrust µ=Drag). However, I wonder if the force of drag is a constant across all ships? I suspect that it isn't based off of distance, like there's an X distance that all ships must stop in, so I would suspect that it is a constant, and stopping distance depends on how heavy the ship is.

In the end, I don't have access to Starbase CA. Thus, I was wondering if some players that have access to CA, would be willing and/or able to perhaps run some experiments, and would be willing to share their findings and hypothesis with us all.

 

[RedPine]

All the CA folks of watched stream on Twitch confirm that there is no in game speedometer. There are rangefinders, and there are ship based radio receivers (but no ship based transmitters) so it is possible to note the distance to a station and figure out speed from there... but so far no-one I know of knows the formula.

What is known is that 150 m/s is the speed limit, and that the difficulty of reaching that speed is based on total mass. The players on moon voyages have noted that as they use propellant, fuel rods, and coolant, the mass of their ship decreases and the total thrust needed to maintain max velocity decreases, but the details are unknown.

Given how highly requested a speedometer is, I suspect it is only a matter of time until it is implemented in game, at which point figuring all of this out will become much easier.