Potential Increases to Top Speed + Limits to them

Hi,

To my knowledge, it's been almost a decade since the original 100m/s speed limit was designed, and since then, hardware and the game's stability have improved. I think that the in-game speed limit could be raised by some amount, and that there should be in-game systems of speed reductions that players must engineer their ships around (atmospheric drag, space debris) or suffer the consequences of. This would add even more depth (and fun) to building, while making bumping against the speed limit feel less jarring, as you'd struggle more to reach it.

Just as an example, (I am not aware of how much this would hurt performance), speed caps could maybe go up to 200m/s, but have the 200 be much harder to reach, and potentially start damaging your ship slowly once you reach/attempt to exceed that speed in space (because the little rocks are smashing you at 200m/s). Similar to the existing wind noises, space debris clanging noises (like rain on a tin roof, but in space) could add a nice ambience to flying around, joining the noise of your thrusters and hydrogen engines, and louder clanging/metallic scraping noises would indicate when your ship has begun to take damage.

The one specific friction point in gameplay that I think it would help the most is the transition between space and atmospheres: 40km of distance with not even the possibility of a jump drive means that you have to spend at least 6 minutes just traveling from point A to point B, no matter how advanced you are, whether you've built a massive cruiser or you're just an engineer with a backpack full of hydrogen bottles (in which case you have a 10% higher top speed). There is a frustrating lack of progression in moving between atmospheres. Jump drives make speed limit frustrations obsolete in zero-g (and building and tuning up a robust, warp-capable ship is a fun long-term goal), but moving from one planet to another takes a minimum of ~12 minutes for a one-way trip, assuming 40km of atmospheric travel at 100m/s. That's 12 minutes you have to spend pretty much doing something else. This can occasionally be avoided with clever usage of antennas to avoid planetary travel whenever possible, but it still stands that the time spent transitioning to/from atmosphere is consistently dead time that cannot be mitigated with shipbuilding in the same way that space travel can.

I think having a max speed is still necessary both in atmosphere and out of it. As an example, stationary defenses would become even weaker if everything was allowed to move at 800m/s, giving 1 second of reaction time to the poor auto-turrets. I also don't think increasing the speed limit by orders of magnitude would help gameplay much, as spacefaring ships would just crash into meteors helplessly past a certain speed. My problem is mainly that it's too easy to hit the speed limit very quickly with more nimble ships, and then jarringly stop accelerating at 100m/s. But also, speaking to the root of the gameplay problem, speed mods might not be as appealing if there were more interesting things along the way when you've got a 40km trip to make. I've heard rumors of an AI/NPC-focused update, and that too sounds like it could maybe hit the spot and make 100m/s a fine speed to be cruising at :)

The game's been updated with fun and new things I never thought I'd see in the vanilla game (weapon/combat overhaul, vanilla custom turrets, even a 1x1 advanced rotor), and I understand that some things still aren't feasible, but if taking another look at the speed limit is possible, I think the game would benefit from more depth regarding how our ships accelerate and decelerate, and what speeds they can reach.