Accel/Decel feels "off"

I did some quick testing and deceleration appears to be ~6 times faster than acceleration. Same with the spacesuit. Really doesn't feel good. I think the best option for a space sim is for it to be either gone entirely or disabled by default. I think the intent is for it to be a safety feature for new players to not crash into things, but like you said it doesn't feel right in a space sim.

It is most probably so you dont kill yourself when flying around the base, building something and just flying around. If you had same acceleration than deceleration you would smash yourself in objects a lot more often.

Strong deceleration is good if you are about to impact an object, you just release the buttons and slow down instantly.

Indeed it feels like you don't have access to your full thrust power, meaning a lot of dead weight...

One solution would be a "safe" max propulsion %, to be set in the thruster setting. Which makes controlled accelerations only reach that set % of the max thrust, while braking at 100%. If you set it at 100%, you get access to its full power when accelerating similar to SE1.

(for a QOL feature, set the default value in the game option, as to not have to set every single thruster to your preference when you build it)

As someone who was part of the fight against the superdamper menace back in SE1, I'm less than happy about this.

They've been talking about boosters for engineers though.

How about we get a boost for ships too, which can be used for acceleration as well, and the superdamper uses this boost to help stop the ship? And give us the option to turn off automatic braking boost.

Win/win. Everybody gets what they want... plus a fun booster for the ships ;)

I found the strong acceleration to be really weird being used to SE1. I would rather have thrust be thrust. want more? add more thrusters. Just like in SE1

Rotation acceleration does not feel linear too.

Although the amplified deceleration may help prevent ship crashes for beginners in the game, it feels unnatural and out of place for a physics-based space simulation game, which can put off experienced players.

As players become more familiar with the game's mechanics—and especially for those with experience from the first game, where this mechanic was limited to the space suit (and already felt wrong in that case)—the inconsistency of having different ship and suit behavior without active input remains a long-term issue.

In my opinion, expanding in this direction is a poor decision, as it only enhances the initial experience but offers little to no value for long-term enjoyment.

I have reported bug that could be linked to this as it looks like some amount of thrust is ignored on heavy grids unless you have high enough thrust. In my example I was not able to accelerate grid with 19 thrusters but it was working with 20. Also the same grid can be stopped with no issue with only 2 and maybe 1 thruster.

Acceleration bug

I think this will be resolved later on. Its likely in the game currently for testing reasons. if you just turn off the dampeners you should have an issue currently with flying ships. but seeing as ships flight isn't optimized yet i wouldn't be too worried about it currently.

I would like the see the option to adjust the maximum power output on thrusters though similarly to how you can adjust the max power on wheels in SE 1. That would be useful in a number of ways by 1 limiting overall speed, 2 it would conserve on fuel in the long run, and you could have your reverse/breaking thrusters be stronger so its easier to slow down when need be.

Adding to what a lot of people have said here, and summing up a few observations, while the intent of this "amplified dampening system" may be to make it easier for newer players to not accidentally crash during flight, the inconsistent thrust with this system will likely make flying and designing ships much more confusing and problematic to both new and old players down the road, especially once planetary flight is implemented. Here are a few points:

- If a ship becomes just a little overloaded with weight (in relation to non-dampening thrust power) while flying in planetary gravity, this dampener system would allow the ship to slow it's decent and perhaps even hover. The problem comes when attempting to ascend. As others have pointed out here and on Discord, when attempting to vertically ascend in this state, the ship will either not ascend at all, or fall out of the sky as vertical thrust switches from amplified damping to standard weaker thrust. I can't imagine this would not be confusing for both new and old players.

- This is a bit more subjective, but I personally find that having to account for breaking thrust concerns is part of the engineering and gameplay challenge in SE1. I build ships with asymmetric thrust all the time for reasons such as aesthetics, cost, purpose, and especially when using the atmospheric drag mod, for aerodynamics. Figuring out how to build and fly a ship that is fast, sleek, compact, and cost effective by determining where thrusters should be placed is part of the design challenge. This dampening system removes some of that.

- SE2 is a space physics sandbox with standard Newtonian physics. Players coming from SE1 and other space physics sandboxes based around the same concepts are going to expect space/air craft and their thrusters to behave in the same way. As was pointed out at the very beginning of this thread, the amplified damping system on thrusters can make space flight act and feel not as expected, and not just when decelerating either. What makes it worse is that new players coming in are likely going to have no idea why thrusters are behaving this way, leading to more confusion.

