Currently, 31 of the 36 fighters I've tested have higher retro thrust than maneuvering thrust, even though most retro thrusters aren't visibly larger than maneuvering thrusters, and some of these ships don't even have dedicated retro thrusters to begin with. Why are the ships like this, and do we expect changes in the future?

So the reason why ships are like this is the ships have very fast acceleration on the Y axis, so you can go very quickly. But if we made it so that the size of the thruster defined the actual thrust itself, then with some of the retro thrusters you would take a long time to slow down. So the ship would move very quickly in a straight line going forwards, and it would roll quickly, its rotations would be very quick, but it would feel terrible trying to slow down. So it would feel really strange. Part of the overall balance we're looking for is to have ships that can actually slow down as fast as we want them to. But it depends on the type of ship as well. We've got some ships like the Hammerhead, for example, that has its two retros at the front, and that does actually take quite a long time to slow down. But then you've got fighters which have maneuvering thrusters as well as the fixed thrusters that can help slow it down. But it's just like a car, kind of the opposite, really. With a car, you have acceleration up to a certain speed, but it can slow down almost four times quicker than it can accelerate, for example. So obviously we don't want that with the ships, but one of the feelings behind it is we don't want ships to feel like they take forever to slow down, because it'd be really hard to engage at that point, unless you just swing the ship around and slow down with your mains. But that's not something we really want players to have to do to slow down.

I'd also say that the idea that the retro thrusters have to be larger in order to counter the forward momentum is a bit of a fallacy. Something that's bigger is not automatically more powerful, and something that's smaller is not automatically less powerful than something that's bigger.

So on a typical ship, you have four thrusters on top, and let's say two at the front. When you fly the ship and you rotate the ship, it has those four thrusters moving, so it is using a lot of energy, whereas with the retro thrusters, you're only using two thrusters to slow down, so they can actually have more power diverted to those two thrusters in that axis.

And then things like the Khartu-al don't have retro thrusters at all. It just rotates the main thrusters.

Yeah, and it's got lots and lots of little thrusters around the ship as well.