John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Well, our ships fly in atmosphere, they fly in space, so you can't really directly compare them to Cold War jets, which just fly in atmosphere. They don't have to worry about going to space. So we were talking about this the other day, and our ships are much larger than they appear to be. They're much larger than modern day fighter jets. They're much heavier. They're often four to five times heavier than a fighter jet. So they aren't designed to be super fast in atmosphere. Ultimately, we'll make them go whatever speed makes sense for the game. I'm not going to put an exact speed on that because there was just a huge variety of scenarios. All the planets have different gravity, different atmosphere. It varies like real life depending on how close you are to sea level. You go faster the higher you are in atmosphere. So as to why are they slower than a Cold War jet, I would say maybe they are in some scenarios, but they're also not in the other. I went and dug out some stats. So the Gladius in 3.10 PTU, not using afterburner, goes at 450 meters a second roughly at sort of maximum speed before you need to actively do any injection of pace, which is about 1600 kilometers an hour. So yes, that is slower than a Cold War jet flying at altitude, but that's it flying as low on Daymar as I could dare go. I then took it up to 5000 meters and it was going 900 odd meters a second, which is 3,300 kilometers an hour, which is much faster than a Cold War jet.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So you're saying that, similar to actual aircraft, the speed changes with the height at which you're flying.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, it's completely driven by the atmospherics. If you go low to the ground, it's going to be slower than if you go a few thousand meters up, just like real world aircraft. If you want to grab hold of a Tomcat and go full Top Gun one meter off the deck, I'm not sure you'll get the flight stats for that speed.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's the atmospheric things and there's also the weather effects. Whatever the weather is like at the time that you're flying will impact the speed. The SR-71 didn't break speed records flying 100 meters over the ground. It did it as high up in the atmosphere as it could. So faster the higher you go up, slower the lower you go.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's always something we're looking at. If there's one ship that's clearly well outside of what feels right, then there could be a bug there and we'll look at it.