- At least for me this damping system doesn't bother me on the character jetpacks, but only because I seldom think of my character as a physics object with mass. I usually tend to treat my character more as a floating camera with acceleration that just needs to get from point A to point B quickly and precisely. So this damping system on jackpacks works to streamline character traversal in my opinion. The jackpack in SE1 also doesn't seem to account for player inventory mass, which is probably why we don't see the "falling out of the sky on ascend attempt" problem with player characters in SE1.

Say "NO!" to super dampers.

I do hope they remove this, there was a similar issue in SE1 very early on also.

"the intent of this "amplified dampening system" may be to make it easier for newer players to not accidentally crash during flight"

But... But.... that's PART of it! Learning that in outer space, things aren't like they are on Earth with air drag and planetary gravity! It's a space sim for goodness' sake! You're supposed to crash, and then learn how to pilot properly in the merciless vacuum of zero-G!

The speed feels very uhm Arcade was hoping space ship design would mean something regarding the whole dampening situation. Realism for the win!!

It doesn't make sense for this to be in a physics-based game.

I like the idea of decelerating faster but I think its just tuned too high at the moment. I think reverse thrusters are always an after thought when designing ships. There is usually a slow deceleration in SE1 unless you flip your ship around to have your forward thrusters slow you down which feels unnatural.

I've said this before in other posts, but I actively, absolutely DESPISE, and I do not use that word lightly, the current arbitrary thrust increase when "slowing down". This is space. There is no atmosphere. The very concept of even having a distinction between acceleration and "deceleration" is flawed, let alone thrusters actually giving different outputs depending on which is happening, let alone it being a 4-10x thrust modifier!! It feels absolutely TERRIBLE to the point of being unplayable for me.

That being said, I completely understand why they did this. They want SE2 to be easier for new players, so they want it to be harder to accidentally slam into static objects. However, this is the worst possible way to go about this, as it sacrifices the flight model to the point that it's practically unplayable for anyone who cares about realism. Here is a far better suggestion, posted by somebody else: https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/45973-thruster-change-make-overboost-a-player-choice-improve-dampeners.

Related to accel but different from this specifically you can fall off grids as if there is air resistance when jumping or exiting a cockpit

Check THIS out you can recreate it with a moving ship and jumping

Well, I mean they said that such stuff is not really balanced right now and everything is not final, all can and many will change.

But one thing I learned also from Speed mods for SE1: the faster you can fly the more difficult is it to estimate the way you need to completely slow down. You more easily can overshoot.

So it is a lot more beginner friendly to have it that way as it is right now. Even when some hardcore sim players don't like it at all, after all SE was never a true space sim, it is a mix of sim and arcade casual game with some settings where you can make it a bit more sim or even more arcade. For even more realistic or arcade stuff their was always mods and will also be mods in SE2. But maybe we get a game map settings option to change the "break" behavior.

I would like to remind the people arguing for "the player" that we are players.

We are players, and this issue is not only sitting pretty on page one of the post popular issues, but growing every day... that should tell you something. True, we are just a small number, those of us interacting with this site, but we're still representative of the player group.

Yes, this was likely done to benefit "the player" but not every suggested feature hit the mark.

Also the fact that this was done on SE1 as well, and was just as unpopular there which they seem to have forgotten :D

I was hoping that they would implement a more modern thruster physics setup, would like to see something perhaps along the lines of how Avorion manages thrusters.

Making thruster placement actually matter and from a "this is a space-sim" perspective, a lot more appropriate.

It would also make it possible for thrusters to be animated properly when rotating, and reduce/remove the need for Gyros.

But all in all, I just want at least basic Newtonian physics to be adhered to, as in SE1

since this conversion is still as alive as ever, i want to throw in my new grain of salt:

boost mode wont solve the problem: why wont you press it 24/7 and crash anyways?

heres a simple idea, since people would immediately counter me with jetpack: jetpack boost mode separates situation where you are building and you dont need to get across some long distance fast, and situation where your backpack is flying away at 69m/s, 3km away from you, with 200 units of platinum, and a cleanup countdown of 5 minutes.

for jetpack, the un-boosted mode is the new safe experience; where the boost mode is the classic SE experience where you miscalculate braking distance and slam into another ship and die

what ship thruster boost brings to the table, is either you go un-boost and be happy to be slow, in which case you are not likely to have problem braking as you never go "too fast" in the first place, which you can already do with a trick known as "tapping"; or you go boost mode, start to end, and either get the braking distance right and do a sick suicide burn, or your mis-calculate it and your metal box is now a coffin.

would you happily use un-boosted mode to accelerate up to speed and only use boost mode to slow down? nah you wont.

no mechanic can help with flying irresponsibly

Please remove this option we don't need this casual garbage even for my 3 year old.

I know it was in SE1 for the jetpack, and that is fine if its the same way in SE2, as long as its only for the jetpack and NOT ships.

I certainly understand Keen is trying to make the game more beginner friendly, but the only people youre going to help this way are the people who wouldnt be buying a game like this anyway.

would a person unwilling to figure out how to do something as simple as stopping take the time to figure our conveyor systems? power generation? mining?

anyone who is not able/willing to learn that it takes longer to stop when going fast is either not going to play the game anyway, or not going to buy the game to begin with.

TLDR: dont cripple the game experience for people who wont be your player base anyway.

Not here to engage in the debate, just to weigh in. I don't like it.

I want each directional thrust vector to be predictable, repeatable and consistent.

The super dampeners break the flight model prediction I have running in my head when playing.

I would also like to point out that in SE1 way back when, we had this but it was only 1.5x strength on dampening from memory.

When they rebalanced ion thrust values they put it to a community vote whether to keep the super dampening and the overwhelming community response was to scrap it.

I like the extra deceleration on the ships so that I don't have to put so many back thrusters on my builds, particularly in atmospheres where you would realistically have aerodynamic drag, but that said, I totally agree with the comments the ratio is too over powered in the alpha, needs to be some sort of middle ground or ideally have it an adjustable setting.

I cannot stress how much this needs to be fixed (in my opinion).

Before I go into why I think this is a poor fix, I'll address that, the issue of struggling to slow down ships, especially for new players, is certainly a valid concern. Keen is clearly aware of the struggles new players have, and this was a big bump for me when I first started playing SE1. I'm so used to other flight games or even driving games where decelerating is instantaneous.

But this is NOT a good fix for that. Here's why:

1. This isn't star conflict; this is a physics simulation game at its core. If you betray that, making thrusters produce less power entirely dependent on the direction of movement vector compared to the thruster direction vector, then there is only 2 reasons occurring in a players mind: either 1, the game isn't really dedicated to rational physics, or 2, and possibly the worse one, that Keen has no trust in ANYbody to fly ships well -- or else there would be an option to remove this excessive dampening. If the game doesn't give any trust to the players, then the players won't have the freedom to learn and get better.

2. It just feels bad. One of the great things about SE1 was that physics was incredibly relative, just like real life. Besides the universal speed limit (which makes plenty of sense from a performance perspective), kinematics was entirely relative. Regardless of speed, if you tap the forward button for a second, you will gain X amount of speed in that direction relative to where you were before (again, ignoring cases with the speed limit). This feels good and right. In SE2, theres a 50% chance that tapping forward for a second will give you X amount of speed, and a 50% chance that it will give you 6X speed, which feels horrible to play. You CANNOT adjust a ship's velocity to match another object's velocity with any amount of reasonable precision, unless the object has a velocity of 0 m/s. It feels viscerally wrong to me -- and yes, that is subjective, but I haven't seen a single person who thinks this is a good solution. All features that benefit from this relativity are broken with this.

Make it optional, at the very least. Some other comments here give excellent methods to solve it -- being able to customize the amount of thrust used in acceleration vs deceleration in the settings is very reasonable (though the physics student in me hates calling these objective acceleration and deceleration because of relativity). Genuinely, I will not be able to play this game if this isn't fixed. Flying is just atrocious. And I am not usually one for being dramatic.

I think a reasonable approach to avoid having a bunch of thrusters in the front of your ship to increase your decel which can make some ships looks silly is to take the classic "Flip & Burn" approach to braking where if you want maximum breaking, you rotate your ship backwards in order to use your primary thrust as your braking source.

In a game where it's easy to reach the speed limit and you have nothing to do between point A and B but to coast, you can spend that time rotating the ship to improve braking performance once you're ready to slow down (if desired)

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voRVvU8RRBA